eonite opened this issue on Nov 03, 2009 · 302 posts
eonite posted Tue, 03 November 2009 at 10:57 AM
Hi folks!
It`s been a while since my last post on this forum.
The last thing you have probably heard that Chipp and I were working on a common cloud project.
In the meantime we decided to go "separate ways".
But one thing is for sure: there will be a cloud product shortly (that will take all the latest improvements and discoveries into account).
The product I want to release will not be restricted to cumulus clouds. The goal is to have a collection of clouds with a natural look.
Will post some pictures below which will give you an impression in which direction things have been developing. One point that made a cumulus cloud product so difficult, was because of the Aerial Perspective. All the clouds I am developing use an AP setting of 1. I do this because its the Vue default setting and it gives you very realistic atmospheres. However in order to have the terrain matched with the sky it need to have real world dimensions too. If you are using AP set to 1 along with "miniature" terrains, like a mountain that is only 100 meters large and 50 meters high, there will be a mismatch at the expense of realism. In order to match a 50 meter mountain with the atmosphere it would require an AP setting of 10 or higher. Now, if you are using an AP setting of 10, the cloud layer needs to be adapted accordingly. In practice this means that a cumulus cloud layer that is supposed to have its base at an altitude of 1 km needs to be lowered to 100 meters and needs to be rescaled accordingly.
Doing those adaptions is no big deal, however the cumulus clouds I developed by using the function editor have a number of parameters, which have been set to match an exact clouds altitude and height. So getting one of those cumulus clouds to work with an AP setting other than 1 requires a lot of retuning (if you are going for maximum realism).
This is why I was looking for a system that would make it rather easy for users that do not want to work with an AP setting of 1. And this is basically what was delaying the whole clouds thing.
So the product I want to release will have many cloud layers that can easily be adapted when using AP settings other than 1.
There are 2 things I would like to know from you folks:
Below you will find some renders I did in both Vue 7 and Vue 8. Will add a small comment to each.