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View Full Version : Clouds Turn Into Snow? Mental Ray help please!

egnarodude
03-11-2010, 04:11 AM
Okay so I have a scene that I basically trying to show as the gates of heaven. It is for a personal animation project.

Here is the problem. I have been playing around in Maya and using the particles to make clouds I have gotten some pretty cool results. Then I went to light it and I am not the best lighter. I got the clouds the way I wanted them and then I decided to try using a dome light with final gather with mental ray...

This is the result....

http://i1006.photobucket.com/albums/af190/donaldcmarks/CG/Heaventestrender1.jpg

You will notice that the clouds are black. This is obviously not what I want... although the lighting in the back of the palace seems very nice lol. So I tried messing with the material applied to the clouds and then tried rendering again and this was the result...

http://i1006.photobucket.com/albums/af190/donaldcmarks/CG/Heavensnow.jpg

Apparently my clouds have turned to snow lol. I am not sure how and now I cant get them back to clouds and unfortunately dont have any previous saves. I guess I could redo the clouds but I really dont want to I lke the way they are laid out. Its not tough I guess.. Anyways still would like to figure this out....

The particles are set to Cloud S/W type and followed a tutorial for all of the settings, looked good at first. Mental ray didnt really know what to do with it and i dont quite want to throw mental ray out, i love the general look of it for this shot. Any ideas? I want nice fluffy clouds in mental ray.... white ones... basically is what I am trying to accomplish. Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you!
Reed5point0
03-11-2010, 02:59 PM
If you are feeling froggy....

I would say make a series of spheres scaled in Y and just make some crazy shapes....theese are your clouds...

Make a Maya Fluid container and have it as big as your scene...The voxel resolution and size need to scale together...
So if the container size was 20 20 20 in X Y Z
I would make the Resolution 40 40 40...hard to explain but simple I promise...more Res = more detail...too much res and you will bog the workstaion down..

At that point make the sphere like geometry emit the fluid...and hide the spheres visibility from the render

play with its transparency curve and other behavior settings to get the clouds..

I found it was easier making clouds on accident while I was making my dust cloud for a Rally composite so it shouldn't be too hard.
egnarodude
03-12-2010, 09:32 PM
Will these clouds be static? I dont want them to be moving... it sounds as if they will... Ill give a shot and see what happens but dont want to get into quite a bit of work if they arent really what im looking for....
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