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I wish the physical sky had a way to put clouds in, to make sun shadows softer - it's quite rare in the northern hemisphere to have striking clear skies and full sunlight. It could be a nice touch to have a setting to tweak the shadow sharpness...

or mbe I've just missed it, I'm a complete maxwell noob - just recently bought it

I didn't mean that maxwell should create 3d clouds, as the discussion in the above-mentioned post is about. For stills, I guess it's a lot easier to composite clouds in photoshop afterwards.

I was more interested in that maxwell had the possibility to emulate the effect of let's say a thin cloud in the sunlight - not to be seen in the physical sky itself. This way the shadows would be softer, and not automatically giving away the rendering as cg because of the ultra-precise shadows. I thought that absorption and scattering would do the trick, but I can't get it to make a difference...

I would suggest to make some sorta use of METAR data which updates 24/7 with instant weather and cloud data, it's used in many flightsimulators including X-Plane and MS FlightSim 2004 and it works really well.

Personally i would love to see support for this implemented in a future Maxwell version either via some script or plugin. Then you could make very accurate atmospheric and cloud simulations using real life realtime data.

More info here about METAR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METAR

/ Max

Wow nice info Maximus

Hehe live weather in maxwell, that would indeed be amusing.

mortenmr,

you can change shadow sharpness. up your turbidity. It will however change the color of the day.

The way METAR data works is once implemented into something is that you can have it updating automatically or you can do it manually, you can set the location, time, date and everything else and then get the weather data for just that specific data you enter. This would just work as a alternative to any other more common method of cloud and atmosphere generation, not a replacement.

You're not forced to have auto-updated weather and cloudcover data in your scenes. That's fully controllable by the users. But the advantage is that it allows the users to have a chance to make use of realworld real life weather information and cloudcover data in their renderings. I cannot see that being and bad thing, more like a good thing as you have control over it.

/ Max

No worries

It's useful for realistic timelapse shots as a example and if you wanna do stuff like compositing, you have the time, date, other enviromental data and your phots and then you just pick the same info from the METAR database and voila there you got your perfectly matched enviroment ready for compositing alot of cool stuff can be derived from this if used the right way.

I'm not saying it would be better than a preset based system but it would be a nice and useful complement to it. It never hurts to have several different options when you create 3d.

A preview system for METAR data could be a small window using procedural noise to show you the cloud density, cloud layers and the atmosphere roughly rendered. Nothing fancy but so you get a idea of what it look like. I'm pretty sure it can be done.

/ Max

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