Animated warped clouds.

[bigben]

This is a follow on from the "Ultimate" cirrus clouds. I ran a quick (4 sec) animation using a variation of the file I posted there using 3d clouds, changing the warping shader to the normals of a PF and then animating both PFs in opposite directions.  It's a little rough but shows a lot of promise.

http://podcast.bigben.id.au/files/warped_cloud_0/warped_cloud_0.mov

[Mohawk20]

Nice effect, but not realistic by itself, since the big shapes should be moving as well, though that should be a quick fix with a transform shader between the warp shader and the cloud layer.


Nice test though!

[bigben]

I left out any horizontal movement deliberately to see exactly what the result of the animated warp shader was.  It might also be interesting to see what happens when you substitute the normals of the terrain (without animation, obviously) and then move the clouds across it.

[bigben]

Increased the quality a little, added a real terrain and changed the animation.  Cloud density fractal translated equal distances horizontally and vertically (upwards), warping shader animated vertically downwards (no horizontal movement).   Here's the first 88 frames.... heading in a very pleasing direction given the relative simplicity of the node network

http://podcast.bigben.id.au/files/warped_cloud_1/warped_cloud_1.mov

[inkydigit]

looking good!

[rcallicotte]

Hey, Ben, this is looking fine.  Cool.

[Mohawk20]

Sweet!

[Aagam]

I've played around with this kind of thing before, although I didn't make an animation so to say, just a bunch of stills that I then animated myself (had to do it that way for a project), so it was more jumpy than this which is very nice and smooth. I find the effect works best with a low sun which, in turn, puts a lot of emphasis on the clouds (especially if you can give them a very golden-red appearance). The only problem with a low sun is I seem to find myself getting weird "lightning" like things and other apparitions now and then, but that's fixed with post work. Great stuff as usual though, ben.

[bigben]

Thanks guys. The last sequence is now complete (only an extra 11 frames)

Increasing the quality a little again, dropping the sun a little and increasing the roughness of the clouds.  I'll run a longer sequence this time.  The surfacing on the terrain may look a little odd.. It's just a geo referenced topo map.  (got my hands on 1:25000 geo-referenced PNGs for all of Victoria)

[bigben]

Still working on this    

Increasing the render size and quality showed up the need to adjust the warping shader (mainly just scale and contrast adjustments)  Stopped tweaking, now it's just a waiting game.

[Oshyan]

Ben, are these links to *real* .mov's you're posting, or just pointers? I can't get them to download. I'm hoping they're not some darned iTunes-specific thing.

- Oshyan

[jo]

Hi Oshyan,

They're just QT movies, they work fine for me in Firefox on Windows and Safari on the Mac.

Regards,

Jo

[Tangled-Universe]

Hi Ben,

These are looking really good! I like the way the clouds "swell".
I wonder how this would look with more cumulus congestus type of clouds.
Seems I'll have to save some money for the animation module

Do you have any update on this in the meantime?

Martin

[Oshyan]

Hi Oshyan,

They're just QT movies, they work fine for me in Firefox on Windows and Safari on the Mac.

Regards,

Jo

No, they appear to be QT link files which point to other files based on a detected bandwidth or platform type. This is the contents of one of them, for example:

 
moov 
rmra   Hrmda   0rdrf    url    warped_cloud_0-Desktop.m4v     rmdr     
ð   frmda   4rdrf    url    warped_cloud_0-iPhone-cell.3gp     rmdr      +À   rmvc    mobi   
   

   armda   /rdrf    url    warped_cloud_0-iPhone.m4v S   rmdr     
†    rmvc    mobi   
   

and you can see if you look at the directory it sits in that the files its pointing to are there and can be accessed directly:
http://podcast.bigben.id.au/files/warped_cloud_1/
It's http://podcast.bigben.id.au/files/warped_cloud_1/warped_cloud_1-Desktop.m4v (for example) that is the movie file.

The reason any of this matters to me is I don't use Apple's official Quicktime app as I much prefer alternative players. But they only work on the actual media file, not the pointer/container file. Now that I found the m4v's all is well.

- Oshyan

[jo]

Hi Oshyan,

They're still Quicktime movies, they can contain all sorts of stuff, too bad other players don't play them properly ;-).

Regards,

Jo