Vray Clouds

[Chris MacDonald]

Here's something I've just been playing with today;

 

 

For quite some time I've wanted to have fully animatable clouds in my arch vis animations and I've finally worked out a way of doing it. I'll be re-rendering that clip so that it's longer and in HD. I hope to put together a little tutorial on how to achieve it, but that could take some time as I'm so busy so I'm quite happy to answer any questions about it.

 

Keep in mind it's entirely a work-in-progress, and I'd much like everyones help in progressing it further as I think it shows a lot of potential and has some major advantages over using HDRI's such as;

 

• Low memory usage.
  
• Full control over cloud coverage, density and quality.
  
• Able to render to any resolution.
  
• Fully animatable.
  
• Clouds affect/cast shadows.
  

I'm well aware that Eon's "Ozone" and "Vue" products can do incredible skies but my main issue with this is two fold: It's another third party product that my wallet can't afford and also it only works (within max) with mental ray, not V-ray (to my knowledge - though correct me if I'm wrong).

 

If anybody knows of a procedural noise texture that better mimics clouds (this was all done using the max noise function) then I'd very much like to see it! Also - any ideas on how to get the VRay sun to not sho through the clouds as a bright white dot?

[-MerlyN-]

I've found this tutorial by Stefan Ivarsson on creating realistic 3D clouds for planetary simulations and renderings a while back on scifi-meshes.com. So far I have only tried this once with mr and scanline renderer and it takes quite some time to render, but so fra its the best way I've seen on creating realistic clouds. Not sure, though, if it is applicable or will work at all when the camera is positioned below the clouds, but if you have time give it a try.

 

Cheers,

 

-Merl

[Chris MacDonald]

Appreciate the input but from my understanding that technique requires you to have a "cloud map", thus it would no longer be procedurally generated clouds and ultimately you wouldn't be able to animate them (properly at least).

[-MerlyN-]

Yeah, it assumes to have a cloud map. But I dont see, why it shouldnt work with a noisy procedural cloud map. What that procedure does is to give some actual 3D depth to the cloud layer, which, to be honest, you clouds do lack the most IMO.

 

Anyways, it was, what I remembered and came to mind first, when I read your post and figured I'd share.

[Ricardo Eloy]

Very good results. Are you applying a "cloud" mat to a dome?

[Chris MacDonald]

The technique is pretty simple really - a kilometer (radius) dome that has been squashed on the vertical axis to flatten it out - then a shell modifier (though i've modelled mine in sketchup) applied to give it around 300 meters thickness. Within this thick hemisphere is where the clouds are generated - I feel it would look so much better if we could somehow get a noise map that mimics clouds - currently I'm using the max fractal noise.

 

I've nearly finished rendering a second animation at 1280x720, so I'll upload that as soon as it's ready. I've attached two stills from it.

[Chris MacDonald]

Edited June 7, 2010 by Macker

[Devin Johnston]

You've still got a lot of noise going on, are you using IR and LC? What are your render times like?

[Chris MacDonald]

These were done using Irradiance map (primary) and Brute force (secondary). Render times were about 3 minutes per frame. I'm not too worried about the noise/flicker though simply because that's down to render settings (I had it set to single frame, not animation) and can be quite easily cleaned up. It's the shape of the clouds that I'm looking to get right more than anything.

[Devin Johnston]

Is there a way to get more of a SS effect without killing your render times?

[Sketchrender]

Can I ask a simple question.

3 mins a frame with brute force and nothing else in the scene sems like a long time.

Why not just use an animated sky on a dome or plane like alex roman?

I know you want precedural but seems like a lot of work at the moment.

It's looks good don't get me wrong but it looks like the same a s the cinema 4d ones from years ago.

 

 

phil

[andstef]

Those are nice clouds!

I played around with the technique you described, but I couldn't get it right, the light barely got through. I must be doing something wrong in the vray fog parameters (applied a noise map to density). If it is not too much to ask, could you post some settings of the vray fog?

 

The next thing I want to try is to have two domes, so there will be two layers of clouds, all this after I get the first layer to work properly.

 

Thanks