Realistic cloud with max possible? help

[Dave Black]

There is an exellent plugin called AfterBurn that has been used in all sorts of movies and games. It's sort of the diffinitive pyroclastic/Volumetric cloud plugin. It's not a feee plug, but worth the money.

If you can't afford it, you can try mapping particles, which can give some very nice effects if done properly.

Hope that helps.

-3DZ

:D

[snot_nose]

or you could use some noise map in your opacity mapping

[Lucidium]

If you don't want to buy a plugin, 3DZ's right about the particles.
I reckon you could get pretty realistic clouds with a bit of tweaking.
I did this to test it:
Clouds (http://www.davidmear.com/temp/clouds.jpg)

[Namroth]

Lucidium, nice claouds, can you post how did you do that...:applause:

[erilaz]

You could try the techniques used by Andy Murdock on his Lots of Robots DVD. Good stuff!

www.lotsofrobots.com

[Lucidium]

I textured a geosphere with it's opacity linked to the camera axis.
So that it always fades out towards the edges.

Then used PCloud to fill a simple cloud shape with them. Vary the particle size and the opacity falloff to get different kinds of clouds.

I tried to make long wispy clouds by stretching the geosphere, but that doesn't work quite as well.

I rendered it with the default max renderer, one omni light, no shadows, and it only took about a minute. Beware though, the render time goes up pretty quickly when you start making larger clouds.

[Namroth]

I have one problem:
"I textured a geosphere with it's opacity linked to the camera axis. "

How do you link this. If I use Face in Pcloud I cant use geos...

[Reality3D]

Use a Fallof Map in the opacity slot and select Distance Blend, so it goes from one value to other according to the camera Z axis(or other)

[Hires]

mm i've tried to make clouds with geosphere and fallof but i cant reach a result even far from the example u made.I create the geosphere i created the material puttinf fallof in the opacity map and making diffusion color to white, the i created the PCloud and picked the geosphere as the object base emitter but the resul is a cloudy sphere with some particels (all white) in the geosphere surface , i think i miss somethig.... can u explain im more detail how u created theese nice lloking clouds? (sorry im kinda newbie in max) thaks for help

[Hires]

oh nevr mind i realize how it worked ^_^ only a question how many cloud particle have u used in the example u made?

[amckay]

Jeremy A engleman has some nice cloud R&D max files on his site in his tests or whatever section.

[Lucidium]

I'm not sure how many particles are in each cloud. I just raised the numbers until it looked good.
I think it might be somewhere around 100-200

[TheDevil[DK]]

Is it maybe possible to see the .max file, could be interesting :bounce:

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