More on the clouds following the terrain

[mhaze]

More on clouds following the terrain. I've made this work with greyscale images and with ters and an assosiated B/W image map/mask. I've had limited success with power fractals and none whatsoever with the heightfield shader. Matt any chance the HF shader or the load HF/generateHF could have a B/W mask that can be exported to photoshop - would be very useful for many purposes.
There is huge potential here, I leave you to play.

[cyphyr]

Oooh very good discovery, I remember people looking into this a year or so ago and the general consensus was it was a non starter. You've broken the barrier !!
any chance of a node network view
richard

[JimB]

Great stuff!

If you were to somehow mask them further based on angle/direction and possibly slope, it should create gaps to one side of the mountains as often seen in the real world. E.g., use World Machine to load the terrain and add an Angle Selector to create the masks from the terrain.

You should be able to create a terrain in .ter format from Power Fractals and HF Generators by saving an area as a .ter by right clicking on the HF Generate node and selecting Save As...

[mhaze]

Thanks for the comments and ideas.

Cyphyr you'll find a basic node network for this in my previous post clouds following terrain

Thanks for the ideas JimB - ! had a quick try the the twist and shear shader - with little success I'm afraid.

I'll try some of your other ideas, a gradient mask or redirect shader might achieve the cloud offset. I'll experiment with creating ters from powerfractals - still need a greyscale image map though - hmmm might be able to do that in geocontrol 2 

[j meyer]

Hi,
nice experiments.
As for the editable images you could try Terraconverter(tconv),you can
convert ter files to tiff with it and viceversa.

[mhaze]

A quick update  - you can get the twist and shear shader to give the effect of winblown clouds. Nodes attached

[bigben]

Hi,
nice experiments.
As for the editable images you could try Terraconverter(tconv),you can
convert ter files to tiff with it and viceversa.

Even loading it up into TG0.9 and doing a screen grab of the terrain modify window should be enough for masking purposes.... or campath or terranim.   

Very interesting experiments

[dandelO]

This is one of the coolest uses of TG cloud I've seen yet. Great work and keep going!

[domdib]

Perhaps this post and the previous post on cloud following terrain could somehow be incorporated into the cloud library?

[mhaze]

Ok after this I shall leave others to play! and go and make some pics.

The terrain is a ter and the clouds are from a greyscale of the same terrain - you have to carefully match the height with a heightfield adjust vertical shader.The terrain is coloured with a standard shader. all created in geocontrol2

The clouds are pushed to the right with a twist and shear shader into a warp shader and there are two density shaders to give interest to the clouds. Note how there is less cloud on the winward side and more on the leeside.

Have fun playing.

[JimB]

With the Twist & Shear shader attached, have you tried lowering the camera so that the cloud and peaks are above the horizon line? I came up with a rather undesirable result (the cloud is fine below the horizon, but is like a 2D texture on the peaks above the horizon line). Maybe you find it different.

That said, this is a great technique without the Twist & Shear, and I can't believe it's so simple.

[Aagam]

I've been trying to do this for a while. I got something like this but not quite as clean. Thanks!

[mhaze]

Hi JimB no I havn't seen this. I'm just doing a test render now but look at my pic "from the depths" mountains and clouds well above the horizon and no odd effects. could it be lighting? could you post a pic?

[bigben]

This would also look great animated...  orographic clouds

[mhaze]

Hi JimB

Yes, I've just come across a problem to do with clouds above the horizon - doing a render now.