Adventures across the 3rd dimension

Yes, that was my initial plan but I always struggle trying to get my messy, smeary painting style to fit with the sharp edges and textures of the renders.

I may rummage around some disorganised folders to see if I can find some old Photoshop custom brushes that might help.

Valence wrote:

Yes, that was my initial plan but I always struggle trying to get my messy, smeary painting style to fit with the sharp edges and textures of the renders.

I may rummage around some disorganised folders to see if I can find some old Photoshop custom brushes that might help.

Nagel's cloud brushes that you can apparently get from this collection:  www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/91334

 

Dave Nagel brushes!
There's a blast from the past.
I think I have a couple of his skin sets somewhere on an old hard drive that I downloaded back in the day but I never got any of the others so it's great to see them all in one place.

My attempt at a painted background didn't work at all.
I like painting big cloudy skies, I put them in far too many of my pics, but none of them are anywhere close to being photorealistic and this one was no different.
It looked like a theatre set in a cheap school play.

I shall go back to putting lots of cloudy bits together from HDRIs.

Valence wrote:

I shall go back to putting lots of cloudy bits together from HDRIs.

...and they only look slightly better.

May have to have another think about this.

*glances nervously at countdown*

*launches Blender*
*loads in file*
*checks out rendered viewport*

What's happened to my fog???
I spent ages the other day multiplying two textures together in the node thing to mix the wispy mist with the linear gradient to get that soft edge and now I've inexplicably got a hard line of fog stretching out behind the buildings!
What's going on??

*checks node editor*
*double checks texture*
*tries to think of something else to check*

And it doesn't help with everything being so slooow. Let me put it in wireframe mode while I think.
Oh. Wait a minute. What the hell's that?

It seems at some point I've inadvertently edited the fog domain cube and moved a single vertex way off the edge of the screen.

The fog looks good again now I've fixed it.

And after a lot of other fiddles I'm almost happy with the way it looks in Eevee. Almost.
Now I'll need to try it in Cycles... when I have a bit more time.

Fog domains sound creepy. Glad I've never had to go near one 

Creepy and... slooooow.

Thankfully I just have to click a checkmark and set a distance 

Ah, but is it volumetric?

I ended up having another fog-related issue with Cycles (I was doing some little test renders of small selections of part of the image.) I'd set up some more little fog areas to pick out some shafts of light and it doesn't seem to render them through the transparencies of the blurred rotors. I think it may be solved by tweaking the number of max light bounces but I think the easier, quicker option would be to just do two renders in Eevee and Cycles and Blend them together where the problems appear.