How to create haze (for depth) in Maya

[bflat]

I see it in nearly every good effect that has any scenery or distance, and I'm not sure the professional way to approach this.

I have a scene with a foreground, a rope bridge leading into the background to some cliffs, and some mountains in the far background. This is supposed to be the kind of shot where you would see the cliffs with a little haze on them and some tiny birds fluttering to give it some scale.

Here's a screenshot with some very temporary lighting:

http://wahoo.com/reference/bridge%20no%20haze.jpg

It's way too dark right now, but it will be changed.
I would really like to make this shot a nice scenic shot, but I've never seen something that gave a good explanation of how to accomplish this.

[goggle]

I believe it is atmospheric perspective of which you speak. In most instances this is best handled through use of a zDepth pass. Search the forums for information on what zDepth is and how to use it. I know it's been covered here before.

The tiny birds you're gonna have to animate though :-7 And where are you going to put the coyote in that scene?

Hope this helps.

-James

[vignisson]

I've been using a volumetric cube, you should try that. Just select Create > Volume Primitives > Cube and within minutes you have a haze. This way you don't need Z-depth, just hit render...

[goggle]

I like the zDepth method because having depth as a separate pass lets you tweak the look you want in compositing without having to re-render everything.

Just a thought.

-James

[tbriggs]

A simpler and rendering-efficient route is to feed the camera z depth from a sampler info into a set range where have the oldMin and oldMax be values like -200 and -20 and the newMin and newMax be 1 and 0 .
Feed the output into the blender channel of a blend colors node and put the fog color you want on color1 and your shader's outcolor on color2. then feed this into the shading group node in place of the shader outcolor. The setrange will key a mix between the two colors. You need to do it for each shader but need only duplicate the blend colors node with connections and hook it in. Adjust the oldMin and oldMax values to the scale of your scene.

[goggle]

That's simpler?

-James

[bflat]

Would doing all that come out with a better effect in the end? Because, just to learn how to do it, I've so far created a Sample Info node, and a new camera, and I've middle mouse click-dragged from the sample to the camera. Now I'm trying to link up the zDepth between the two and I can't find anything that says zDepth. I see a Depth but not a zDepth.

I'm also grateful for the other suggestions, which I am also trying. I just like measuring out all possibilities so I can learn more.

Maybe if someone feels like filling in a few more of the steps inbetween I can run through the one that tbriggs wrote.

Thanks for all the input!

[joojaa]

ok one good way could be to make a fog shader thet is added on top off all the other shaders trough a switch node (thiswy you could have pretty custom haze too), and then on rendertime assign this shader to your objects an make sure their swich is set to thir original shader.

[sidefxken]

Have you ruled out simple environment fog? If you measure your scene (distance tool) from a top ortho view, you'll know better how to set saturation distance, this is also a good way to figure out what your old min and max values would be for your set range node if you're gonna go with tbriggs way.

-Jo

[joojaa]

Well thet wuld be the simple way... but why go simple when you can do it soooo complex (besides you could have very wierd fox thisway!).