I was testing the Mist function in Blender last week, and must admit to being somewhat disappointed. The mist itself looks fine, but it seems that there are very few options for customizing, not to mention that it seems to use only World material/texture for background, which sadly makes it next to useless. I am trying to recreate a rolling fog over water (with waves), and the Mist effect just does not seem up to the task.
Is there a material setting that allows geometry to be rendered as if a Mist effect? I have tried assorted solutions with alphas and the Blend texture, but they leave lines in any area not completely saturated by fog. Halo particles do the same, except they leave dots at the center of each halo unless the fog is over-saturated (which is not good). Currently, the chosen solution is a volumetric light shining through the water and hitting invisible geometry to provide a shape to the surface, but the quality is not quite satisfactory. An actual Mist ‘material’ would be nice.
yes. define a plane in front of the camera. Set alpha to .1, and assign it a cloud texture and map to grey color and alpha. Animate the plane moving in front of the camera, slowly.
No… that does not provide the effect of mist enveloping things (you can see the mist form ‘edges’ around items caught in it, and a textured plane does not do that, sadly).
This… is… BRILLIANT! I have to check that it works as needed, but if it does (as you hint at), this old-skool trick is a goldmine! Theoretically, it should be able to do animated geometrical fogs (just animate the inserted geometry in a Z-image sequence), allow multiple unrelated fogs, etc. If it can do free-standing fogs, there is no limit to the fun!
Plus, I can actually see this trick being programmed in as a fixed function in Blender, cutting away the drudge of having to do the Z-images and so on by hand.:eek: