How to create rolling clouds animation?

[phamarus]

once they incorporate some kind of fluids in cloud layer models,vue would rock..

fumefx, houdini pyrofx would probably do this pretty well.

as for vue, well take some metaclouds and move singel spheres upwards and rotate them little too..that might give some rolling motion.

Since vue now has collada, I tried a trick for a rolling mushroom cloud inside of lightwave.
1. a toroid shape is created in lightwave
2. I then select a circle curve and create skelegons/bones of that.
3. the object is then moved up and bones are rotated and the mushroom cloud is rotated
aswell along with hypervoxels that follows the rotation well..so that´s ok for lightwave.

My thought was to export to collada and put some volumetric material on there inside of
vue..it imports fine with bones etc..but it doesn´t seem to have recorded the
rotated motion.
otherwise collada export and bones animated in lightwave works fine.
My computer got locked and crashed so I didn´t try to repose animate the object inside
of vue.

but as I mentioned in the beginning....fluids..fluids.
Ohhh..anyone remember the swell cloud system?

Michael

[fernando749845]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the input, I'll try your suggestions. Although I think FumeFX is a lot of work to get right. I was hoping that Vue had some 'standard' animation setting for this...

But thanks!
Fernando

[phamarus]

I tried moving some metacloud spheres and rotated them, but I don´t think the cloud
material changed through that.

In the metaclouds materials third tab (lighting and effects)
you might be able to get some fluctuating motions by changing the velocity over time, that
will at least probably give some texture motion to the clouds, and together with moving the
spheres and perhaps change scale of the sphere or the material itself will yield a rolling cloud effect.

Another thought is to try the spectral clouds and animate the cloud height first along with velocity.
and perhaps several cloud layers.

Michael

[phamarus]

well..you could check if the grass is greener on the other side with Terragen 2.
this is really sweet..it´s a premade cloud pack containing a couple of different cumulinimbus
clouds..and there is also one animated rolling cloud in there.

http://www.nwdanet.com/buy-packs/7-preset-packs/23-cumulus-atmosphere-pack-v2.html

you can see the rising cumulus cloud animation at the bottom of the page.

I still havent seen anything better for these kind of clouds in vue.
On the downside for terragen might be that it is harder to learn and Even longer previews and render times.

Anyway..Im gonna nag about this "poor" function procedural models inside of vue for
cloud density..Please E-on You need to step this up abit and start create procedurals
specially designed for clouds.

E-on is implementing a lot of cool features for their updates..but this one has been lagging too long me thinks, I would suggest on starting to adapt better procedurals at first, then
Please do something about metacloud saving editing, use an l-system structure that kan
be changed or loaded at will to place metacloud spheres where needed.

After that ..start working on a cfd fluid smoke and cloud models inside of vue, that would
really knock some socks of if implemented well.

theres now a new terragen update available..and Terragen an maya volumetric clouds
where used in gi joe for some cloud sequences, and some vue was also used, but to
what extent I don´t know.
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5249

Michael

[FrankB-de]

Hi,

the boiling clouds animation that you can see on www.nwdanet.com, just took a couple hours, still with potential to reduce render time by optimizing settings for rendering the animation frames.
The trick with doing something like this in Terragen at very acceptable render times is to understand the various settings that influence detail and quality, probably similar to vue (I hear, I don't have vue).

By chance, I am the creator of the cumulus pack on the aforementioned site, so in case you're interested to learn more about it, I am happy to help answer questions you may have.

Best regards,
Frank

[phamarus]

Hi,

The trick with doing something like this in Terragen at very acceptable render times is to understand the various settings that influence detail and quality, probably similar to vue (I hear, I don't have vue).
Best regards,
Frank

Great job frank,it does look great.

I tried the free beta version of terragen 2, but I just couldn´t stand the preview rendertimes
to actually get the initial view of how clouds are shaping up, compared to vues previewer
it´a snail against a lepard.

So once the terragen team puts some power and speed in a good previewer, then
I might check it out again, and perhaps your cloud pack.
overalll thou for terragen renders, I think cloudscapes and lighting conditions are top notch and they are one step ahead compared to vues.

I wish there were features like adding metaballs to geometric shapes and morph and displace those, like in lightwave You could use the Dynamite voxel plugin that adapts voxel size
after polys it is attached to and then random rotation can be applied and random voxel size,works great to get a rolling cloud rise effect, unfortunatly we don´t have the other
atmospheric effects inside of lightwave.

Edit..ohh..and open gl view on how the voxel size and rotation of metaballs are moving is a wonderful thing with dynamite.

Michael

[FrankB-de]

(sorry Fernando for hi-jacking your thread, just this one reply to Michael....)

Thanks Michael, and yes you are right in that it's a pain that the 3D preview is not multi-threaded (yet, it will come). I usually help myself by just rendering a low quali preview. On 8 threads that doesn't take more than a couple seconds, but of course is different from being able to move around the scene in near real time.

In TG2 there are a number of ways to modify the cloud's appearance and shape, but since clouds are not based on actualy geometry, but instead are a volumentric interpretation of fractal noises, the tools to transform clouds are a little different, although with its rendering method for clouds, TG2 is pretty good at simulating believable cloud lighting and scattering.

(for the record: I'm an absolute cloud lover, in general ;) )

In real (yet procedural) geometry, like the one created with terrains, TG2 really shines, in my opinion. I have been able to create entire worlds that have detail from a continental level down to grains of sand, and terrain displacement is generally very versatile and powerful with TG2. No voxels's, though, but enough ways to well make up for it ;)

If one day you or anyone else would like to know more about all that, feel free to contact me off-list and I can point to a number of useful resources.

Cheers,
Frank

[fernando749845]

Hi Frank,


Thanks for the input (hijacking is always okay!).

Before diving into Terragen, I would like to know if it's possible to create separate clouds like in Vue. It's important that I can shape the cloud in a form that I need. Does Terragen has something like meta clouds? I couldn't make that out so quickly on their website.

I actually need to model one cloud that has this rolling type of animation.

Thanks,
Fernando

[phamarus]

to bad the vue metaclouds are so limited in saving options and how to distrubute them in a modeled
or structured way.

I would love to have a kind of geometry structure to control placement, or simple modeled geometry wich metaballs can be attached to.

Like the dynamite plugin for lightwave, and I could morph and expand the geometry
too and the metaball follows that morph and also adapts to each poly size if you want, or
use points or particles.
random size are available to as well as random rotation for the metaballs or control rotation with nulls or textures.

nevermind the cloud texture, just a sample to show voxel metaball placement and structure.

[phamarus]

damn quota exceeded and why cant I select older attachment and delete them, the selection

box aren´t there.

Michael

[FrankB-de]

Hi Frank,


Thanks for the input (hijacking is always okay!).

Before diving into Terragen, I would like to know if it's possible to create separate clouds like in Vue. It's important that I can shape the cloud in a form that I need. Does Terragen has something like meta clouds? I couldn't make that out so quickly on their website.

I actually need to model one cloud that has this rolling type of animation.

Thanks,
Fernando

Hi Fernando,

because in TG2 clouds are inherently procedural, the way you would go about creating a single cloud is to work with a mask for placement. Either through an image map (it's enough if the image just has a white/black gradient of any shape you like), or by placing a camera somewhere as a reference point, and use its position to tell TG2 "ok, at a radius of 4000m around this camera position, you will generate a huge hero cloud for me, and behind that radius, you fade the cloud out." You would use a multitude of parameter to shape the fractal to give you the type of cloud you want, plus potentially use additional ways to warp the cloud, blow it up further, make edges hard, soft, define the light scattering etc.... whatever.
That's actually how the (my) cumulonimbus preset is implemented: you place your hero cloud by placing a reference camera anywhere in the 3d space, and the rest of the preset node network does the rest for you, while you're able to adjust every single bit to your liking if you so wish.
(I've got one example render in my still rather small cgtalk portfolio that shows you the result of one of those cumulonimbuses)

You would use a similar method to, i.e. tell TG2 to generate a new global cloud layer, but have the clouds fade in 5000m before your camera, so that your immediate surrounding are in bright sunshine and not shadowed by clouds.

I've probably written more than you wanted to know, so I stop here, but am happy to explain further if you wish.

Cheers,
Frank

[FrankB-de]

Like the dynamite plugin for lightwave, and I could morph and expand the geometry
too and the metaball follows that morph and also adapts to each poly size if you want, or
use points or particles.

That's actually a pretty cool way of being able to shape individual clouds. Thank's for the example :)

Frank

[phamarus]

That's actually a pretty cool way of being able to shape individual clouds. Thank's for the example :)

Frank

There should have been some more images with other opengl modes and other examples
but since quota is exceeded and I couldnt find the checkboxes to remove older attachments
they were left out.
Ill get back to that once i figured out whats up with editing older attachments.

Yeah its an easy way to shape up clouds, I wish vue would invest a little time in improving
how metaclouds are made, arranged and applied.

first off would be to fit or arrange the metacloud spheres inside of sculpted geometry or
match that geometry as in lightwave dynamite voxels system wich also has metaball blending.

the best cloud shaping Ive seen, was a tutorial for houdini where they started of with
an L-system tree shape and attached metaballs on to the L-system and then the whole
cloud volume was displaced and further more added turbulence noise at the edges of the clouds...no wonder it is used so widely for clouds in feature films such as Timemachine,superman etc.

even thou you could create some nice cloud structure in lightave, lightwave don´t have
any decent volumetric atmospheric system that matches vues for skies. and the hv voxels
are quite slower than metaclouds.

there was a plugin called ogo taiki (for lightwave) that had volumetric clouds and godray fog layers long
before vue had it..but that plug has stagnated a long time ago.
it had some nice features and could use a particle system that was billowing upwards for
rising clouds.

main page
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~pq1a-ogs/taiki_e.html

movie sample particle cloud
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~pq1a-ogs/pttest3.mpg

most of those samples are rendered on not so good quality on the page, I know it can be
much better..but ogo taiki was very slow, and hard to tweak since there were quality settings everywhere.

Michael

[phamarus]

well yeah it´s not vue, but the dynamite plugin´s way of attaching metaballs and volumetrics on geometry would be sweet to have in vue for the metaclouds, there´s not much control of vue metaclouds in terms of saving metaclouds, distrubute and order metaclouds or shaping it up and animate it.

so I mentioned earlier that I would post how the basic technique works with dynamite to get a cloud like rise ..so there´s three simple short videos at vimeo showing this..a wireframe morph, an opengl sample of how metaballs look like in realtime, and a voxel render..
Nevermind the actual cloud texture I didn´t bother that much to tweak it or light it..I just wanted to
show the basic concept wich I hope e-on might think about for metaclouds.

the morph is done in lightwave modeler and once in layout morph mixer controls the expansion.

http://vimeo.com/user680656/videos

Michael

[fernando749845]

Hi to all,


I just wanted to let you of my findings and results in my quest for the best tool for creating rolling clouds with a very specific shape.

I tried Vue 8: creating a specific shape for a cloud is indeed possible with the Metaclouds objects. However, getting the shape right was really a great pain.

A Metacloud object is built up out of metacloud spheres. You can't combine two Metacloud objects because they are not combined ('glued together') during rendering. The only option is adding metacloud spheres within a Metacloud object.

But selecting a specific sphere is really hard (only using CTRL+click), you can't select groups of spheres, adding new spheres is done at a random position, all spheres are called "sphere"... By the time I had modeled the cloud I wanted I had been cursing and shouting at this software for more than four hours.

But then came the real disappointment. I wanted to animate the clouds with Vue. But that's impossible! You can move the Metacloud object around, rotate the metacloud spheres and that's about it. It seems that most if not all values cannot be animated. What a waste of time, and I was angry at myself for not testing the animation possibilities at forehand.

In conclusion, the render part of Vue 8 creates stunning clouds and it's great if you don't need to animate them and keep them fixed while you do your airplane flyby.

Then I had a look at Terragen. I bought the cloud pack from Frank (@Frank: by the way, which file delivers the animation at the bottom of your product page?) and I came quickly to my conclusion. The rendering takes so long, that the preview/adjust/preview workflow would take up too long. However the work Frank has done with it looks really great.

Next I tried Afterburn and Pyrocluster in 3DS max. They both have proven to deliver great cloud renderings. But it turned out that I didn't succeed creating a specific shape with Afterburn.

Using the same Pcloud object (particle source) that bases the particle positions on a selected geometry, Afterburn combines the particle spheres best when using the metaspheres, but then it's impossible to get a natural cloud shape.

Pyrocluster is superior in combining the spheres that are created on each particle. By setting the particle count high enough, the custom geometry was filled with so many particles that the exact shape of the geometry was created, but then with a natural cloud look.

Animating the cloud was a breeze. I animated the sphere size, the turbulence pattern size and slightly the phase setting. These three settings together create the typical rolling cloud movement.

I like the Vue cloud renderings better, but Pyrocluster renderings are very nice too.

I hope this helps anyone who wants to create specific cloud animations.

Fernando

[phamarus]

Fernando ..it would be nice to see a render sample from pyro cluster if you have the time and can provide, or an animation sample.

I guess pyrocluster and dynamite might be similar in approach.

Yepp the metacloud shaping,editing,loading and saving in vue sucks big time..that´s why I
mentioned techniques similar to that of the dynamite plugin for lightwave.
voxels are taking on the polysize dependent on how the geometry looks like, and it
can use random rotation or particle size as shown in this open gl video..
http://www.vimeo.com/9127056

base geometry and expansion and movement are done in modeler and an endomorph that
looks like this..
http://www.vimeo.com/9127003

Voxel renders might look something like this, low quality and not tweaked for best results thou.
http://www.vimeo.com/9127089


another way to sculpt clouds in lightwave..spray a point cluster, and create a modeled
geometry shape of desired look in a background layer, by using boolean and intersect,
we can use the geometry to stencil out and fill the geometry with points, and
apply hypervoxels or dynamite on it...so sculpting cloud point clusters as we want are
pretty easy.

Michael

[fernando749845]

Hi Michael,

Here's a really small render test video that I made. The story below the video tells you exactly how I did it. It's much more fluffy than the one Frank made, so it looks more like clouds and not like a nuclear explosion cloud.

http://vimeo.com/9524728

[phamarus]

That looks pretty sweet, great job.

now..then there´s the issue of adding atmosphere and light properties,scattering to affect
the clouds, and throwing in some godrays might be tricky unless doing it in post I guess.

Michael

[FrankB-de]

Then I had a look at Terragen. I bought the cloud pack from Frank (@Frank: by the way, which file delivers the animation at the bottom of your product page?) and I came quickly to my conclusion. The rendering takes so long, that the preview/adjust/preview workflow would take up too long. However the work Frank has done with it looks really great....

Fernando

Hi Fernando,

there's no specific file that creates the animation, that's kind of built-in to TG2 anyway. As you've seen every parameter in TG2 can be animated, so it's not a big deal to make boiling clouds, and there are several ways of doing that.
However the presets you have tried have definitely been built to make absolutely high-q stills. For animations, these are too slow to work with comfortably. Also in an animation, you just don't need that level of sub-pixel detail that is calculated for the still. I haven't tried to particularly tweak these presets to be optimal for animations, but maybe that's something I should consider in the future. As I said, I haven't tried but I think I could cut down render time by facror 3, for an animation without a notable quality difference.
To do that, I would remove a few branches from the node network that are designed to produce the super-small scale detail, also reduce the cloud density and edge sharpness and thereby the required samples significantly.

I have developed the cumulus clouds a step further recently and I am very happy with the result: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=132&t=853761

Lastly, I think the short low-q animation you are showing looks really nice, and the animation works really well for me. I have definitely enjoyed reading this thread :)

Regards,
Frank

[fernando749845]

Hi Frank,

Thanks for the feedback on Terragen. I will certainly look into this application later this year, your renders are stunning. Also your new cumulonimbus looks great!

Fernando

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