"Ultimate" Cirrus clouds

Started by moodflow, November 19, 2008, 12:15:39 PM

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bigben

Thanks moodflow... another result for the forum approach.

Apart from the scale/displacement settings of the alpine fractal, you can tweak the degree of warping by adjusting the colour of the distribution shader.

Matt

#16
Just keep in mind that the Alpine Fractal is probably the slowest of all the shaders in TG2, so don't use this for volumetric clouds unless you're some kind of masochist... :)

Have you tried using a Power Fractal displacement for the warper instead? Might be able to get similar results with quicker renders.

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

bigben

That thought had crossed my mind, as the slow down in the preview is quite noticeable.  Here's a comparison with a plain fractal and the unwarped cloud density shader (screengrabs to include the render times).  Without any surface shaders and only one cloud layer, the simple PF is about 4X faster than the alpine fractal.

bigben

Having a bit of a play with this model and 3d clouds.  Swapped the Tex coords with a compute normal and then added a visualise normals node.  Add a transform shader immediately below both fractals.  Animate the warping shader downwards (direction is possibly irrelevant), and the cloud density shader upwards...  looks promising so far for some very effective animations.

neon22

I took Big Ben's tgd and wedged some parameters.
variation method and noise flavour.

I think noise = ridges, mix1 and variation = multifractal variants are looking promising
(I had to over compress slightly :( to get it to fit in 512K but you can see pretty well)
Cheers...

bigben

Interesting comparison. That'll save us a bit of time  ;)

neon22

Animating the displacement offset in the pf shader also seems to give nice animations.