I make VR180 movies and have been trying to learn Blender to widen my technical skills. My current project is an orbit of the earth, and I am starting from inside the atmosphere. I want to have the ship going through clouds and have the scene and flight path setup, but keeping the clouds outside of the ship has proven to be quite a challenge. I first tried using the fluid physics, but I always had some cloud penetration regardless of settings and increasing the resolution any further results in Blender crashing. I am now trying to render in layers with the ship as a top layer and then everything else in another layer. The problem I have now is when I disable the atmosphere the light it reflects onto the ship disappears as well. How can I disable the visibility but keep the light reflections?
Welcome!
You can put the atmosphere in a collection and set that collection to “indirect only” in its settings.
There is also an other way that could work without compositing if your scene is the fog is an object with a volume material, which is to make the volume fade in only past a certain distance. This would be done in the material editor, using the view distance.
In that setup, the volume material progressively disappears close to the camera. The multiply node acts as the rate at which the volume fades in (smaller number means it becomes visible farther away) and the color ramp allows having a bubble that’s completely free of fog around the camera.
Thanks for the help. I tried the indirect collection and the reflected light disappears as well. I will see if the bubble method will work in a VR180 environment.
Did you re-enable the visibility on the atmosphere? “Indirect only” needs the object to be visible for this to work.
Also, Eevee or Cycles? Visibility is much less flexible in Eevee and depends much more on what’s actually on screen, because Eevee uses screen-space reflections, which are based on what’s visible on screen.
I might have forgotten to re-enable it. I will check. I can only use cycles for VR180 renders unless I use an elaborate camera system with stitching. I am adjusting the bubble now and that may work, but I am not seeing the color ramp affect anything when adjusted.
If you did everything like my setup, the ramp will shape the falloff of the fading gradient, so you can tighten the transition. The fading distance has to be big enough for the effect of the ramp to really be visible.
With my lack of knowledge I am having trouble understanding the color ramp settings. Yours shows the black slider at around 25% and the Pos is 1. If I move the slider to that range the Pos reads .25.
Never mind. I see you just had the white selected.
Thanks a lot for the help. I have the bubble settings dialed in and this will allow me to complete the scene in one render rather than layering. I have spent about 2 months on this project between learning, rendering and re-editing after finding flaws. While not perfect, this should be the last edit thanks to you. Do you own a quest or any other VR headset?
I don’t. Will your project have anything you can show without the VR? It would still be interesting if you had something to post and show your work at the end, even if not everyone can see the VR version.
Yes, I usually post a 4k version on Youtube along with the VR180. You can still watch the VR180 on a regular screen as well but lose the immersion. I am Hillbilly Hobbyist on Youtube and have only used Blender for one other video thus far, so keep that in mind lol. It was for the opening scene in this video.https://youtu.be/S54gGqco8bo?si=7odDdYC9DoxuY_M_
I tried the unticking the camera first and that gets rid of the light reflections as well. Since the ship is moving through the clouds wouldn’t they appear on the other side since they are now occupying that space? The camera bubble method that etn249 showed me seems to be working fine so I should be good to render now.
all other rays should continue to interact with the scene (reflection, bounced lighting, transmission, etc). But glad you found an alternative 