2 seconds!!!!!11
That’s right. This rendered in the Max scanline renderer in 2 seconds, an unbelievable improvement over what I was getting with my Mental Ray SSS clouds.
Another thing that I improved, besides using the plug-in based off Grant Adams script
members.optushome.com.au/ghra/
for faking translucency by blending vertex colors, was that I decided that I actually could get decent clouds with a whole lot fewer polygons. This cloud isn’t based off any high-poly primitive or metaballs, its just a box with meshsmooth and displacement. Same displacement as I described before. Mapping coordinates set to xyz to uvw, displacement map set to keep existing mapping, and don’t apply new mapping, then used cellular 3D map for displacement.
The results are as beautiful as the SSS clouds, but render incomperably faster. The major drawback to using this method is that the cloud translucency look has to be set up manually and cannot be animated. Though the clouds can move, the lighting effect is baked into them and wouldn’t change.
That doesn’t seem like a bad trade off though. Because they keep the same angle to the sun, since it is a distant direct light with paralell rays in nature. As background elements they can float across the sky, though they can’t cast shadows on each other. Though they could cast shadows on each other if they remain still for the rest of the animation. And in all cases your viewpoint is free to move about them. They will appear just as accurate from all angles, even to fly-throughs.
Inspired partly by this piece on CGTalk:
forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=301762
And partly by the clouds in many of the compositions at Boring3D.
www.boring3d.com/daily_archive.htm
This image for example:
www.boring3d.com/daily/04-03-03.jpg
Other attempts of mine:
www.flickr.com/photos/sightrays/91116510/in/photostream/
www.flickr.com/photos/sightrays/91968718/in/photostream/
Like it? Would send me some bitcoin as a tip?
1H76GsGpfkyg2PtwnsZnTYgED3NinWgsG6
Or QR code here: www.flickr.com/photos/sightrays/8672657341/
By Electric-Eye on 2006-01-31 03:27:24
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