Eye of the Storm by Betis

Eye of the Storm by Betis
http://www.filterforge.com/filters/9208.html

I'm looking at it now, but you made it quite optimal already. One thing I noticed though is that you'd rather use normal Blend instead of Lerp. I'm not sure how much you gain fr om changing to Lerp, but it should be faster..

About the self cloud shading - one reason why it slows things down is that you double the sample calculation from the main cloud cluster (the one wh ere you set Cloud Size). This cluster ends up in distortion (rotate) which is the "main" output. When you take an output from somewhere before the rotate, you "double" the whole cluster, because it need to render both the rotated version and the non rotated version. Maybe you can find a cheaper alternate source for the cloud shading..

I'm still checking out things, I'll let you know if I figure out anything substantial

Okay I just swapped the output of the clouds before the rotate with one after, and it actually made it 4 seconds slower, other than that, there is no other output before the rotate

congrats on the EP! nice clouds

Way to go on that Ep Betis...Looks beautiful..

Updated!

Updates (not submitted yet)!
+ Added Sun for directional control
+ Updated with some new v3 components like color mapping for sky
+ Extended light shafts and made smoother
- Comes with new control that lets you render less samples for faster rendering
+ Updated the presets a little

Downside
+ About 40-50% slower usually (which is a lot, I know)

Below is an example of the new Sun control which directs the light shafts for a more dramatic effect

Here's variation 8 with the new sun in the sky

Also remember that this filter uses NO anti-aliasing (otherwise these would all be slow as hell rofl)!

Well what I was pointing out is that this filter actually doesn't need AA at all! I was convinced that it had been and when I went to go check I was amazed that it has always been off

Looks great Betis!