Sky color and displacement

[Elele]

Howdy,

I keep running into these problems:

1.every time i want to apply displacement, the driver crashes. How are you supposed to apply displacement?

2. the sky environment is way too bright compared to the light it emits. It basically just renders white.
I can lower the exposure, but then it turns blackish, with very little saturation.

...Also, is there a way to change the haze at the horizon?

Thanks

[larsmidnatt]

for the environment, do yo u mean an HDR? then try lowering the gamma. Some work best at 1.0, some work best at 2.0.

Displacement should not result in a crash, at worst it should result in ugly results. Try lowering the power to very small numbers, like .001 and the like. Also, what resolution displacement are you using? And is the mesh the displacement applied to very high poly and not very flat? displacement works best on relatively flat surfaces.

[Elele]

You can't use too big geometries for displacement apparently. I wanted to create a sea (pretty big). So in the end i made a little primitive for closeup with displacement, and big one with bump for far away.

For the environment, i meant the default daylight model (with all the parameters for time, sun ,...) that comes with Octane. Is there a way to darken the background independently of the light intensity?

Edit, I tried with just hdr backgrounds too, but i get the same problem. Guess my materials are too dark. Is there some kind of reference of for the brightness of meterials?

[sikotik13]

For the default daylight, at the bottom, there should be two color sliders, the top one is Sky Color , and the lower is for sunset. Altering the top color affects the color of the sky, as does time of day, and the longitude/latitude offsets (though they may or may not be accurate for any given point on the map, and the change is minimal to my eyes). It's quicker to just adjust the color for me, since I can just adjust it and preview the results on the fly. Also handy for "out there" scenes. This also has zero effect on the light passing through the scene, so the sun still shines however it's shining based on your settings, the sky is just changed to the color selected in the top box (even if it's black). Nifty idea, actually.

The haze is transition point where the sky "ends", so really, the only ways I see around it would be altering the angle of the camera, blocking the horizon with scene elements, or using HDR, I suppose. The darker you set the above, the "lower" the haze sits. At black, it's little more than a pretty small gradient blur.

Note: the default camera angle is looking down so steeply, it is essentially showing only the "ground" color, which is whitish at defaults. I doubt that's the root of your problem, but worth mentioning.