Sometime ago I've seen on a book a striking photograph of the Auiguille Noire du Peuterey under a strong wind, in the Alps. There was a sort of cloud formation streaming over the major crest, it was really marvelous and amazed me.
I thought about it for a while then I started to think how could I reproduce something similar on TG2. It was quite difficult because TG2 (almost actually) doesn't manage 3d clouds and cannot get a very accurate control over cloud placement. I'm not so familiar with functions, so I decided to utilize image mapping: I rendered many orthogonal projections of a black and white cloud density shader at high resolution, then remodeled them in Photoshop to give every layer the shape I wanted. The concept was to create a cloud formation with an accurate '3d volume' that follows the exact model I had in mind, and to do this I overlayed multiple cloud layers in the scene, like a cross section of an object. Something like that:
The shapes were modeled directly on Photoshop over an orthogonal projection of the terrain, then I placed them with the right coordinates in the scene, as density shaders for the clouds. There are six cloud layers in total.
And this is the final result:
Well, maybe doesn't seem anything particular, but I worked a lot on it
I'm trying to do many versions in Photoshop with different contrast, colour balance, little corrections etc. I'm undecided and can't manage to get a final version that completely satisfies me. I'm not an expert in post processing so I have to experiment a lot.
Any comment, hint and critic is very welcome, as always!
Regards,
Lucio