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Not trying to beat a dead horse with this topic lately, but it is what im trying to figure out.

So right now we have volumtric's we can use for clouds which look great, but as they do not contribute to the z depth channel, adding post atmo haze to a nice cloud scape isnt't really possible in compositing.

Using the camera sphere scattering method or the environment medium input doesn't really produce the correct effect either to what atmospheres actually do on large scale scenes. And if it does, im having one hell of a time finding the right settings lol. Also using primitive volume geometry with scattering on them does look good, but the camera can not fly through them to my knowledge.

My question is, are there any known plans to improve the physical sky model to include natural haze and air effects? Kinda like what Ozone does from e-onsoftware?

2nd question is will there be a simple fog implemented at some point, like lightwaves old fog system, main need for this one is it would be ridiculously fast to render, and most seens would look great with it. I know this can be done in compositing, but as mentioned above, if volumetrics do not contribute to zdepth channel, this is not possible.

Thanks.

Hi there!

Not sure I understand your question fully, but here goes my opinion:

1) Fog does behave as it should in my opinion. It is a b*tch to set up properly, that's true, but it does work as it should, I think. It does, however, carry a severe speed and noise penalty.
2) LW fog is just a simple formula that changes the color of geometry based on the distance to camera. If you want you can put this in your surfaces. Of course this can become impractical to set up for a large number of surfaces, in which case running a seperate Z-pass for compositing can do the same for you (e.g. using the depth pass as a mask for an adjustment layer in Photoshop that changes the color to the "full haze colour".

Not as easy as Lightwave, so I do agree that we could use a render target camera option that fades colour with distance to camera.

I understand those methods you mentioned, but as stated above, current octane 3 volumetrics do not contribute to the z depth pass. So post comping a haze would not work for clouds, which makes high altitude stuff very hard.

The Lightwave fog is very simple, and thats why i think it would be also very simple to implement, and it would save a lot of time.

Setting up surfaces like that is extremely non-practical.

And i dont think the current scattering system does work as it should, or if it does, it might need some tweaks. I find it hard to get the correct depth look of fog in it. No matter what i do i always seem to get a constant value of fog over the whole scene, it never seems to "build" with distance as fog does.

Maybe im still just not doing something right, but i have read everything i could find on it, and i get it working, it just always looks really flat.

I dont understand how this was done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Pr9f78JwRU

if its scattering volume geometry, how does the camera go inside it with out it vanishing?

Hi!

Just did a quick and rough test, and got something like LW fog fairly easily:

Settings:
Absorption RGB 0 0 0
Scattering RGB 8 8 8

Scale .297
Phase -1.0

Medium Radius 250m.