My intention in starting this thread is twofold :

1. To include screenshots of useful atmosphere settings, with explanations and renders showing what it does.

2. To include links to anything useful that's related.

If anybody else has any suggestions, observations, settings, etc please feel free to add them. I'm sure there's lots of stuff about this already, so please add links !

. . . . . . . . . . .

To start with a quick 'reminder to self' of where I'm at with the Poser atmosphere. Screenshots and more detail in later posts with any luck!

Since I first discovered how to get visible glowing lights in Poser (Connatic's thread), I've been using the 'Volume' bit of the Poser atmosphere a lot in conjunction with spot/point lights.

Since I discovered that I could do postwork depth-of-field in GIMP using its focus-blur plugin (it was difficult finding it - I think that's the link I downloaded it from), I've been creating Z-depth renders (I know there's a thread here at Renderosity about that, but can't find it) of most of my scenes using the 'Depth Cue' bit of the Poser atmosphere. Then in GIMP I use that as the 'Depth Map' with for the Focus Blur plugin to do the depth-of-field - each change takes just a couple of seconds, instead of needing a complete re-render.

I also realized that the Z-depth render could also be used to apply a postwork distance fog effect, although I ran into some problems using postwork Z-map based fog and postwork focus blur together - the fourth image of my "Dust Storm" picture at ShareCG shows the problem and a sort-of solution.

Then I read over at RDNA about fast-rendering atmospheres (no link - their TerraDome is a commercial product), and I've been using the 'Depth Cue' bit of the Poser atmosphere to create distance fog/haze effects in the main render. I haven't noticed any "Dust Storm" type problems.

Snarlygribbley's SnowMachine and EventMobil's Dust Shader (3rd page of "slightly soapy water" thread here - nudity warning!) started me wondering about creating height-dependent fog, and then I found an old (castleposer.co.uk - 2008?) site that explained what the P-node actually does (the site also explains a few other nodes too).

I've just started playing with plugging the P-node into the root Atmosphere node...

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The 3Dcheapskate (also available in DAZ and HiveWire3D flavours) occasionally posts sensible stuff. Usually by accident.
And it usually uses Poser 11, with units set to inches. Except when it's using Poser 6 or PP2014, or when its units are set to PNU.