Vue has the ability to make decent looking clouds with a little work. All of the clouds shown here are volumetric mats on spheres. The next message explains how.

Here's how to do it. Take a sphere, scrunch its depth in, and map the material shown in the pic onto it. You can adjust the puffiness by increasing the depth of the sphere. The key is mapping the diffuse channel to the fractal that creates the cloud density. You can ajust the brightness of the clouds by playing with the luminance channel and the filter hooked to the diffuse channel.

Whoa, that's excellent, Dave! Thanks again for some great information.

Yes, thanks - valuable methods!

They are really nice looking- but the main drawback of Volumetric Clouds and Fuzzy Materials is that they are awefully slow to render. I've tried Fuzzy Cloud Balls in other renders and while the previews look nice- when it comes render time they are incredibly S L O W. I use an Athlon 64 with 256MB nVidia card and 2 GB RAM and even then I usually bale-out of a render after I see how long its going to take with these kinds of materials.

That's strange about the long render times. I just did this piece using about a dozen volumetric clouds and a GA atmosphere and it took less than 5 minutes to render. If you want the scene file for this, you can get it here (only 250 KB):

Volumetric Clouds

Your scene has a nice foggy kind of effect but the clouds are not really the Fuzzy Cloud Balls that I was referring to. Also- there is very little really "volumetric" happening in your particular scene. Rendering against a relatively plain flat background IS pretty fast- but that's not what I was thinking of... However- if you WANT to use Fuzzy Materials- like Furry-Fuzzy Cloud Balls- I would suggest rendering them against a BLACK PANEL- saving them as 2D Bill Boards- and using the "Flight Simulator Clouds" approach. The 2D versions, with Alpha Channel Masks- actually work quite well. Plus you can multiply them in groups and have the "Fuzzy Volumetric Cloud Look" at hugely reduced CPU rendering time.

I have to say this looks to me like the most convincing clouds I've yet seen.

dburdick, I've taken one of the cloud mats out of your scene and blended an angle of incidence node to the density, then applied it to metablob groups for this image. This is getting close to what I'd like, and at last... shadows!

Density way up, luminance down, they're starting to look a bit threatening. Really getting into this, but it's way past bedtime.

thats looking real good jwithman

Thanks, I think I'm finally learning something about the function editor.

This view from above is interesting; five identical metablob groups at different scalings, look how the functions scale. Also if you make large changes between the scale of spheres within a blob, you get a right mess.

Message edited on: 09/19/2005 18:33

Getting into backlight now, not a great image, but they really are starting to affect light like clouds do.

This is so cool; I spent some time yesterday trying to replicate this with Dave's screenshot printed out, but I'm afraid I need a version for function dummies...