Aurora 1.0
Adobe Photoshop Natural FX Plugin by Digital Element
By Jeff Mottle (jmottle@cgarchitect.com)

Digital Element, the makers of World Builder, have recently released a new product called Aurora, a natural FX plugin for PhotoShop. This new offering does not fall far from the Digital Element tree in that the purpose of this program is also to digitally re-create nature. Targeted towards landscape and traditional architects as well as CG artists in general, Aurora boasts the ability to create incredibly realistic clouds and skies, as well as water, starscapes, volumetric lighting, haze and sun.

The Aurora plugin works from layer information defined in Photoshop to simulate 3D depth. This separation of 2D layers into 3D space enables the plugin to create perspective matched clouds, accurate water reflections and impressive volumetric lighting etc. However, there no need to worry about learning another 3D application as all of the 3D calculations are done internally by the plugin; users need only to adjust individual settings for each effect and allow the plugin to render them out.

Upon launching the plugin from the filter file menu in Photoshop, you are greeted by a rather daunting interface. With sliders, buttons, numerous FX tabs, each with their own set of controls, and preview window controls, you will immediately realize that this is not just another Photoshop plugin, but rather a very powerful application within PhotoShop itself. The saving grace is that the 68 page online manual is extremely well written and very carefully describes how each feature works and how each will affect the outcome. Users also have the option of selecting a standard and advanced interface to control the outputs.
In about 2 hours, I was able to read all of the documentation and experiment enough that I felt pretty comfortable with the entire plugin. You will however need to put in a fair amount of extra time to become familiar with how each setting will affect the outcome more specifically how you can get the plugin to produce what you want.

Main Interface

I'll start first with the cloud section of the plugin as I personally feel that this is the most powerful and useful section for any architectural CG artist.
As you can see from the cloud interface below there are a lot of settings to contend with. Each setting in the interface has a distinct function that control everything from the overall placement of the clouds to subtle glows and opacity changes of the cloud edges. While I obviously won't be going over each option here, I have included several images below that depict the capabilities of the cloud renderer.
One cloud feature that I would like to point out however is the ability to step through the Horizontal and Vertical shifting of the clouds. This option allows you to create keyframed cloud animations. The drawback however being that you must manually shift each frame and render it out. Unfortunately neither Photoshop actions nor a built in plugin feature allows you render out a predefined set of frames or to automate this procedure. Another feature that is common to most of the FX types is the ability to create instances, this allows you to overlap multiple versions of the effect to create more depth and add further realism to the rendered output.






Cloud FX Dialog box options


As I mentioned earlier you will need to experiment a fair bit to get the results you are looking for, but once you get there you will be pretty impressed and subsequent attempts will go much quicker. To give you a head start you can also use any of the built in presets by pressing the "Presets" button and taking note of how the settings for each one of them were configured.

For those working on a night scene, Aurora also has a built in star renderer. There are enough settings to configure a fairly realistic looking night sky, short of drawing distinct constellations, and is definitely worth a look if you are designing the next Starry Night. In the example below you can see an example generated from the Aurora plugin.


Star FX dialog box options




Example star map

The last two FX types that I wanted to mention in this review are Water and Light Beams (Volumetric Lights)

The water FX type is also quite impressive, and like the other options allows for a great deal of customization, including wave height and amplitude and seven different photometry controls ranging from specular reflections to refractive index.
Like the cloud FX type, water also allows you to keyframe

animated waves for short animated shots, but like clouds must all be done manually. With the water effect you are also not limited to simple straight horizons of water either. As long as you have a cutout in one of your layers, the water will be whatever shape you desire and will accurately reflect the content of the other layers.


Water FX dialog box options





The last FX type is Light Beams or what most of us know as volumetric lighting. Believe it or not you can actually recreate volumetric lighting from 2D information. By using several different layers, some layers with information removed or cut out, you can direct the light beams through these cutouts and have them trace a path through. In the example below you can see how accurately and realistically Aurora shines light through tree leaves and through glass in a cathedral. The setup is very straightforward and requires you to only draw a vector to represent the beam of light and the configuration of the where your layers are in relation to the light beams.



Light Beams FX Dialog Box






Conclusion

Overall I was very impressed with the power of this plugin, and as I eluded to earlier the cloud FX type in particular. For high resolution renders it can be quite a challenge to get a sky that is both large enough and meets the look and overall feel of your rendering. With Aurora this is no longer an issue as you can render out whatever resolution you require using a myriad of settings to achive th exact look you are after. The only complaints I would have is the missing ability to automate the procedure of getting animated keyframes from the plugin and I would also have liked to see the ability to easily create large cloud maps that are tileable end to end for use on skydomes. With a bit of fiddling you can modify your output so that no clouds extend out of frame, thus creating a tileable maps, but actual tileable clouds would be a nice touch.
With a bit if experimentation and a good read through the documentation I found the plugin quite easy to use. The Digital Elements website also has some great online video tutorials that step you through all of the available features. For only $149US ($129 downloadable version) I think this is a great buy and for the cloud FX alone should be in everyone's toolkit. You can download a free trial from the Digital Elements website, so be sure to give it a try and see for yourself how powerful this plugin can be.


Digital Elements website: http://www.digi-element.com/