normal pass for a cloud?

Started by kirk12, October 19, 2014, 03:36:00 AM

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kirk12

Is it possible somehow? Something that I colud  turn into a normal map to use with a game engine lighting ?    I see a cloud depth pass and some uncertain tgcloudpos.  May they be any helpfull?    Depth needs to be gamma edited to be seen at all.   I guess I need something normalized or something from it at first

Matt

Nothing out of the box, no. But there could be ways to make this work. With clouds, much of the shading comes from self shadowing, so if you want to relight the clouds in a game engine you probably need normals that somehow allow this effect to be recreated. Without knowing what your exact requirements are, I don't know if this is really what you want, but I would try rendering a normal pass using red, green and blue lights (coming from appropriate directions), and allow them to cast shadows in the clouds to produce shading. The resulting image might work as a normal map. If you use soft shadows with a large soft shadow diameter (maybe 90 degrees?) maybe you could get something that produces reasonable cloud relighting.

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

kirk12

I meant a kind of translucent sprite ( billboard) that would have normal map and probably depth map too for more complicated real time shaders.      Thanks for your idea with 3 light sources. I need to try it .    Although I am not sure it would shape the cloud properly unless I would do very dense clouds.

Right now I try to use depth pass and do usual surface interpolation into normmal map or maybe into an actual surface(in zbrush).   I just can't normalize it properly  to represent a true volume of a cloud.     Is it possible to set a specific distances, min and max,  for the  depth pass . A way 3ds max does it for example?

When I try to gamma/exposure  correct it in Photoshop I get somewhat noisy and flat result

Also I have no idea what tgCloudPos is ?   Looks like vector displacement . Is it so?   Could I feed it into Zbrush somehow to get a usual surface?