Atmosphere

Volume Fog and Fire add atmosphere to scenes but dramatically increase render time this may require a lower poly count for us to sustain our 3 minute animation.

A simple Displacement map; using a plane (25l,25w sections) with the displacement modifier of  a nose map on top to create our environments base. I set this to a sandy colour and created it to look like sand dunes.

Next I added tree objects from 3DS max's own library (AEC Extended primitives) (as this was a test for atmospheric effects there was no need to create these from scratch as they are not the focus of this test). I played with the setting to give different levels of detail and a higher variety to them.

This was my basic environment, I added a Sky box by creating a sphere, deleting its lower portion (by turning it into an editable mesh and selecting the polys on the lower section of the model) (this lowers the poly count, the lower section is not seen and therefore is not required). Using the materiel editor I created a materiel that resembles a generic Sci-Fi worlds Sky  (red and grey, oddly spaced clouds). 

Now its time to add Volume using the Atmospheric apparatus Helper. Drawing a Box Gizmo the size of my plane and the height of my small trees. I set this to Volume Fog (this already increased the render time to about 30 seconds compared to the 5 that it was before this addition), playing around with the coloring of the fog (setup tab), its density (setup tab) and the height which it covers (changing the height of the Box Gizmo its self). I settled for a Purple color as the suited the environment (Sci Fi world) and then decided to start adding other affects. With too separate fogs you couldn't properly see the environment (Fog blurs as its purpose but you cloud only see half of one tree poking though it) so i=I changed the second box gizmo to Volume Fire winch created an eerie feel (combined with the other colors of the scene it seemed to create the effect of a power source (Spiritual maybe?) radiating in the fog). 

I attempted to add a light but it struggled to render the image. I had the same problem with the render time when adding more box gizmos. So I changed the color Filter when rendering it with the blue looking the best  (it caused a night like looking scene). I am looking into Playing with the colors in Photoshop