I'm trying to make an atmosphere to get some good godrays, but at the moment it's pure luck if I get anything.

I have enabled godrays, and added some thick cumulus clouds and put the shadow density up, but am not getting anything.

Does anyone have some good advice to achieve better rays?

thanks in advance

Rich

well

1. disable vol lights
2. check the camera settings and adjust accordingly
3. check the sun position in the atmo editor
4. load up any existing godray scene and notice how that´s setup, that will give lots of good ideas

Alternatively, you can start with a godray atmosphere in the presets and tweak it to get what you want.

thanks.

I have had a quick play and found that you need to put the cloud layer at about 1.2k or higher to get the godray effect.  From there I just played around a bit.  Thanks for your ideas.

Good fun these new features.

You need dark dense big clouds with a few tiny holes in the sky. Place the sun in one of the holes, and use a wide view camera angle. And no volumetric sun. The preview won't necessarily show your godrays. You need to make a "final" render to be sure you have rays or not.

The clouds must cast shadows. If they don't right click the cloud layer in the atmosphere editor, and in the cloud material editor, tick the "cast shadow" box.

Was going to do a tutorial on Godrays, but have not had time yet. I did find that the built-in Help on Godrays tells most everything you need to know. For one thing, unless you load the pre-made ones, there is no guarantee you'll get Godrays - they require pretty unique lighting circumstances.

Also, to look best you need to get far away from them and use a wide angle (small number) camera lens focal length, else they will not have well defined edges. All this trouble making them is because e-on made them so realistic! They are just as rare as in the real world, because they are made pretty much the same way.

That is to say that e-on's 'Spectral Atmosphere' is a good simulation of the physics and optics of the actual Earth's atmosphere - much to e-on's credit, i think..