Cumulus mediocrisis

[Hetzen]

Clouds have been a bit of a struggle for me in the past. I've been trying all sorts of techniques to get the shape I want out of them, especially cumulus clouds. The problem has been getting the billows without the floaters.

I've not quite managed it yet.

I built these from looking above originaly, concentrating on getting variation on the overall peaks of the clouds. Once I was happy with that, I moved the camera in to have a look at the detail, which held up, so I kicked off a render...

[attach=1]

[inkydigit]

I have been experimenting with these too...
my head is melted...
I will continue...

nice shapes btw!

[Dune]

With a color adjust shader and higher settings of the buoyancy and clumping you'll get rid of many floaters, but it's still hard. I recently thought of using a single blurb (perlin 3D perhaps) and redirect that outward into billows, which can be redirected outwards again in smaller billows, just so they won't untie themselves from the main blurb. Never tried it, though.

[Walli]

looks like you have a mediumcrisis with mediocris?



I like the clouds!

[inkydigit]

With a color adjust shader and higher settings of the buoyancy and clumping you'll get rid of many floaters, but it's still hard. I recently thought of using a single blurb (perlin 3D perhaps) and redirect that outward into billows, which can be redirected outwards again in smaller billows, just so they won't untie themselves from the main blurb. Never tried it, though.

Hi Ulco, that is a very similar technique to the one I used for my recent post 'cloud mangling'....though it got a bit convoluted, I was using stacked perlin 3d scalars each progressive smaller scale was masked by the preceding merged scales...thinks started to go awry when I threw in some warp shaders and some redirects...still it is almost the holy grail...I am nearly 100% sure that it is possible/feasable...I will endeavour to continue...

[Hetzen]

Thanks for your comments guys.

I've been using the (not so new ) Linear Step node to act as a Colour Adjust shader. The nice thing about this node, is that we can modulate the black and white, floor and ceiling values with PFs.

I've finally come to the conclusion, that warping doesn't work on trying to put billows into a shape. The main issue, is working out which direction the side of a cloud is facing, so that the warp shader bulges out rather than cuts in (which looks like ridged noise). We can do this by taking samples in the positive and negative directions in X and Z to find out which direction the cloud's density greyscale is traveling, to define a positive or negative warp displacement. But this is way too costly in terms of render performance.

The above image is part of a bigger system I'm working on, which can be seen to a lesser degree in the bleow picture, showing a 1000m depth cloud layer with a pleasing variation on it's peaks to the horizon. Something I struggle to get from PFs alone.

Oh, and Mediocrisis is my awefully humerous play on words. Sorry about that.

Cheers

Jon