These guys are a mystery to me. When I got the program, I thought theyd be objects like the primitives or the rocks. However, theyre just a limited form of volumetric materials that dont look right no matter what I do. Certainly the volumetric atmosphere model has cloud layers, but they hardly look or act volumetric to me. Just like the regular cloud layers. they seen to be just infinite planes with no real volume at all. Sure theres a density parameter, but that doesnt seem to have anything to do with actual volume. Assigning volumetric cloud materials to spheres or cubes or rocks doesnt work, either. Once theyre up in the air, you can clearly see the outline of the primitive or rock, and the transparent areas change the color of the sky. So how DO you get real, honest to goodness volumetric clouds in Vue4? The kind that you can move around to cast shadows wherever you want? The kind that you can stack on top of each other to create thunderheads? The kind that you can arrange so that you have neat little holes between where sunbeams can shine through? How can this be done? Or is this something Vue4 cant do? -SMT

Either no one has an answer, or no one has a clue what I'm talking about...

heyas; small, i was wondering/hoping the same thing. i think maybe.... just maybe you and i were expecting something different in 'volumetric clouds.' i was thinking of something like in ray dream's 4 elements plug-in thing. you say fire: and you want your fire to occupy, say, a cone shape. so you toss in the cone of fire, and you get flames inside this area defined by the cone. so i thought: volumetric clouds, okay; you put a big cube up, and volumetric clouds make clouds appear inside this cubic area. however, it seems it just doesn't work that way. the volumetric stuff in vue 4, if you puzzle out the manual's explanation.... it calculates different densities of 'stuff' as light passes through it. so whereas a 'normal' cloud material has a thickness on the surface of your object (plane or cloud or whatever) that is dependant on its trans map... a volumetric cloud material has a 3-dimensional thickness that is calculated from some volumetric material algorithm. why this doesn't make puffy cumulous cloud shapes appear inside your cube isn't quite clear to me, either. :/ also, the manual states that the volumetric cloud materials, per se, are not 'normal' volumetric materials, in that they have special tweaking to simulate the special lighting of clouds (whatever that means). things such as the illumination boost and 'flare' settings in the old atmosphere cloud editor. i believe that the volumetric cloud materials are only meant to be used in a volumetric atmosphere, in the cloud tab. or that's what they seem to be saying, to me. perhaps guitta can shed some light on the subject (npi). :)

What makes it even more confusing, is that the Sun can still not be positioned behind the cloud layers, so that we can get additional interaction that way. I've tried to recreate the effect with Gel's and planes, but it just don't cut it. I think that we was all hoping for Terragen rays...we're half way there, in the way the landscape can interact with the light. It looks like if we want sun rays to appear from between clouds from a sun hidden behind them, then we will have to wait till version 5 or until someone can come up with a technique to fake it. Cheers

What they mean by volumetrics is that the light and fog/haze interacts more with the clouds than before. Also, you can clearly see the interaction with the rest of the scene. No landscape software that I know of has true volumetrics or voxels...I know Digital Natural Tools does but it's a plugin for LightWave, Maya and others and costs over 600$. I don't think they could add this feature in Vue and keep this price level since they require a LOT of power and tweaking. For example a simple scene with voxel storm clouds in LightWave requires over 6 hours to render when you activate all shading effects so imagine with the interaction of Vue's scenes! :) I do agree that using the term "volumetric" in many softwares is a bit confusing. Cheers!