Original subtitles

The next box in our cinematic lighting checklist is adding atmospheric haze. haze is a really

powerful tool that cinematographers use in movies to tame the dynamic

range, to soften up the contrast, to make the light beams visible alongside other things,

in order to haze this environment first thing that we need to do is obviously add

a new collection, name it fog_01 and then we'll need some kind of a box, a container,

I'm gonna add a cube, scale it up so it encompasses all the objects within the

scene, it's a shame it blocks the view entirely, so I'm going to jump into the object properties

menu and in the display drop down select bounds. then it's a matter of setting up a new material,

which will actually be the volume material. let's get into the shader editor first, then

delete the default principled bsdf, go Shift A, Shader and add the principled volume shader,

plug it right here all the way and lower the density considerably. we just need to fill our

room up with haze ever so slightly, so I think the density could be pretty low something like

0.1 or 0.05 even, I'm just looking for this kind of ethereal glow rather than the Silent Hill fog. okay

the anisotropy value controls this scattering of the volume material, it is pretty hard to put

in words, we'll have a look at a few examples later on, let's crank up the density all the

way to 0.2 to make the anisotropy effect visible. thinking about it, I would put it like that and

I'm not sure how precise is this explanation of anisotropy and what's actually going on, but

I feel that the higher anisotropy values kind of shift the scattering of the volume shader

towards the... the light source, let's say at 0 it's a totally uniform scattering and at 0.75

and higher we start to see how it shifts towards our area light here. and at the negative values

it kind of moves it away from the light source, I know this explanation may sound a little bit murky, hehe :))

in theory the higher anisotropy values might look like smoke and steam while the lower, even negative

anisotropy values may look like dust, the best way to know it is to play with it yourself I guess.

I'm setting the density back to 0.05 or even lower than that... yeah, I think that... that looks good.

is this kind of enhancement to the depth and overall dimension of the scene that allows

the foreground objects to pop out, it sets up different tiers of contrast throughout the

scene, here we have a dark foreground and then a still pretty high contrast within the mid-ground

figure which is our mineral pack, then a totally washed out backdrop which has a relatively low

contrast in between the shaded and lit areas. the mid-ground contrast ratio is much more abrupt,

it just naturally makes this object closer to the camera stand out just due to the contrast

levels, that's probably one of the major things about this image. and there is something very

prominently cinematic about this combination of the extra depth and dimension created by the haze

and at the same time, the actual extra readability of the center of interest, that is a powerful stuff.

and of course with the harder light sources like our sunshine it allows us to see the

beam, to see *the beamage* or *beaminess* that is also called light shafts and god rays.

nice beautiful rays of sunshine that give texture to the volume or space we are in.

so that was atmospheric haze, one more component of our cinematic lighting formula. what's next?