Hi. I'm trying to make some animation footage of flying through the sky passing through clouds. I've had a look on some of the threads on here but can't see how clouds can be generated as objects. Any ideas please.

Regards.

Mike.

pictures of clouds and trans maps on a plane would be one way. Hopefully one of the gurus knows of a better one.

Clouds cannot be generated as objects in Poser. I had some success making objects with a shader on them that appeared to be clouds, but it is really really slow.

Use pictures for background clouds (behind your subject) and if you must have thin clouds in front, use transparency.

Thanks for the fast response guys. I thought it may be the case that I will have to use some kind of modelling software for this as the cloud needs to be 'flown through' as a 3d entity.

Cheers anyway.

Regards Mike.

You can use the transparancy on  a plane with a cloud texture, and plug a cloud node in to get some variation in your transparancy.

Euh plug the cloud node in the transparancy channel.

Have a look at how clouds were done in Microsoft Flight Simulator. It might give you ideas how to build these yourself for Poser. It's using pictures with transparency on planes, but if you assemble enough of them, you can get something workable.

http://ofb.net/~niniane/clouds/

Very interesting. Thanks for that. It's quite impressive.

Awhile ago I modified bill's fog shader into clouds, but it has limitations and could probably be improved a bit.

Attached Link: http://motionographer.com/features/damian-nenow-at-siggraphpaths-of-hate/

would it be considered 'volumetrics' ?

Volumetric materials would help but it would increase rendering time. Apparently the guy who made that animation in the link used vertex colors to achieve the look. That's really basic but I don't think we have access to that in the material room directly out of the box. There may be a python or something out there or  maybe BB knows of something that would let you fiddle with them. You'd still need to manually group the spheres though, as we don't have an easy way to do it in Poser. Hmm...maybe a cloud prop would be worth including in the next release? 

You know, clouds are just tint drops of water vapor. You could take a shpere, shrink it down really tiny, apply a water shader and then copy it a billion times nd spread them out like a cloud. If you have a powerful enough computer, you might get it rendered.

Rather than draw the clouds, I made a blob that controls the general shape of the cloud, and a procedural shader that follows that shape. I mount these on one-sided squares to make sprites. The shader produces a different cloud when you move the sprite - because it uses actual coordinates of the sprite to choose the final detailed features. They will always fit within the boundaries of the painted blob, but no two are alike as you move the sprites around.

Placing the shader on a few one-sided squares like this...

I obviously need to work on the quality of the cloud generator, and the blending and coloring. But generally speaking, the concept seems to work.

They are actually 2D sprites but I think I can get a version of this working with spheres and ellipsoids. And then you could fly through them from any direction.

Nice!

Wow - this is great. That looks very realistic Bill.

Thanks for all the replies guys.

A few more notes on what I used. I'm not at all sure what my final advice would be, but if you're following along you may want to play.

I used the fBm node - it seems to be able to do certain features that none of the others can do.

I modulate its "Bottom" value using the inverse of the blob. Watch out for Bottom=1. When set to 1, this makes it go totally white instead of the desired totally black.

In matmatic parlance:

blob = ImageMap(...).asNumber()

cloudBottom = .999 * (1 - blob)

pattern = FBM(..., Bottom = cloudBottom)

Note I am not at my Poser PC and may have spelled Bottom incorrectly (might be bottom - lower case). 

I used the FBM as the transparency map (actually an opacity map).

Note that I get the positional modulation by plugging coordinates into the x,y, and z scale parameters of the FBM. This disconnects its internal use of model coordinates.

By using the P node, I get world coordinates to drive the FBM.

Attached Link: Blimp in flight...

Thinking about clouds got me wondering about transmaps.

Do Transmaps have to have hard edges or can the have graduations like bumpmaps?

As you can see in my video the blimp flying through the clouds works pretty well but if I cold make a transmap for the foreground clouds so some areas were completely clear it would be more effective, but it would have to be graduated so there were no hard edges.

I've been thinking about clouds or more correctly in my case fog for a while because my videos which are all set in England would really gain some atmosphere if I could have fog drifting across the moors.

Mike

What do you mean by hard edges? Transparency maps are images that control transparency. Transparency can be any value from 0 to 1, not just 0 and 1. If the image has 256 levels (8-bit) then you get 256 levels of transparency. If it has 16536 levels (16-bit) then you get 16536 levels of transparency. But internally there is no limit to how fine-grained transparency can be.

So if I make a transmap for the clouds or in my case fog, that has values of grey in it, it will translate a different amounts of transparency depending on how dark the area is when applied to an image.

I.e. Black areas will be 100% transparent, White areas will be 0% non transparent and areas that are 50% on the grey scale will be more or less 50% transparent?

If that's right I'll get to work on it.

The reason that I asked is that I've only used transmaps to outline things that I applied to a shape i.e. a star shaped object on a clothpane to remove the unwanted area.  Or to make holes in things.

So they were just black and white.

I'm learning something new every day. LOL

Yep - the transparency map is actually an "opacity" map - high values in the map lead to higher opacity. This is the complement of transparency, but in the end the effect is the same. Doesn't matter what the channel is called.

Inquiring minds would like to know... if we turn on atmosphere, would we get rays of light coming from the clouds if a light was behind them?