Any suggestions how to make Cumulonimbus clouds?

[Kadri]

Looks good.

[pokoy]

One thing that always was a mystery to me is how those awesome examples manage to have one more or less continuous surface rather than the typical PF structure with one big 'surface' and many smaller 'orbiting' clouds close to its boundary. It looks like it's rather a low-octave cloud displaced with smaller noises instead of one noise with more octaves. I tried this route a few times but never had enough time to really dig into it and make one setup that works everywhere with only a few adjustments.

[eapilot]

Quote from: WAS 5/7/2020, 3:57:09 PM

Vector warping a controlled shape is doable. You'd want to isolate all this in a surface layer, or masked by a distribution shader. The important thing here a large depth zone to encompass the cloud, than you want to a surface layer/distribution mask in texture space so it can be further warped. Once you have a rough shape or blob you can use the warp shader and warp by a vector disp or redirect (I prefer redirects for unique PFs per X Y Z easily) to warp the shape into something. Ulco also mentioned this and may have been where I got the idea from in the past.



@WAS Something that looks like this?  I could get large shapes with this but smaller details were way off.

[WAS]

Kinda. Ill try and throw something together real quick.

[WAS]

Here is two basic examples of warping a cloud "form" from a masked shape. Definitely room for improvement.

There does seem to be an issue with what is produced in effect vs what TG actually reads. It was actually hard roughing it up, and by everything I understand about shaders, and the results provdied, both examples should be far rougher.

[eapilot]

Here is two basic examples of warping a cloud "form" from a masked shape. Definitely room for improvement.

There does seem to be an issue with what is produced in effect vs what TG actually reads. It was actually hard roughing it up, and by everything I understand about shaders, and the results provdied, both examples should be far rougher.

@WAS This is a very interesting cloud setup.  Its very clean and structured. Its too many separate nodes in the X, Y, and Z coordinates for me to play with but I will experiment with its versatility in the near future. It looks like it provides a lot of control that I am really looking for in cloud creation.  Would using a Distribution shader be the same as a surface shader?  If so I would sue the simplest nodes in my own work.  Its really impressive.

[eapilot]

@WAS or anyone, this is a noob question but how do you create an uplevel node, so that the network is hidden? I noticed that in WAS's network.

[eapilot]

@WAS or anyone, this is a noob question but how do you create an uplevel node, so that the network is hidden? I noticed that in WAS's network.

nevermind, I figured it out.  What a clean way of working!