Can clouds respond to objects?

[TheBadger]

Hello

If you have a ship of some kind raising up through clouds, is there a way to get the clouds to react to the displacement of air that the objects movement would cause?

Perhaps not a imported object, but a native one? So the native object could be make invisible and put on the same flight path. Then as the ship and invisible object rise up out of the clouds, the clouds "poof" up behind?


Or could an image map be moved through 3D space, so that clouds are filtered through it. Kind of in a way a miner sifts soil through a screen to find gold, but upwards rather than down (if that makes sense)?

Its a hard one.

Thanks.

[jo]

Hi Michael,

I'm sure you could do something like that. You could animate a distance shader to open and close a hole around the ship for example. There's plenty of things you could try. There's the Altitude offset function and Depth modulator in the Functions tab of cloud layers. TG is a pretty open ended toolbox :-).

Regards,

Jo

[Tangled-Universe]

Jo's distance shader suggestion is exactly what I would try first too.

Copy your object's animation to a camera, so that the camera flies along.

Hook up a distance shader and set the proper falloff.
This distance shader mask is usable for other purposes of course, very handy.

For instance, hook up a warp input shader to the cloud density shader and warp it with a powerfractal.
Mask that powerfractal with the distance and make sure to invert it. (we want to warp clouds around the object)
To that powerfractal apply 4D noise.

I'm pretty sure this gives interesting results for starters.

[Oshyan]

That being said, to answer the question directly, no you can't currently influence the clouds (or anything else) by proximity to an object. But that's something I'd like to have the option for in the future. In the meantime as stated above there are various methods to achieve the same/similar result.

- Oshyan

[dorianvan]

If the option does ever happen with clouds, I hope water reaction would be included...then of course GPU rendering

[TheBadger]

Thanks Jo and T-U.
Thanks Oshyan.

I'll see if I can get any place nice with this.