clouds
on November 25th, 2009, by soenkeSome weeks ago I was looking into clouds and whether we need to paint them or if we can use actual 3d clouds. My first try was more an accident than an attempt.
While looking into methods to create massive amounts of trees for far away shots with hair, a simple render showed up after pressing f12. Slight tweaking of materials revealed that it might be possible to do clouds with hair but doing a quick 4k render showed that the number of hairs would need to be much too high.
Some time went by and I tried out doing clouds with volumetrics, which I should have done in the first place… It looks much more promising, is quick to set up and it’s animatable, perfect for our project.
The file bellow shows the volumetric clouds. The scaling is too big and will be different in final shots. The colors are a result of a simple rgb-curve in the render compositor.
simple_volumetric_clouds.blend
Have a nice day.
-soenke
November 25th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
I had been wondering how you would do clouds, there’s a lot of demand placed on them as the script calls for “wispy” clouds and you’ll be rendering it at 4k.
I know some people have experimented with using the smoke simulator for clouds, you could get a more physically accurate (Somewhat anyway) result from that maybe.
November 25th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
This is a great result! Congratulations
November 25th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
reminds me of that:
http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/we-want-volumetric-clouds-in-blender/
November 25th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
…And it renders fast too 🙂 It’s great! Thanks for charing!
@Davis:
I suppose Smoke applied to cloud simulation will be very useful for having, for instance, a plane passing trough clouds (when smoke supports animated objects).
November 25th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
interesting shapes – it doesn’t render for me – it just crashes on blender 2.5 alpha 0 64bits. too bad.
November 25th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
pretty!
November 25th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
pretty cool 😀 that system will be useful… the volumetric clouds reminds me of something, but i can’t find what…lol
November 25th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
pretty cool!
be sure to make the tut latter ;p
November 25th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
“Hairy clouds” conjures up fantasic images in my imagination!
It’s sort of cool how blender makes volumes look acrylic-painted, but I can’t wait to see if you’ll start making clouds more solid and tangible. 🙂
So far, great work!
November 25th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
@rogper: or say, a dragon, for that matter!
November 25th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
thx for the file 🙂
November 25th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Hey there,
cool result with the volumetric clouds looks very good and i bet will work well in the final shots:)
renders quite quick even on my smaller than average machine, clever use of the nodes!
thx for sharing this cool .blend!!!
happy thanksgiving and a great weekend to you and the whole blender/ Sintel team!
Best regards
November 25th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
renders well and fast on blender 2.5 alpha 0 64bits on Linux, thank you, this volume materials are awesome!
November 25th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
:::::::::::::::::. video editing, it is with blender???? :::::::::::::::::
November 25th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
I am interested in seeing your hair aproach, I’m aware that volume is an ovious boon, but this is a very unique approach(using hair)…I would love to see it!
November 25th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Fast? Yeah – I guess so… I’m getting around 2min 20 seconds per frame on a Dell Latitude D620… not the fastest computer I admit. No doubt this would be good with a renderfarm though.
November 25th, 2009 at 11:27 pm
Soenke: I think you have to press the RGB to Intensity in the texture in order for them to work nicely in volumetrics
November 26th, 2009 at 6:59 am
Is it just me, or does it not really look good when the cloud is animated? Blender crashed about 27 frames in, though.
Well, I hope there’s a way around it, in any case.
November 26th, 2009 at 8:42 am
Love how they look rendered at the full 4k resolution. Took about 22 seconds on my AMD quad core (64 bit Linux). 🙂
November 26th, 2009 at 9:26 am
Hi Soenke,
it took me a while to fully understand your blend! But now I have! Here is my attempt to create some nice Volumetric Clouds!! Thanks alot for sharing! I’ve learned some nice new Feature of Blender 2.5!!!!
Keep it up!!!
http://misc.artbyndee.de/3d/cloud.jpg
November 26th, 2009 at 11:28 am
I recommend you to check out the work of Harris et al at http://www.markmark.net/cloudsim/
Even though that is supposed to be in real time, I think their approach could be done offline, with much higher amount of detail. I think they will be interested in a discussion if you contact them as well!
Hope it help! /Peter
November 26th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Awesome. I’ve been wondering for some time now how to do simple clouds and not to render it for 5 years. Thanks a lot!
November 26th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
I tried to kick up the resolution and smooth the resulting noise out a bit, but no go….seems that this would work very well with particle driven metaballs.
November 27th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Awesome! nice job, soenke.
November 28th, 2009 at 3:09 am
Now that I understand your approach to giving the clouds those nice fuzzy edges I am intrigued and disappointed at the same time. Doing it through the geometry gives absolute artistic control, but the level of detail is severely limited.
I’m still hoping for a volumetric-texture plugin that will automatically create fractal 3D-noise based on object boundaries at some point in the future.
Incredible work so far, though. The clouds as they are will be sufficient in a lot of scenarios. Playing with the 2.5 alpha0 takes up huge chunks of my time now.
November 28th, 2009 at 4:30 am
I have been working on clouds for months and posting it. I also created two tutorials on how to create them. I look forward to seeing your solutions as well 🙂
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=166174
Please add comments, sorry I am late to post here been on vacation.
July 9th, 2010 at 6:41 pm
Don twork with Blender 2.49 ????