Matte Fog? What is this?
Daventaki
Posts: 1,624
Downloaded the new update for DS and found this Matte Fog is the Render Settings under Enviroment? I tried to do a render with it but nothing showed up?
Image1.jpg
443 x 1017 - 314K
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See the section a bit after half-way through this post https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5534391/#Comment_5534391
That doesn't say what it actually is. Having seen fog in real life, which has texture, I doubt that it looks like fog. Probably more like haze? Daz is really poor at communicating about Iray features, and seems not to care whether its customers use them or don't. I'm not sure whom they're trying to impress.
The nomenclature is, as far as I know, nVidia's. Yes, it seems to be an even density fog rather than a dry ice cloud effect - but fog/mist are usually like that in my experience.
Well did a test with this setting on and well the picture will show what it does.. The settings here were 200 meters and 50% brightness with the colours both being a dark grey.. If the brightness is set any brighter it washes out the image a lot..
Thank you everyone who has replied. I will play with it further and see what happens. Might start out with Ghosty12's settings and go from there. Need to do some experiments maybe to see if it renders faster than fog planes (although unless I can get a differnet look from the hazy I will probably stick wiht planes at this point).
Wow! That's pretty good ... it actually looks something like that around here somedays, I call it "Nibiru Whiteout".
I can get it to work on a figure close to the camera but cannot get it to work on Landscapes, so I'll just stick to using the atmospheres do have that work easily.
OK finally getting something and its much quicker than most atmospherics, this took about 6 minutes and went to 500 interations but looks a lot cleaner than if I used one of the atmosphere sets I have. No post work
The nVidia documentation is here https://raytracing-docs.nvidia.com/iray/manual/index.html#rendering#matte-fog
Thanks Richard! I was thinking about going and looking for that!
These forums are weird.
Interesting stuff. So turns out that the thicker the fog, the fewer the iterations and faster the render. I ran a quick test with Sickleyield's old Iray test render scene and here's what I got with a 1070. Daz Public 4.12.1.117. All Matte Fog settings except Visibility left at defaults.
10000m (Default) - 3743 iterations, 3.038s init, 146.158s render
1000m - 2443 iterations, 3.063s init, 95.622s render
100m - 476 iterations, 3.065s init, 18.802s render
10m - 131 iterations, 3.070s init, 5.079s render
For comparison, without fog, this is a 167 second render on my machine.
So there's a big reduction in detail, and you won't get any wispy goodness like you would with a plane prop, but it's kind of cool.
Thank you.. :) Just unfortunate that the setting is just a very basic one, maybe in the future there will be some more advanced settings, case of wait and see I suppose.. :)
From the forum post for those not finding it - https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5534391/#Comment_5534391 :
Edited to add link/set quote
Don't forget this could just be a stepping stone. Who knows, maybe some PA will be able to make something amazing with this as a foundation?
Science marches on! So after I was investigating something else, for science, I thought I'd give Matte Fog another whirl, and well, it disappointed me. Turns out, Matte Fog has some limitations!
Here's a figure with just an HDRI for lighting. There's a bounce next to the camera to provide some reflected light. The Matte Fog appears to have no effect on the HDRI, whereas it has a very significant effect on the figure in the image.
No Matte Fog or anything.
Matte Fog set for 100m. Other settings default.
Matte Fog set at 100m. Brightness Relative to Environment OFF because I was curious.
So in a case where you are using an HDRI as background, there's still no quick and easy substitute for an atmospheric prop.
What are some good fog props?
I am wondering, how does matte fog compare with just adding volumetric haze by using a cube/torus/other shape and changing the refraction etc?
Well, Matte Fog is much, much faster to render, but it doesn't give the impression of dust, if that's what you're after. If you're after fog, something like Sickleyield's Fast Fog is nice. Render Studio 2.0 by Colm Jackson is also very good. I'd sort of stopped using volumetric props they took soooo long to render, but I just upgraded to RTX, so I'll probably use them more.
You don't actually need to buy the props, since there's a really nice tutorial, also by Sickleyield on how to make the props yourself.
Iray Dawn to Dusk 2 Atmospheric Lighting works well for me.