Ozone

[Jon Berntsen]

Hi! I am currently looking for a good way to get pretty clouds/skies and atmosphere. I am testing Ozone right now. My current hdri setup is working, but the skies will never be as smooth as if rendered. use vray and max. Did anyone in here try it with vray3 and max setup, what are your opinions and how is your workflow?

 

I am testing the PLE now, and initial thoughts are that I am loosing control over the lights. But oh my the results are promising. Havent totaly got the difference between how GI/AO and the other lighting modes works... Anyone with opinions?

Edited December 4, 2014 by chroma

[heni30]

can you post your test results?

 

(got a sad face saying video is unavailable..........)

[Francisco Penaloza]

I have not tested the latest release of Ozone nor VRay 3, but from what I remember from previews version was, yes you get nice results but renderings time increase exponentially.

To get the best results I did disable the GI from Ozone and let VRay do what it does best

a good workflow was to setup the sky and sun with ozone until you like it then, render an HDRI and use with a VRay dome light instead ozone it self, this will give you very similar results lighting wise and render way faster. Of course you will loose the fog and mist effect but it is a decent trade I think.

[Jon Berntsen]

can you post your test results?

 

(got a sad face saying video is unavailable..........)

 

Here are two quick tests I did. I think it's too dark, and I can't really seem to get the blue daytime atmosphere setups (sorry no preview now) to work with the sunny 15 rule that they state on their own website. Must turn the iso up, and it then results in a somewhat flat image. So the potential is here, but I still need to do more testing to understand how Ozone works with vray. It should be straightforward, but is isn't. So when it isn't, and the program's GUI is build to be straightforward, then what to do... Spend hours and hours with testing, yeah.

 

PS The tests are done with simple boxes as hills/mountains, couple of kilometres wide, in three layers/distances. Next is trying to get nice looking blue sunny days.

 

I also found that the light cache is slowing down a loooot.

 

 

Try my signature now, thanks for noticing me.

 

 

Edited December 4, 2014 by chroma

[Jon Berntsen]

I have not tested the latest release of Ozone nor VRay 3, but from what I remember from previews version was, yes you get nice results but renderings time increase exponentially.

To get the best results I did disable the GI from Ozone and let VRay do what it does best

a good workflow was to setup the sky and sun with ozone until you like it then, render an HDRI and use with a VRay dome light instead ozone it self, this will give you very similar results lighting wise and render way faster. Of course you will loose the fog and mist effect but it is a decent trade I think.

 

Thanks for the tips. I fundamentally believe that the fog and mist effects lit by the sun from the exact correct angle is two of the reasons why it can look so good. It's a shame if one have to alter on those, but that aside - the sky itself is the most important reason. It just hit me that it seems like a lot of hazzle to render out hdri from the sky composition and then do another light setup test to get things correct.

 

With everything in a heavy scene, forest, grass and different objects, with ozone, I fear really really long render times, like two weeks on something that used to take 5 hours. Just imagine trying to pull off an animation. ... Should be possible to make it somehow.

 

I am going to do more tests with trying it to look as nice as I want first, and then I will add on more elements in my scene to see how things impact the render time.

[Jon Berntsen]

If someone else is interested in testing Ozone, here is a (short) thread from their forums. http://www.e-onsoftware.com/support/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7629&sid=26a30d31037fa803269676260a300e16

[Francisco Penaloza]

Actually is not that bad, you only setup your ozone sky until you are happy, then render a 360 image, save it as HDRI or EXR 32Bits then turn off Ozone and load that image in a VRay dome light, it should render pretty close, lighting wise.

 

Now regarding that e-on post, if you disable Disconnect Ozone from FG you'll lose all the color illuminations produced by Ozone plug in, this should be use only if you want Ozone as a back drop only.

 

The best workflow for me is, load an Ozone preset, or create one from scratch, then change the Lighting model from global ambiance to Standard, this will disable the influence of the dome light created by Ozone. Then increase the Light balance to sunlight, to get better shadows, and check apply setting to all lights. Be sure that you are using physical scale in Ozone properties.

 

This way you'll force Ozone to let VRay do the GI only. In the latest release of Ozone they introduce Photo-metric Spectral that will use "real" values for light intensity of Sun and Sky, this work really good with V Ray or Mental Ray, just be sure to follow all of the above step and you may need to increase the physical scale to get better contrast on the sky. You'll get nice ambiance lighting.

 

The following samples, shows, Ozone default, (here is where everybody get depress )

The following image is with my work around.

the final image is with workaround plus Photometric Spectral sky.

 

 

Hope this help and show us your progress

[CliveG]

I'll go slightly off topic here, because as far as some of the sky plugins go, I'm so far underwhelmed. I'd love to see some images and hear of rendertimes that convince me they're a good investment in all of that time to get them working well.

 

If the topic is just "a good way to get pretty clouds/skies and atmosphere" then the other alternatives seem to be Skydomes and Vraycomptex-ing the VraySky. (apart from just straight HDRI's which have been covered enough on the forum)

 

My experience was that the Skydome sounds good but the lighting of clouds / atmosphere never seemed to look all that realistic (I think some better maps may return better results though) and they always seemed to lack depth and perspective of clouds rolling convincingly to a far horizon. Which seems to be a failing of some of the plugins or volumetrics as well.

 

At the moment I'm liking the comptex option in that it's simple and seems to offer the controllability and versatility. Obviously it interacts with the Vraysky and sun so with the Turbidity, Ozone and sun angle adjustments a variety of colours can be seen blending through the clouds relatively easily. It seems a lot more forgiving solution.

 

As an aside, I'm curious what the vraysky is based upon (technically within the software) and whether there is any way of someone cleverer than me conjuring up a variety of vraysky's with clouds of differing types? Or do I have to just make my own library of Comptex materials to achieve the same thing.

Edited December 8, 2014 by CliveG

[CliveG]

Here's a quick test of a Comptex material to see if the colour of the vraysky works through the clouds in a reasonably convincing way....

 

[Francisco Penaloza]

That is a nice sky, but not sure if all that work around would be better than to use one of this HDRI http://www.hyperfocaldesign.com

you can even get the shadows of the cloud in the ground, I didn't see that effect in your test.

I am not saying that what you are doing is wrong I am just comparing.

 

Regarding using dome images or Ozone or other sky generator, yes you are correct in your first assumption but, the main difference is Ozone, or world builder, world machine they use the sky as a volumetric effect. not and plain image, in the case of e-on ozone, you can change color in clouds or environment, and this will affect the sun light passing through it, Ozone was designed to be use more than just a background, you can actually fly through the clouds, so yes if you'll use as a simple background, it is a little too much. But again if you want to have specific clouds and accurate distant fog, you'll need to start using volumetrics on V-Ray to re create or mimic these effects, where as ozone can do it right away, and they look great. Of course you need to pay in rendering time.

[Jon Berntsen]

Here's a quick test of a Comptex material to see if the colour of the vraysky works through the clouds in a reasonably convincing way....

 

 

This looks pretty good to me. So this approach needs the use of vray sun for it to work, or is it solely a vraysky thing? If so, then it can be done with using a hdri as sun source, right? Sorry if I am being slow, but how did you achieve this result, except for "using comptex"? I like it!

 

Problem with the sun is that it gives bad shadows and bad colors (which needs to corrected with trial and error each project). The problem with hdri as backgrounds/skies is that they remain the same, and when you do like 100 images each year they start to look a little boring as the years fly by.The main pro with this comptex approach, as I have understood it, is that you can special fit your sky into the composition, which I feel is hugely undervalued these days.

[CliveG]

In my experience the actual Vraysun doesn't contribute that much to the lighting of the scene, the Vraysky / Comptex provides most of that. What the sun does do is change the colour of that sky with the 3 controls - height, turbidity and ozone, which is the facility I like. I'm pretty sure it can be switched off and still achieve this control by the way so doesn't need to contribute any light. The Sky still provides a shadow, though a distinct light source might give more shadow control ultimately. (Remember that the Vraysun default has v low sub-divs if not happy with some of the Sun's shadow etc.)

 

In the end though you may find some of the same limitations, in that I've used a 32bit image as the material comp'ed together with the Vraysky in order to achieve this test. So you may get bored with them in another 100 images or so, but one other thing I'd suggest is to not be shy about editing HDRI's in PS and making them suit your purposes.

 

I guess the main issue I had with the other sky options was the flatness of them, unless I made a scene 100's of kilometres large I wasn't getting that depth of perspective of the clouds gathering at the horizon which I feel gives real genuine depth to an image. All of the HDRI's, Skydomes, volumetrics and background images just looked flat and 2D and even then I struggled to put any colour through those clouds if I wanted a particular flavour light in the scene, the clouds colour wouldn't match the scene colour.

 

You wouldn't think that I do 95% interior stills so I just want a hint of blown sky through glass usually.

Edited December 9, 2014 by CliveG

[Jon Berntsen]

In the end though you may find some of the same limitations, in that I've used a 32bit image as the material comp'ed together with the Vraysky in order to achieve this test. So you may get bored with them in another 100 images or so, but one other thing I'd suggest is to not be shy about editing HDRI's in PS and making them suit your purposes.

 

 

Thanks for your very good information. Ok, I thought you maybe did it with a procedural workflow (needless to say I am not familiar with vraycomptex). Any chance to just see how that image look like?

Another question, was it with this comptex workflow you didn't feel the need to make 100000 km scene to make it look with depth?

[CliveG]

Vraycomptex is similar to Photoshop layers in that you can adjust the blending to Multiply, Add Subtract etc. so by layering the VraySky together with multiple iterations of an HDRI allows the colour of one to blend through the other (thus the Pinks and yellows of sunrise and sunset showing through the white clouds of the HDR). This is the sort of functionality I was after, I'd searched through old posts and saw reference to the Comptex and just did some experiments about the time you posted.

 

I'll probably do some more tests, for a start removing the sun from the HDRI in PS so that I don't have the two brightspots that you can see on the sphere through the middle of the day and also so the HDRI may contribute a bit less to the overall lighting. But as I say, I do interior stills so don't need to spend too much time on this, I just wanted more control of the colour of light and the sky outside my interiors.

 

To answer your question, because the HDR image itself shows clouds gathering at the horizon with spherical mapping, it means the depth and perspective sky effect is driven from the environment slot and doesn't require an enormous scene, in this case just the three geometry items plus a camera and Vraysun. These were simple 10- 15 second renders at 1600x1200, very adjustable and easy to set up.

 

As an aside have a look at this

for volumetric clouds, I found links to this when searching on the subject. Awesome animation anyway but having played a bit with the volumetric clouds it's all the more impressive!