God rays disappearing

[ksgy]

Hi,

 

I realised I'm missing the God Rays from SkyMaxx. Made a short footage how they appear and disappear after a while.

Do you have any ideas what could cause this?

 

Thanks

Edited May 16, 2015 by ksgy

[JohnMAXX]

I've never seen this.....I wonder are the clouds moving due to wind?

The reason I ask is the clouds may obscure the god rays....

Also can you give me a rundown on your hardware and operating environment....

[ksgy]

Nope, there was no wind, and when I press the Apply button the clouds not even re-render to a different position, rays just appear then disappear. 

 

One thing I forgot to try yesterday: removed all the other plugins and switched to a default plane to make sure no other plugins are loaded. 

and still no luck. After a couple of seconds rays just disappearing.

 

Attached the log.txt

 

Is there any internal dataref where I can check the value of this setting? Or any other way to debug the current value?

 

Thanks

Log.txt

[sundog]

It's hard to say definitively, but here's what I think is going on.

 

Crepuscular rays will only appear when the sun is in the scene, but obscured by clouds. Holes in the cloud cover near the sun will cast "god rays". SkyMaxx Pro analyzes the scene to see how much of the sky is obscured by cloud cover relative to where the sun is, in order to produce this effect.

 

When you turn on the god rays feature in the SkyMaxx Pro configuration screen, it's not just applying that setting - it is also re-applying all weather conditions. In doing so, it will fade out the existing clouds, and fade in new clouds to replace them, over the course of a few seconds. Since the cloud-related settings didn't really change, this isn't too noticeable, as it's replacing one set of clouds with another, identical set.

 

So, I think as the old clouds are fading out, it's allowing just enough sunlight to shine through that it triggers the effect. But once the new clouds fully fade in, the sun is obscured again, and the rays disappear.

 

Short story: if I'm right, it's behaving as designed, and it's just a quirk of the new settings getting applied after you close the SMP configuration dialog. If you fly around and get the sun behind some holes in the cloud cover, you'll probably see the rays as intended.

[ksgy]

The reason I did this test because never saw rays for a long-long time, just a minimal ones... I tried with different weather settings (real weather, pre-defined, drew), but none of them helped.

[sundog]

Just like real life, they only appear in very specific conditions. You are most likely to see them when the sun is fairly low, and behind clouds that are dense but have openings for the sunlight to shine between. Usually you need to be under the cloud layer.

Edited May 17, 2015 by sundog