cloud shading

[nirokugraphic]

hey guys,

i was wondering if it were possible to invert the colour result of clouds ?

what i mean is to change the clouds from white to black, without changing the actual colour of them to black intending to keep the darker edge shading intact so that it becomes brighter when inverted . literally a invert/negative of the current shaded result .

any advice greatly appreciated .

[Volker Harun]

You could try to swap the colours inside the clouds' density shader - which 'masks' the clouds.

I doubt that this will be a 100% negative cloud ... but give it a try.

[nirokugraphic]

i tried various methods but all that seemed to achieve in doing was to change the shape of the clouds or their coverage based on brightness values (for example pipeing in 'adjust colour' shader) .

i suppose what i'm asking is if there is something that specifically alters the colours of a cloud after everything has been taken into account, much like if you add a 'visualise normals' shader ..?

[Tangled-Universe]

hey guys,

i was wondering if it were possible to invert the colour result of clouds ?

what i mean is to change the clouds from white to black, without changing the actual colour of them to black intending to keep the darker edge shading intact so that it becomes brighter when inverted . literally a invert/negative of the current shaded result .

any advice greatly appreciated .

To achieve dark edges you'll have to make use of the fake internal scattering setting.

Set the cloud and scatter color to something really dark. I use 0.1 and 0.3 for example.
You'll have very dark clouds now. If you increase the fake internal scattering slowly each time you'll see that the inner side (hence "internal scattering") will brighten.
It's very tedious to find the exact value and to still keep the look realistic,  but it is possible.

[nirokugraphic]

i understands that ordinarily the brighter edges of a cloud would be caused by the position and direction of the light source, so using the 'fake dark' param makes total sense and would ordinarily work, but what i am looking for are dark clouds with a brighter outline that are not driven by light conditions .

thinking about it, there probably isn't a way .

[Tangled-Universe]

Oh you want that...that wasn't really clear to me, sorry.

Reducing glow amount to about 0.1 will give an even distribution of glow power across the whole cloud. If you increase this parameter you'll see that clouds in the background will become darker. You don't want that, so reduce it.
If you want evenly distributed lighting you'd have to use quite high enviro light values and then reduce the fake internal scattering.

I think most of the things you're looking for are in one of my clouds pics from which I also shared the .tgd-file here at the forum:

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=3691.msg48625#msg48625

Hope this helps, as a base at least.

Martin

[rcallicotte]

TU, thanks for all of the great tips lately.  Your explanations of clouds lately have been distinct and astute observations.  This has been very helpful and I'm learning a lot.