Vray Clouds Yet?

[Macker]

Doing it with actual geometry is not the way forward imho.

It should all be done via a procedural noise map for the density - far less ram intensive, no modelling required, fully animatable and wont lag your viewports - plus the varying density will give the clouds a more realistic look, letting you give the clouds very soft, feathered edges.

[edit] see video I made; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4LBQM4iI8g

[Swahn_Kung]

Maybe it'd be worth making two clouds using the same mesh - one inner version of the mesh with no displacement and a large push value to shrink it in and an outer version with your displacement turned on. Use two different vray environment fog operators, one with no texture for the inner "solid" cloud, and another for the outer "noisy" cloud? Nice tests by the way!

That's a really good suggestion!

Doing it with actual geometry is not the way forward imho.

It should all be done via a procedural noise map for the density - far less ram intensive, no modelling required, fully animatable and wont lag your viewports - plus the varying density will give the clouds a more realistic look, letting you give the clouds very soft, feathered edges.

[edit] see video I made; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4LBQM4iI8g

I get what you're saying, but under certain circumstances you might just want to do one single fluffy cloud where estimation of the cloud shape is necessary, as well as manual shaping.
And the experiment I've been testing out doesn't necessarily lag the viewport either. You can apply a Turbosmooth which only subdivides at rendertime, so you'll be able to see the shape in the viewport, yet have a high resolution render.

joconnell's suggestion might eliminate the need for a high resolution mesh though. I'll see what I can make out of it.

[joconnell]

Fully animatable but totally uncontrollable! Having some kind of basic control over the starting shape is really important for art directed vfx shots so being able to sculpt a simple volume is really handy in my opinion. The displace modifier on top for the larger bumps and shapes and then the texture in the environment fog for the small broken edges. I get what you're saying about viewport overhead but I reckon Swahn Kung's test images from above are far closer to being realistic - it's a tough one to pull off!

[Macker]

My animation was made using the standard max noise; hence the shape not being right.

Let's face it Vue's implementation looks the best out there so far, yet I'd bet any amount of money it's not done using geometry - I reckon it's all procedural noise maps that have been custom built to imitate clouds. I am still not sold on the idea of geometry for clouds.

[Swahn_Kung]

joconnell, your suggestion about using two instances of fog, one for the inner part and one for the edge is good. However I encountered a potential bug or limitation.

If I create two VrayEnvironmentalFog, and try to add one mesh for each fog, they seem to share the same list of objects.
If I try this 3ds max will crash almost instantly.

To replicate this crash:

• Create two meshes
• Add two VrayEnvironmentFog.
• Try and add one of the meshes as a gizmo to either fog.
• Crash.

I'm using Vray 2.20.03

I'll probably should post this is the problem section too.