3EA51489.A067C415@gmx.de...
> 6 hours sounds good.  Do they interact with the light (i.e. cast shadows
> etc.)?
Yes, these are media clouds and they cast shadows (see the shadowing on the
top of the mountain in the attached image). Note that a good deal of the
render time was taken by isosurfaces and other media elements, the clouds
themselves are relatively fast, and particularly, they're very fast to test,
a few seconds at 320*240 using intervals 1 and no aa, which makes scene
development quite easy. But, as I said, I have to test the technique at
higher resolutions, though it should be scalable.

> In my experience the most serious disadvantage of using isosurfaces in
> such situations is the strong slowdown you get when using radiosity.

There's no perfect solution I fear. Function-based HF are good and render
fast but they require a lot of memory and may show artefacts. I've favouring
this technique though, because for many terrains and when the view is
horizontal it's possible to tile the same HF over and over at different
sizes and get away with it. Plants and complex textures can hide the
artifacts pretty well, even at high-res... In other cases (snow or mineral
desert with no plant cover), "true" isosurfaces are the only good solution
for the foreground.

G.

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