Creating Clouds

[CG_Utopian]

Hey Guys,

I need to create aerial shot for an upcoming project (A plane over the clouds) and i would like to ask if there are any good tutorials for creating clouds with Phoenix FD. i know i can start with the preset but after that i have no idea how to improve it and i'm aiming for the highest quality possible.

Thanks and Best.

[AtlJimK]

Also interested. <subscribed>

[japetus]

Agreed, I've tried this numerous times with fume and phoenix to ok results...some people online seem to get great results but don't want to share.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey guys,

Not sure how we could help.. do you have any specific questions or issues, or maybe a setup we could build upon + a reference image? First off, do you need the clouds moving and animating, or just as a static environment to fly through?

Cheers!

[AtlJimK]

Here is a start...

http://planetside.co.uk/terragen-image-gallery/

[japetus]

I guess for me it'd be ways to get different types of clouds, banks of clouds vs singular clouds, like in these videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErP9ng0YyLE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eRzuL7liUg

[joshclos]

I guess for me it'd be ways to get different types of clouds, banks of clouds vs singular clouds, like in these videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErP9ng0YyLE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eRzuL7liUg

You could get results pretty close to that by emitting smoke from creatively shaped emitters. If they need to move and roll around, it's more difficult of course but if it's just a frame, you can sim out the smoke sim and load in an index frame into a volume grid; or a phoenix container.

[dgruwier]

For those large scale soft cloud banks, you might have significantly more luck shaping the clouds by piping vrayDistanceTex and noises into the density channel of a uniformly filled grid, rather than simulation. That is, assuming you use vray.

[joshclos]

That's a good option too. I'm curious about everyone's experience using textures to modulate density; I've used noise textures in the past to modulate smoke and it significantly increased my render time (approx 1min renders increased to 5min renders). It's possible my setup was wrong because I didn't have a chance to troubleshoot it but I'm curious if anyone else noticed an increase in render time that significant using textures to modulate?

[Fragster]

same goes for environment fog. Noisemap increases rendertime significantly. No matter what.

[dgruwier]

I haven't used textures to modulate simulations, only completely filled volume grid, so I couldn't say.. But since detail is being added it makes sense that it increases the render time.

I will say that when doing soft wispy clouds you can get away with significantly(!) lower grid/step size, which helps balance things out, since the grid/step size is irrelevant in shaping and detailing the clouds, but only affect light calculations. For example, for something like this, you could probably get away with a step size only a couple of times smaller than the largest overall cloud shapes. Environment fog can't be optimized like this, since it's not voxel based, so it can be many, many times slower for a similar scene.

You also have to factor in that you're not dealing with simulation time or disk space usage, other than the initial one frame grid.

[cb LLC]

this would be cool in 3ds max unfortunately it is only in maya https://youtu.be/WAWPE-4Eb8s?t=18s

[joshclos]

this would be cool in 3ds max unfortunately it is only in maya https://youtu.be/WAWPE-4Eb8s?t=18s

That plugin does look neat but I bet if you took the same sphere geometry into phoenix, you could get similar results (probably better, even since it's actually simulating). And the sim time would be reasonable since the shape doesn't have to go far from that initial shape.

[suesssebastian]

Here is a solution i also used. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VTE3EGSqNU
You can create random cloud base meshs with pflow. and use them as source, but convert them to polys first. Then you can simulate the creation process and just use one frame of the sim for the flight through.
with tweaking you can get some nice cloud formations.

Even though this is houdini, the process is similar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcioXEwN0W4

[stevesideas]

I'm very interested in this subject too. I've managed to get good overall cloud shapes now but the softness/fluffiness is falling way short. At the moment I can see major grid artefacts. If I reduce the grid size the grids are smaller and my cloud becomes very noisy. How do I get that soft look?