dark mist

[rossk]

I'm working on a scene right now and am trying to get a dark fog sort of thing at the bottom of the scene, however when I use the mist volumentric I seem to only be able to make fog thats bright... There is no light hitting the fog, but it renders as a bright splotch. I put the brightness down in the mist settings and then the fog just disappears.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't get a dark fog.... it either is bright or isn't there at all.

Any help would be great,

thanks,

--Ross

[jpappas]

Hi Ross,

 

I can only confirm what you are seeing. I used Volumetric Dust in my recent animation for The Door's Stuck and like you say, it's an effect that seems to work only when the color chosen is a bright color. I'm thinking, that may just be how it works? Just thinking out loud now, Volumetric effects usually refer to things involved with lights, like dust swirling and made visible by a light, so maybe that's it.

 

One other thing that I noticed was that the effect caused very visible banding in the area it was rendered. The Help file talks about this and says to increase the Quality setting to get rid of the banding (keeping in mind it makes for a longer render). I haven't seen a Quality setting under the Volume Dust properties in either V13 or V11. Unless its referring to increasing the number of passes for MultiPass, I'm not sure. I ended up using it anyway since the scene was a fast moving object and the banding was less noticable due to that.

 

I'm thinking at this point that a better option for dark fog or dark dust/smoke is probably to use Particle sprites.

 

-Jim

[rossk]

Yeah, I ended up using particle sprites.

 

I think to get rid of the banding you can increase the sampling setting under your volumetric object.

 

Thanks,

--Ross