Dreamscape Review by David Duberman

What's in a landscape? To start with: sky, sun, and land and/or sea. These are the basic components of Dreamscape 2.0, the latest release from Sitni Sati, the Croatian developer that also makes the volumetric software Afterburn. Like the latter, Dreamscape functions as a plug-in to 3ds max. You might be able to replicate some of what it does in max by itself, but only with a great deal of trouble, and it probably won't look as realistic.

The Dreamscape atmospheric effect is the glue that holds together the disparate elements of this powerful landscape-generation software. That and a Dreamscape Sun object get you a realistic sky gradient: light at the horizon, and deep blue at the zenith (you can, of course, set the base color to anything you like). The Sun's position in the scene makes no difference, but the angle between it and its target is all-important. The vertical angle between the two determines the time of day: a low angle makes the sky look like sunrise or sunset; a medium angle gives a mid-morning or mid-afternoon effect, and a 90-degree angle looks like noon. If the direction is aimed roughly at the camera, you can see the sun in the sky (but don't stare!). This isn't overly intuitive, but once you play with it a bit you get the hang of it. Dreamscape offers a preview window with automatic update, but like max's ActiveShade preview, it doesn't respond to transformation of the scene contents; only parameters. Also, the preview window doesn't show the land or sea, so in many cases you still need to render to see the results of changes.

The most important of the Dreamscape parameters control how the software generates and represents the atmosphere. For example, as with Afterburn's volumetrics, you can control the number of steps the software takes through the atmosphere to determine how it will render; the more steps it takes, the more realistic the results, but the longer it takes to render. There's also a Realism setting that lets you choose whether the software should regard the "earth" as an infinite plane or a sphere, with or without reddening; the differences are most apparent when the sun is near the horizon. The Multiple Scattering option can give you brighter skies, and the Glow setting can be turned down to simulate high altitudes, or up to portray the lowlands. If the sun is behind the camera, a rainbow is an option, but it doesn't look very realistic. And if you're rendering a landscape, which should reflect skylight as well as sunlight, you'll want to turn on Render Daylight. Its controls include color, strength, and overcast.

What would a sky be without clouds? Boring, that's what, but fortunately Dreamscape gives you lots of options for adding clouds, from Stratus to Cirrus, heavy overcast to scattered buildups. The preview dialog comes in handy here; its second window shows the clouds and the camera POV; you can move the clouds by dragging in the window. You can add multiple cloud layers and animate their movement by setting keyframes for positions in the preview window. Other clouds settings include density, color and "thickness," and a random seed. Although the default clouds are two-dimensional, meant to be seen from a distance (i.e., the ground), they're very real looking. But if you need to fly through the clouds, you can opt for 3D versions, albeit at a significant cost in rendering time. Dreamscape also lets you produce localized clouds that are restricted to specific areas.

So much for a quick overview of the sky, but there's a good deal more to Dreamscape. For landscapes, you start with the special Terra object. It looks like a regular planar grid, but is actually a special procedural object designed to work within the Dreamscape system. You can, however, opt to have it work as regular geometry within max. You modify the Terra object using a nicely interactive editor, which lets you apply any max map for displacement. Dreamscape also comes with its own Noise and Terrain maps designed for creating realistic landscapes. The Terrain editor lets you paint elevation, slopes, and textures, which are all reflected in the viewports in real time. These painting options include graphics tablet support; a nice touch. Once you've set the overall shape, you can erode the landscape using such parameters as soil softness and sedimentation.

The other special Dreamscape object is Sea Surface, which gives you a wealth of options for simulating lakes, oceans, rivers, etc. Like Terra, it's a procedural-cum-mesh object, but because it's meant to move, it includes quite a few more parameters. First, you can set it to be a simple rectangular mesh, suitable for a lake, or an adaptive object, meant for use in seascapes that extend to the horizon. In the latter case, after you designate a camera, the software changes the Sea Surface outline to spread out as it gets farther away from the camera. Thus it fills the camera view, but doesn't exist outside the camera's scope, keeping calculations to a minimum. For waves, you can set wind speed, height scale, choppiness, and smoothness. You can also set wind direction, and, for looping animations, whether waves repeat.

The Foam settings include a Show In Viewport option, but it's not very accurate. However, the rendered foam effect is fairly realistic. The software creates foam based on how close together the water vertices are, so you need a certain amount of choppiness, but not too much or it looks fake. Other options with Sea Surface include a special Sea material with settings for reflection and refraction, a Sea bump map, and a Subsurface object useful for depicting shallow water. You can also apply the included daemons to the water: the Simple Waves daemon lets you add large, period swells to the motion of the water, and the Dynamics daemon lets you create interaction between the water and other scene objects such as boats.

Conclusion

Do you need Dreamscape? If you render only interior images, probably not. But if you need realistic outdoor renderings, it could help a lot. As with other highly specialized software, the learning curve is fairly steep, but if you practice, the rewards can be substantial. Sitni Sati has put a good deal of work into Dreamscape, with the result that it can save you lots of time over the long run, while keeping your clients happy.

http://www.afterworks.com/dsbfirst.htm

A limited evaluation version is available at http://www.turbosquid.com/HTMLClient/FullPreview/FullPreview.cfm?ID=199843.