Best Raymarcher For Clouds ?

[haggi]

If you use maya, why not use maya fluids and emit density from your particles into the fluid? The maya fluids quality is quite good and control is sufficient for most purposes.

It depends a lot from your goal. If you need fast renderings with selfshadowing, I'd try houdini because they can render their volumes with shadowaps what results in quite fast renderings.

I'd avoid to render particlces itself because you will always get problems if the particles move. And I'd avoid to render maya particles with fluid shader, as soon as you have a lot of overlapping particles, the rendertimes can be very high.

[SebKaine]

thanks for your answer Haggi.

to show you precisly the goal i want to achieve i give you a links to some pics i've shoot last week :
http://appartager.free.fr/clouds/

my 3 main goals are
- precise control over the design of the clouds
- PHOTO realistic quality (not nice CG fluids looking quality)
- ability to texture an animated mesh with my clouds system

For your first idea it looks very interisting ! i guess your talking about the technics describe here :
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=250802
i've never try this , but it will give it a try but i'm afraid that it will be hard to get the pattern i want at the edge of the clouds

For Houdini , speed is not a priority. The billowy shader in houdini looks cool but there are not so many controller if you compare it to the BA volume shader. I'm afraid that at the end i will loose the control over what i want.

For particle texture with fluids, i agree with you overlap will kill my rendertime.

Raymarching throw particles was my first choice to be honest because
- i can model poly cube or sphere to block the shape of my clouds and fill them with particles with a script = control over the shape
- maybe i can find a way to make those particles follow an animated mesh
- i can render then with BA shader

So for now here is what i have in mind
- blocking shape with low goemetry
- fill them with particles
- raymarch with BA shader

let me know what you think about all my boring blaablaa ...:) i'll be glad to heard any advice about the subject ...

[haggi]

In maya2011 you can emit fluid density from particles. This way you can easily define your cloud shape with nParticles and render with mentalray.

But of course you can try BA, I think they are really good, but until now I didnt see any high quality cloud images done with BA.

If you are free to test, then maybe a look at Vue Esprit could be useful. They have a cloud primitive object - a sphere - to build complex cloud shapes and the cloud shader is quite good.

Houdini requires that you have at least some experience with the software to get a good result. But the approach would be the same, create spheres, make a SDF or a metaball surface and attach a volume shader.

I fear you will have to try yourself, all offer good results, maya is the fastest, Houdini has the best control but needs some knowledge of the tools.

[SebKaine]

In maya2011 you can emit fluid density from particles. This way you can easily define your cloud shape with nParticles and render with mentalray.

i'm working on 2010 but I will give a try to this technics , with the old fashion way ...

But of course you can try BA, I think they are really good, but until now I didnt see any high quality cloud images done with BA. .

well the shader looks great and i saw this very promising test on BA website
http://appartager.free.fr/clouds/binaryAlchemy.mov
i really love the behavior at the edge of the clouds

so i will compare your way and the BA way ... and i guess i will stay with maya one more time for this project

thanks for help haggi ...

if Any BinaryAlchemy user have some more advice it will be great !

[JupiterSunset]

don't know if this is helpful in any way, but have you considered using Vue (http://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/vue/vue_8.5_xstream/) or Ozone (http://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/ozone/ozone_4.0/)?
not suitable for all projects, but surely some pretty clouds : )

best,
/p.

[ytsejam1976]

dl3d (http://www.dl3d.com/index.php/logiciels/shader-texture-volumique.html)
Volume texture shader

[SebKaine]

to JupiterSunset
Vue looks great, and very user friendly, but at the end my true goal is to be able to texture animated mesh (characters) with the clouds system. So for precise control Maya and Houdini where my 2 main choice ...

to ytsejam1976
Thanks for the links i'll check this and compare it to BA shader.

To avoid expensive Raymarch Zhang plug could have been great i guess
http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/dynamics/c/zsmoke
but you can't render your images with the default release ...

[Cheesestraws]

For Houdini , speed is not a priority. The billowy shader in houdini looks cool but there are not so many controller if you compare it to the BA volume shader. I'm afraid that at the end i will loose the control over what i want.

Why not just add more controls?

[SebKaine]

Well John to make it simple, because My houdini skills really Suck ! ;)

Anyway by adding controller you mean making a VEX shader base on the Billowy Shader ?

[Cheesestraws]

Well from memory the billowy shader you are talking about is a shading network, so it is just a collection of nodes strung together, if so then it should be easy to work out how things work and add extra controls.

Would you be rendering geometry converted to a volume or volumes copied onto points?

I find that the pyro shader is often a good shader even if you arent using pyrofx, especially for its scattering features that I am sure would work well for clouds.

[SebKaine]

well john , i think i would have chosen the i3d way.

I've also open the billowy shader in the VEX editor and you're right i can edit everything as oppose to the PyroShader.

But honestly i feel like a no brainer in front of a wall of complexity when i'm looking at the VEX graph of the billowy shader ! i'm gonna stay with maya one more time for this project ... cause i'm afraid that i won't have the time to push my houdini knowledge far enough to achieve what i have in mind for this project ...

anyway thanks for your help !

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