Nice atmospherics? Tweet

[coilbook]

Hi,
A lot of renderers can achieve nice foggy backgrounds. Octane's fog is dull and flat. Any plans to improve it?
Anyway to make it similar like from Wonder Park Movie?

Thanks

[milanm]

Hi

Could you please show how do you normally achieve that in other render engines so that we can better identify what exactly needs to improve here. That feature was rendered in Arnold so if you could show how do you normally do that there that would help.

Thanks!
Milan

[dearthman]

I'm not sure what aspects of that render you're interested in but it seems like a lot of what looks nice about it is probably post-effects blooming and highlight glows that are probably not fog related.

That said in my experience playing with the phase parameter is important in octane to getting a nice look. That may not be "proper" (I'm sure there's a physically accurate setting for what atmospheric fog scattering phase should be) but it works for me.

[milanm]

@dearthman

Good catch. As a colorist (that dabbles in color science) I have a lot to say about the grade. But it seems coilbook here has some idea about volumes not rendering correctly in Octane ???

The way they are handling saturated colors in the color grade allows them to have nice saturated highlights without them looking "neon" and "digital". That combined with "golden hour" lighting setup is a big part of this look. It's a bit of a trend these days, Steve Yedlin (cinematographer of Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi) wrote about this at great length and some new tools have been added in Baselight that support that way of grading.

Cheers
Milan

[Notiusweb]

In Coilbook's image you can clearly see fog at the bottom of his red circle, that is not alone a Post Process effect, although, it may have been enhanced by it.
But, functionally, you do that just by placing any old VDB shape at the base of mountains with low density to get that, right?

I think Milanm is right, you would have to compare a simple same scene render of Arnold vs Octane to identify a difference between the 2.

[coilbook]

Thank you all for explaining

[jimho]

usually we want foreground to be clear and sharp and the background to be fogged to help the DOF effect and also sometimes we want upper part is different density from the lower part of the scene,
but what octane's default environment medium treat everything very equally and very difficult to adjust, not very sure in version 2018 or 2019 things are better?

[J.C]

2018 has still the same looking dense fog. It should be much more clear in front of camera while disappearing further along. This is the close I can get. Medium radius is set to 100.

fog.png