Working with Mist
by Vincent Stoessel

Download the blend file

This is a very basic discussion about editing mists
in Blender. When I first started using Blender and there
was no manual, I found working with mists difficult. Now
I use a few tricks to make using them easier. I'm going to
use my motorcycle scene for this example.

OK, the first thing to note is that whatever the sky
looks like in the world buttons, that's what the mist
is going to look like. That is because Blender causes
faces that are in the range of the mist to take on
alpha values. The sky color will be inserted behind the
alpha value. If you feel lazy go ahead and copy my enviroment
values below. But the best way to learn blender is by playing
with the buttons yourself and discovering things no one's
thought of yet.

When I work with fog, I try to make the sky and clouds
very light blue or white, to me that makes the best fog.
Your milage may vary. You will want to select your camera in the the 3d
window and choose the edit buttons. You will see a button
called "show limits" and "show mist", select both.
Now you will be able to see a line from the camera showing
your range of vision and where the fog is, like below.

In the world buttons section, there is a middle columns of
buttons that starts with the mist button. Toggling this
button turns mist on and off. This convinient because some
tims you may want to turn off the mist without loosing
your finer mist settings. The 3 buttons under mist refer
to the mist progression. They are quadratic, linear and
square root. I use linear the most, it gives me the most
realistic and predictable results. Okay, using the settings
below

and using the 3d window to visualize the mist

Produced the image below.
Notice that setting sta button to 0.00
will start the mist immediatetely in front of the
camera. Sta stands for start of mist. Dist is the distance
away from camera from the point "start." In this case
start is 0.00.

Okay, let's move sta to 1.80 so we can get
that "coming out of the fog" effect

Again check the interactive view.

Will produce this

That's it. Remember the best way to learn blender is to use
it and ask plenty of questions.
Thank you for joining me in my weekly
blender tutorial series.
Vinny