This page provides information on the Effects tab in the V-Ray Renderer node.
Overview
The Effects tab offers settings control over two volumetric effects - the Sphere Fade and the Aerial Perspective.
The Sphere Fade is a volumetric gizmo used to render just a small part of the scene by putting it in a special spherical locator.
The Aerial Perspective atmospheric effect simulates aerial perspective - the effect that the Earth atmosphere has on the appearance of objects that are viewed from a distance, and which is similar to fog or haze. The atmospheric effect works together with V-Ray Sun and V-Ray Sky to calculate an approximation to the aerial perspective effect.
Sphere Fade
When CUDA/RTX is chosen as a rendering engine, all unsupported options are disabled from the parameters.
Enable – Turns the Sphere Fade on and off.
Empty Color – Specifies the color outside the Sphere Fade. For more information, see the Empty Color example below.
Falloff – A radius amount that is used to blend the inside of the Sphere Fade with the Empty Color.
Affect Alpha – Controls whether or not the alpha channel is affected.
For more information, see the V-Ray SphereFade Gizmo page.
Aerial Perspective
Enabled – Turns the atmospheric effect on or off.
Sun – Specifies the V-Ray Sun object in the scene that the Aerial Perspective effect is connected to.
Distance – Specifies the distance, in meters, at which the fog has absorbed 90% of the light coming from objects behind it. Lower values make the fog appear more dense, while larger values reduce the effect of the aerial perspective.
Height – Controls the height of the atmosphere layer, in meters. Lower values can be used for artistic effects.
Inscattered Light – Controls the amount of sunlight scattered from the atmospheric effect. The default value 1.0 is physically accurate; lower or higher values could be used for artistic purposes.
Filter Color – Specifies a filter color for the fog. Note that the fog color depends on the color of the sky.
Affect Environment – When disabled, the atmospheric effect is applied only to camera rays that hit actual objects, but not to rays that hit the sky. This is because the V-Ray Sky texture already takes into account the amount of scattered sunlight. However, it is possible to enable this option for artistic effects, especially with low visibility ranges.
Affect Background – Specifies whether the effect is applied to camera rays that hit the background (if a background other than V-Ray Sky is used). This option is enabled by default, but some interesting effects are possible when disabled.
Affect Alpha – Specifies whether the aerial perspective affects the Alpha channel.
Primary Visibility – When disabled, the effect appears perfectly transparent to camera rays.
Example: Empty Color
A V-RaySphereFadeVolume gizmo is used with the Shape set to Sphere and the radius of 390 aligned to the Viper fighter. This provides the active area used by V-Ray SphereFadeVolume. The Empty Color (the area outside of that affected by the V-Ray SphereFade Volume locator and its falloff) can be changed from a default of mid-gray to any color required.
For the following example, the Falloff has been set to a value of 0.1.
Empty Color set to mid-grey
Empty Color set to black
Empty Color set to green