Elementacular 1.5 released - volumetric cloud shaping plugin for Maya

[pokoy]

Thought I'd hare this here:

https://elementacular.com

Currently it's only available for Maya (renders with Mental Ray and Arnold). The neat thing is how they approach the modeling of clouds and that they fully support OpenVDB.

[Oshyan]

Looks like OVDB is the main new non-app-specific feature in 1.5:
https://elementacular.com/content/elementacular-1-5-supports-rendering-in-arnold-and-renderman-through-openvdb

The render on that page, is that minutes and seconds, or seconds and milliseconds?? It has to be the latter, right?

- Oshyan

[pokoy]

I'd say it's hard to believe these are minutes...41 seconds probably, Arnold should be quite fast with that. But they really need to specify this along with that number.

I found that the way the cloud modeling is really interesting, you could automate a lot of this to produce all kinds of cloud forms while keeping control of the details.

[Oshyan]

I agree, Arnold should be faster than that, especially for the relatively unrealistic shading/scattering. That's why I mentioned it.

The only video I've seen of their cloud modeling just looks like a bunch of spheres that act sort of like metablobs, and I saw that back in 2014. Is that what you're referring to?

- Oshyan

[pokoy]

Yes. I wonder how they create the volume data but you probably know more

[Hetzen]

Meta-blobs can be done in TG quite easily. You define a point then measure the length away from that point, convert that to a gradient (linear step), then use a PF or noise combination to alter the black level in another linear step.

What would be useful is a visual cue to realise the volume around that point when constructing your shape out lots of meta-balls. I've been thinking that a particle system could also use this approach.

[mhaze]

??

[Hannes]

Meta-blobs can be done in TG quite easily. You define a point then measure the length away from that point, convert that to a gradient (linear step), then use a PF or noise combination to alter the black level in another linear step.

What would be useful is a visual cue to realise the volume around that point when constructing your shape out lots of meta-balls. I've been thinking that a particle system could also use this approach.

This is incredibly cool, Jon!!!

[Hetzen]

Here's another render with three blobs stuck together. Took just over a minute to render on default settings, just AA=4.

[attachimg=1]

[Hetzen]

And this one took 6 mins with 300 million voxels, Cloud Quality of 0.7, AA=6. With slightly different positions and sizes for the blobs.

[attachimg=1]

[Hetzen]

And another. Same settings as above, different POV to fill the frame, with slightly different blob positions. This took just over 9 mins to render. This and the above two renders use the same PF, just different blob scales and positions.

[attachimg=1]

[Oshyan]

Well dang Jon, that's cool stuff! Need to look into and think about this more...

- Oshyan

[AP]

Those are some interesting cloud experiments.

Here are some older threads concerning Metacloud experiments.

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=3691.msg50489#msg50489

One example in the File Sharing thread.

http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,3691.150.html

[Dune]

Cool, Jon. Off to experiment right away, but I can't get it to work, didn't find a way to change the blobs location. Is this the way you set this up somehow?

[mogn]

Linear step 01  delivers an output at all places  between 0 and 1
So it means no sense to have a limit greater than one on linear step 02.