[Flipside]

I was playing around with volumetric rendering on Vue 6, partly to see what it could do. Excuse the camera looking in lots of different directions, this took over 100 hours to render, so I wanted to get as much idea of parts of the scene looked like as possible.

It's not very exciting, but interesting to see for 3D animators considering it was done on a home computer....

http://www.aqsx85.dsl.pipex.com/Vid1b.avi

[IceyJones]

looks nice in the first view, but it seems that you have not enabled the selfshadows. i´m sure vue also has this function. the lower clouds should receive shadows from the upper ones, but all clouds have the same illumination. bright outside, dark inside......

and to reduce rendertimes for testing, just disable antialising completely.....saves 80% rendertime in cinema for testrenders totally sufficient....

[Flipside]

@Icey

Thanks for the comments The clouds do self-shadow, but don't cast shadows on other clouds, I turned that one off as a time-saver else it would have taken nearly 3 times as long to render

Vue's anti-aliasing is pretty fast (though not perfect for volumetrics, I think the anti-aliasing code predates the volumetric code) the real time killer in there is the sheer amount of math involved in those clouds, Vue treats them as an integral part of the 'sky', so they are actually an infinite plane of volumetric material.

Edit: In other words, there is no 'background box' in that image, I could pick a cloud anywhere in the scene and fly towards it.

[pecenipicek]

just make a box where the clouds are situated, with extra wiggle room for camera movement and you'll have it render quite a wee bit fast.


however, Vue's render leaves much to be desired. It is horribly slow. C4D for teh win.


now, if only i knew exactly how to make those poofy clouds xD

[Flipside]

Well, Vue takes things to absolutely ridiculous levels in some cases, the sub-ray iterations beat the pants off of most software rendering systems, and when it comes to Radiosity etc, Vue beats just about every other renderer on the market for speed, including Lightwave and 3DS Max, however, we are talking about a program that calculate caustic refraction from both the polygonal and normal values of the surface of a liquid, so you get physically accurate caustics etc, it is a very big, hungry renderer, but at its highest level, it's about as close to photo-realistic as you can get.

That's why Industrial Light and Magic use it

Edit: In fact, there was an interesting YouTube hoax, and I can confirm that it was a Vue render because I recognise the style of it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up5jmbSjWkw

[Vasudan Admiral]

Wowsopurdy.

Is this for what I think it's for?

[Flipside]

With luck, yes