CGTalk - blender cloud scape

joshex

07-23-2008, 05:56 PM

alright! I probably should have posted this when I first figured out how to make decent clouds in blender, but I got sidetracked.

anywho, I recently saw someones work on a "kirby" game they were making, or at least the models there of, anyways the cloud terrain wasn't created to be a cloud material, but rather was textured with an image that was so "fine" in detail it made it look like stone rather than cloud. so I posted the details of how to make a good cloud. anywho heres the stuff from that post including a picture of a cloud scape (or cloud terrain) do note; it's nothing fancy it just looks like clouds, it took me like 5 minutes....

heres the logistics, the way I found them? well what is a cloud composed of? (mist water) what effects it? light, shaddows horrizon collor.

Col; R: 1.0 G: 1.0 B: 1.0

subsurf and set smooth,

shaders:

Ref: 0.500 (lambert)

Spec: 0.00 hard: 1, (cooktorrent)

Tralu:1.00

Emit: (around) 0.300 (adjust for darker/ lighter clouds, and for day and night)

Amb: 0.800 (around there), SBias:0.00

mirror transp:

Ray Transp (on)

IOR: 1.47 (or there abouts) depth default (2)

Limit:0 , Falloff:0

Fresnel:1.2 , Fac 1.27 (around there)

SpecTra:1.0

add some "Filt" as/if need be...

that should leave you with something like this if you just left it as the deafult cube setup, with the camera and lamp at default as well:

http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p271/joshex/cloud.jpg

thats with default subsurfing, you can turn it up and down as need be...

and heres a basic cloud scape, took me like 5 min....:

http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p271/joshex/cloudscape.jpg

joshex

07-26-2008, 09:28 PM

sorry for the double post about this topic, I figure everyone is too busy messing about with thier own cloud creations to post a response.

so I'll just put this down as a side note, I'm willing to take requests for cloud scenes. (any scene with clouds in it)

in short you tell me what you need (a rough sketch would be nice), and I'll make the clouds for it, and upload the .blend file somewhere, and the pictures of it here...

you will be responsible for making any non clouds in the scene at your leasure...

Ian Jones

07-26-2008, 11:57 PM

I have to be honest here... but I don't think these look like clouds at all. Did you use a stylised reference image perhaps?

toontje

07-27-2008, 02:40 AM

It doesn't look like clouds. More like some ceramics...

joshex

07-27-2008, 08:49 PM

I have to be honest here... but I don't think these look like clouds at all. Did you use a stylised reference image perhaps?

ah you are referring to the shape I presume, as I said that took me like 5 minutes... the shape wasn't meant to be impressive, the material values however were....

in short that was the whole reason behind all this, this was to show the material values for "cloud" not to make a decent shaped cloud.

though I suppose I should make an actual cloud shaped thing shouldn't I?

this took me about 15 mins:

http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p271/joshex/bigcloud.jpghttp://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p271/joshex/cloudmidday.jpghttp://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p271/joshex/cloudnormal.jpghttp://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p271/joshex/cloudsunset.jpghttp://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p271/joshex/cloudnightnormvalue.jpghttp://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p271/joshex/cloudnightlowemit.jpg

Ian Jones

07-28-2008, 02:21 AM

That's better. The clouds still have hard edges though... have you tried working with ramps to adjust the transparency based on the face normals?

joshex

07-28-2008, 04:26 AM

That's better. The clouds still have hard edges though... have you tried working with ramps to adjust the transparency based on the face normals?

I have to be honest, I don't know how to do that with "ramps".

I've honestly never used ramps...

Ian Jones

07-28-2008, 04:50 AM

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Ramps

The explanation there is pretty thorough... but to sum up ramps allow you to assign a gradient to a material. Ramps can be assigned to use surface normals to determine where to place the colors. So you can make surfaces that turn away from the camera become transparent and surfaces that face it more opaque to simluate thinning out at the edges of the cloud.

In other 3d apps this is sometimes knows as Falloff, i think Maya calls them ramp shaders aswell whereas 3dsMax calls it a Falloff material.

joshex

07-28-2008, 09:09 PM

ah! fair enough.

after a quick look over that I see the application for shaddowing. that way I wont have to adjust the emit value for a darker cloud.

I'll monkey around with the "normal" setting of colorband to see what I can do transparency wise...

edit: though, on that note, I wont be able to do any more work on this till thursday, maybe sooner if work isn't too rough on me... though I did monkey around with it and get somewhat of a feel for it!

one more blender lesson learned, eh?

as for that cloud model above, I didn't save it, but it was pretty simplistic and could be recreated easily...

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