Fog Cameras

kwannie

I was wondering if anyone could tell me if the Marshian Fog camera is any different than other fog cameras in rendering speeds? I notice on the promo page that it say that it can be used to help create masks for post work but is this possible with animations? I have the Atmocam product but using it dramatically increases rendering times. I assume it is because of the resolution of the fog plane textures. I do mostly night Club and Concert style animations so I am dying to get a nice atmosphere product that doesn't take a century to render a few thousand frames. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Taoz

Here's a comparison between Marshian's Fog Camera and Sickleyield's Fast Fog, both rendered for 10 minutes on a GTX 1070.

 

 

kwannie

Thanks Taoz,

   It looks like Sickleyield's is a cleaner render if that's the one on the right.  But my problem is that I'm doing animation so I am trying a solution to render volumetrics well under a minute per frame. For that reason I assume the best way to go is going to be some kind of post work, like Hit Film. I heard that poser could do volmetrics pretty well but I've never tried it. Carrara does very well but I can't get all of my scene items...............like people and geographs transfered from DAZ. I mean I have the Atmocam by Marhian and reslts look great, but the time it takes per frame...............yikes!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ivy

IMO I think using a fog panes & props are better than fog cameras. I much rather use them in animations because Fog  Panes render faster & use less GPU/CUP resources, are much easier to set up and customize in the surface tabs, change colors and trans maps and opacity settings.  better results in the finished render or can be used to create PSD layers. . plus you can add trans-maps in to the panes surface to give you custom fog like a fog face  or a tree-scape outline to the fog.as well giving you better results for volume when creating atmosphere,. .. But that is my opinion I think fog panes & props are much better choice.

kwannie

Sounds like a great opinion Ivy, I have seen some of your work and I know you know what you are talking about. Again my main issue is that I do animations with up to 11000 frames sometimes. All in the flavor of MMD styling, I convert motions and to mostly Jazz Club or theater stlyle settings so mainly I am trying to get a convincing volumetric rays from the lights without the noise and graininess. I have seen fog planes in MMD that made of vertical rings that rotate at different speeds to give the illusion of moving smokiness and was very realistic looking, but obviously I can't convert FX from MMD to DAZ. I also saw your video you made using Nerd3D smoke but unfortunately  in my opinion that product still looks like a rigid bit of gemetry, although your video was still done very nice. I have tried everything from StageFX , fog cameras, bloom filters, to emmisives and all eat up so much rendertime. Im using a GTX1080 and an I8 CPU. Is there a tutorial on using the fog planes? What are PSD layers? Thanks againg

Taoz

Well it also depends on the size of your videos of course. And I probably did let the Fast Fog render run a bit longer than strictly necessary. Here's a smaller one, rendered for 1 minute, again on a GTX 1070.

kwannie

I think I need to explore the fog plane suggestion, are there any freebie tutorials or resources that anyone knows about?

nonesuch00

kwannie said:

Thanks Taoz,

   It looks like Sickleyield's is a cleaner render if that's the one on the right.  But my problem is that I'm doing animation so I am trying a solution to render volumetrics well under a minute per frame. For that reason I assume the best way to go is going to be some kind of post work, like Hit Film. I heard that poser could do volmetrics pretty well but I've never tried it. Carrara does very well but I can't get all of my scene items...............like people and geographs transfered from DAZ. I mean I have the Atmocam by Marhian and reslts look great, but the time it takes per frame...............yikes!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You should do that in Unity then. It's easy to render volumetric fog in Unity that looks good. 

As far as both of those examples above they look like fog cameras and not like fog. I agree with Ivy if you are doing it in DAZ Studio fog planes look better because you can arrange them. It still takes a very long time to render them in DS though.

I like the very old but still very good planes RTDNA Atmospherics. They are $5 each & there are three of them. Fog, Rain, and Lightning

.https://www.daz3d.com/rdna-atmospherics-fog-vol-1

https://www.daz3d.com/rdna-atmospherics-rain-vol-2

https://www.daz3d.com/rdna-atmospherics-lightning-vol-1#

This render was made using the fog and rain products. I've always liked the rain & fog in it although the size of the rain drops could stand to be scaled down smaller.

Taoz

kwannie said:

I think I need to explore the fog plane suggestion, are there any freebie tutorials or resources that anyone knows about?

Fast Fog is plane based.

Ivy

kwannie said:

Sounds like a great opinion Ivy, I have seen some of your work and I know you know what you are talking about. Again my main issue is that I do animations with up to 11000 frames sometimes. All in the flavor of MMD styling, I convert motions and to mostly Jazz Club or theater stlyle settings so mainly I am trying to get a convincing volumetric rays from the lights without the noise and graininess. I have seen fog planes in MMD that made of vertical rings that rotate at different speeds to give the illusion of moving smokiness and was very realistic looking, but obviously I can't convert FX from MMD to DAZ. I also saw your video you made using Nerd3D smoke but unfortunately  in my opinion that product still looks like a rigid bit of gemetry, although your video was still done very nice. I have tried everything from StageFX , fog cameras, bloom filters, to emmisives and all eat up so much rendertime. Im using a GTX1080 and an I8 CPU. Is there a tutorial on using the fog planes? What are PSD layers? Thanks againg

you can try one of my free magic panes in my pane set to see if it works for you  Ivy's magic pane http://www.sharecg.com/v/92902/gallery/21/DAZ-Studio/Ivys-Magic-Pane-prop

I usually set up my scene then where i need fog or volumetric or atmospheric fog. I place the pane in front of the camera. you can add deformers to the pane to wrap and deform concave or stretch the pane per-keyframe in animation to make it look like its moving. I used that trick a few times. sometimes when you need just a ground fog instead of a whole plane.  you can use a cloud prop and scale it down which give you a great 3d cloud effect in animation.

But try my background pane prop to see if you can work with the fogs panes in it.

I also would recommend Plane Easy Atmospheres https://www.daz3d.com/plane-easy-atmospheres

and Above the Fog for Iray and 3Delight  https://www.daz3d.com/above-the-fog-for-iray-and-3delight

you can create fog effects in animation like I did in this animation with those 2 products i linked.

 

Ivy

kwannie said:

What are PSD layers? Thanks againg

PhotoShop file format.  usually used to create Photoshop brushes. The.PSD file can be used like a .PNG as a over lay image or Layer image file, in illustrator, fireworks or premiere, printshop pro, gimp. any phto editing software that can read photoshop formats.etc.