"atmospheric sun effect"

Hi, B.A.

I was wondering if it was possible for blender to create the same “sun atmospheric effect” that MAYA produces when creating a sun lamp.
I recently took a short 3D animation course with Maya, and the more I learned in maya, the more I wanted to use Blender XD
here’s what I mean:



(the mesh was originally made in Maya, exported as .fbx, then imported to blender so there will be texture bugs, but that’s not an issue since I can recreate the mesh in blender.)

I’m just trying to figure out how to recreate the atmospheric effect the sun in Maya creates. If there’s a way to do that without volumetrics (my computer’s due for an upgrade) I would love to know. I tried tinkering with the AO, different light sources (lamps and emission planes) even tried it in the compositor, but I can’t seem to get the same effect.

The same with how the sun affects the color of the textures.

Thanks in advance for any help :smiley:

From what i can see by your renders, the sky in blender could be a bit stronger.
Is the sky texture aligned with the sun position?
And what kind of setup do you have for the sun emitter?

Hi @Jsketchie,
Here is a start file for your setup:

of’course there are clouds but you can remove it or change the scale, even add stars for night…
The sky node: change the orientation of the sun with the ball.
You can add colors in the gradient node…
or add a mix node between gradient node and sky node to multiply the effect…and so!

Spirou4D, I am not looking for but looks really great, thanks.

Cheers, mib

Secrop: I tried adding to the sky texture but it just ended up sort of washing-out everything else. I forgot about the sun orientation with the ball so I’ll get on that. The sun in the image is just the sun lamp, but I have tried with planes and spheres, small in scale but strong in emissions to create the sharp shadows, but it still didn’t create the same look as the Maya sun.

Spirou4D: Thanks for the .blend file, I’m fairly new to the sky texture node set-up so I’ll have to tinker around with it to see what does what.

Thanks for the advice guys, I’ll post again when I get the effect that I’m after… or if I give up entirely XD

Maybe I’m clueless, but could it be the difference between Lambert and Oren-Nayar shader models dependent on whether there is any roughness in Cycles diffuse materials? (Which shader model does Maya use?) The wiki examples page doesn’t seem to show much difference at low roughness settings in diffuse, but perhaps it has a role when light is bounced around a lot with some scattering? (The shadow spread seems about the same, so it might be more due to shaders than the lighting settings for the sun emitter.)

The main thing I notice in the comparison renders is that Maya mats look less saturated and have lighter shadows. The sunlight color is slightly warmer in Maya, and you might want to play with render film exposure and scene color management “look” (film) settings in Blender. Other than that, the world (sky) lighting (same HDRI?) is obviously different.

I also wonder if Maya is also doing anything like mist/z-depth pass internally to fade out and/or blur distant stuff like the horizon? If so, that could be reproduced by adding mist and z-depth pass renders and using the compositor in Blender. That would be much faster than trying to do any actual volumetric rendering to achieve a similar result.

To be honest, I think you can get it there. It’s just a matter of persistence and learning the ins and outs of the render engines you’re using. (There’s quite a bit to delve into that’s not readily obvious at first.)