Day 34

We've just attended another of Jeff Wagner's weekly houdini class.

He taught us about the usage of geometry fog volumes.

Here are some tests I ran.

The first screenshot was rendered using ray-traced shadows. The time taken to render it was extremely long.

The second screenshot however was rendered without any shadows casting from the fog. The time taken to render was much faster than when rendered using ray-traced shadows.

In terms of visual appeal the fog in the first screenshot seems like it has more volume and density in it. The fog in the second screenshot seems flat, however it still shows difference in distance between the three teapots.

This is what happens when I put a camera within the fog to look at an object.

I was curious whether the positioning of the camera would affect the rendered density of the fog.

Well it didn't, I decreased the smoke density in the billowy smoke volume shader to... well... decrease the smoke density.

The fog volume was created using just a simple sphere, along with an isooffset and setting the output type to Fog Volume.

After that, a billowy smoke volume shader was applied to the sphere obj.

Tweaked a little bit of noise and smoke density in the shader, Volume Filter Width in the sphere obj render settings and that's pretty much the result I got.

I'll apply some fog to my actual scene and see how it goes.

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2.33 pm

I've done some fog tests in my scene.

First render is without fog. Rendering time extremely fast. (obviously)

Second render has fog with cloud density of 0.01. Rendering took so long I decided to stop it halfway. Thus it's kinda pixelated.

Third render has fog with cloud density of 0.005 Rendering takes just as long as second render.

I'll resume tweaking, post will be updated soon.

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6.06 pm

Credits once again go to Zack for spending lots of time today teaching me several methods of rendering passes and separate geometries in houdini, such as adding different takes, adding extra image planes in mantra and applying a black constant shader to "unwanted" renderable objects.

Steven also taught me other methods of separating out geometries by going into the mantra objects tab and applying rules for separate object rendering.

Here's a low quality batch render just for testing the new spherical sky ramp.

Project Hellfire: Shot 02 Test Batch Render 09
Artist: Bryan Isaac Emmanuel
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F42HV6RofGA

I'll leave the workstation on overnight again to render out a fog layer.

Once done I'll try compositing it in with the current output I have now.