Vapor effect?
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Vapor effect?
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Hi! What should I buy to make a vapor effect? Thanks!
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Which render engine, 3DL, or Iray?
Also, what kind of vapor effect you are aiming for? Clouds, or fog, or just something to get Godrays done?
Iray engine. I'm trying to make the vapor effect breathing in cold environments. Something like the image attached.
Thanks
More often things like that are much easier to accomplish with a smoke brush in your favorite image editor as postwork.
Clouds/fog, big, billowing smoke/vapor type things are not too difficult to do in render. The fine whispy stuff....a lot of work for what can be a few seconds in an image editor.
The easiest way is to do that in post work using something like Photoshop or Gimp and smoke brushes, for example these:
http://www.daz3d.com/rons-steam-and-smoke
What everyone else said.
It's tempting to try to model EVERYTHING, but small wispy bits is... a huge amount of work, a huge amount of rendering, and postwork often still looks better.
Personally I do as little postwork as possible as I stink at photo editing!
I just take the image, make it black and white, then invert it so what I want to see is white. I then save the new image with something like TM at the end of the name.
I'll then create a primitive plane and add the smoke image in diffuse and the TM image in opacity. Place the plane where I want it and size to likeness.
Plus, once I have the TM file, I don't have do do that part ever again for other scenes. It's just create a plane and load the images.
One last question... There is a easy way to re make the mask effect in the image attached? I made it with D form but it took me like two hours
I was thinking in Z brush. I don't know. What do you think? Thanks again!
Things like that...2 hrs sounds about 'right'. Probably won't be much shorter going the Z-brush route...but it is another way of doing it.
There isn't going to be an 'easy' way of doing it unless you have something like the 'digital doubles' that major studios/effects houses use...and all they are, are very complex animation rigs.
Things like that...2 hrs sounds about 'right'. Probably won't be much shorter going the Z-brush route...but it is another way of doing it.
There isn't going to be an 'easy' way of doing it unless you have something like the 'digital doubles' that major studios/effects houses use...and all they are, are very complex animation rigs.
While doing postwork in PS/Gimp works for still renders, doing vapor/smoke/etc. effects for animation is a whole different kettle of fish. For animation, it's usually better if you can generate such effects in-render. Doing it in post is basically having to hand-tween and hope it looks good, even professional animators have problems doing stuff like that by hand.....not to mention the sheer time involved for even a short animation (if it takes even just 15 minutes per image to do postwork smoke by hand, for a 10 second animation at 30fps, that's 300 frames, that's 75 HOURS of solid postwork!) While doing small puffs or such that dissipate evenly and quickly can be done in postwork, curling smoke and such is a pain to try to add that way for animation.
I'd recommend, like the others, using a brush like http://www.daz3d.com/rons-steam-and-smoke
Diviney's brushes are strongly recommended; they are on sale in Fastgrab every once in a while. Grab them if you can.
If you want to do something "in-Render", you can try going for Jepe's stuff, like http://www.daz3d.com/jepes-steamz
He has a lot of FX that can be used for all sorts of things. http://www.daz3d.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=jepe
Also, Stonemason did something really nifty, though that might be too large scale for your desired effect: http://www.daz3d.com/iray-clouds
For animation, go to Rendo and look for "Texture Animator" by provincial. The Plugin is pay for, but the frebie-section has a lot of free animated textures that work with the plugin.
If you're doing effects in animation you'd really use something like After Effects, or another tool designed for motion comping. Rotoscoping onto each frame by hand would be the hard way to do it.
As an example, look at some of the Youtube videos produced by Action Movie Dad. He's noted he used After Effects (at least for some of his clips), and also has done some very in-depth howto videos explaining how the effects are produced.
Is it really that easy though? I read somewhere that to get those brushes actually looking good like they do in the promos takes a lot of effort in post-work. I've no experience of them myself - just going by what I've heard.
I'd like to use that sort of thing, but I'm always put off by the perceived difficulty in using them.
Well, you need to work with several layers, and shades of white for the steam to get the "perfect" experience. It might take a few attempts, but once you get the hang of it, and understand the concept, it's okay.
How do you figure out that concept in the first place though? Do the Ron's stuff come with instructions on how to use it? Cos my knowledge of Gimp is extremely limited right now.
If you learn how to do masking in GIMP, it's not much harder than trying to do the same thing in the actual shot, and the results are easier to tweak (and often look better).
I use GIMP all the time and for any effect other than very specific godray effects I generally go with post work. (I particularly like doing distance haze that way -- get a Depth camera and mask it, then make a second 'distant' copy and make it less saturated, a little more sepia-like, and maybe a little extra blur.')
Actually, adding smoke is pretty easy if you have a good quality brush, and naturally assuming you understand how to use them, preferably on a new layer in PS or Gimp. I have added small amounts of smoke like shown in the image above in just a few minutes. Other postwork, like adding realistic looking water splashes, can be much more work, but smoke is not a difficult effect to get to look reasonably good.
Thats for the feedback guys (and sorry to mdmanouusoso for hijacking the thread somewhat). What I'm really interested in using is http://www.daz3d.com/rons-slime and I'm trying to figure out how easy that'd be to use. I'm not even adept enough at Gimp to know how to create new layers or wot not, so I think I'll have to explore it more before I take the leap.
https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-using-layers.html
https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-concepts-brushes.html
Those two should give you some ideas. There's also lots of videos and other turorials if you know the secret art of GoogleFuu, so I hope you can find something that works for you, tutorial-wise.
Once you know how to install and use brushes, and how to create a layer, all you need to do is select the brush, and adjust the size, and give it a color of your choosing. Ron's stuff usually works pretty well out of the box, but sometimes creating additional layers on top of each other, using differently sized brushes, creates really amazing results.
(and don't let it scare you... go at it one step at a time, and don't be afraid to start from the beginning if it doersn't seem to work. Like, I managed to paint my first Iris yesterday, using functions I didn't even know existed Photoshop... and had to restart several times because I made some misstep someplace. The good thing is, with every misstep, you'll get better and gain knowledge.
)
EDIT: The "add of Brushes" is actually on the next page of the one I linked to: https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-using-brushes.html
Thanks BeeMKay. I'm going to give those a read through. Its about time I learnt how to postwork properly
Yeah Ron's smoke Brushes and layers, building up the smoke bit by bit and using just off white and grays mixed in. It took me many attempts to get the smoke done in this really old image I did in Poser 8.