Some tests I’m doing to create clouds with PhoenixFD. and they render amazingly fast. One took longer because I used a dome light.
Sweet 
Looking very good.
Are you using temperature, reversing the gravity at some point and then zeroing the gravity?
Thanks, Yes exactly. At the beginning I have hot temperature in my source. Then the source stop and I have positive buyancy and normal gravity. then I inverse the buyancy and lower the gravity to shake them a bit and make the surface vorticity create some nice patterns.
I am wondering if the source temperature still have an effect even if it is in volume inject mode when the inject is set to zero.
In fact it seems like it’s the way real clouds are acting, I just noticed that afterward! lol:
my favorite is beaunuage.png
Well, try to use houdini cloud rig, with its procedural shape generation, to get an idea, how to make ur spheres look more natural
Chaos guys should improve thier turbulence noise, to make it natual. For now it is so “alien-like”
Hi Paul! I know there are many other solutions to make clouds. But I am trying to see what I can get with Phoenix. I know it still look a bit unnatural but I just played a day with it. And I think I can get better result with some more tests.
The houdini cloud rig looks great, I will have to take a look at it. I just bought a license recently but I’m still learning it.
I also like Krakatoa volume rendering. I have that one too.
But if you look at those examples they look a bit too transparent or blurry some time… and also a bit too uniform.
A real cloud can be really opaque some times like this:
https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2523/3994848374\_3f9966b33d\_o.jpg
Maybe the best solution would be to combine the houdini cloud rig with some hero clouds simulated in PhoenixFD or any other fluid simulator.
I just tried the houdini cloudrig. It’s really cool but sooo sloow to render!
I will try bringin this into max for rendering with the vray volume grid.
The same houdini cloud brought into max and renderwed in vray.
Basically the houdini rig is crating sphere like I do with particle flow, then it just apply noises. I think with bercon maps we could do the same kind of cloud by aplying them with the vector displacement on a volume generated by Phoenix. We could even mix those noises with a fluid simulation.
Another one with Phoenix. I’m now trying to get the god rays sharper…
Here they are:
Now I have to get rid of the voxels we see on the edges…
i think it’s the opacity, are you using curve or simple smoke?
This one without modulating texture (it renders almost 2 times faster without the texture):
I’m using simple smoke, do you think I could get rid of it by using curve? without loosing details?
Oh yes! It’s far better with the “based on smoke” with the curve! Thanks for the tip!
like this:
BTW. You can try using sphere interpolation, not default box (why on earth it is set to default), to get rid of boxy artefacts (previous pix).
Ummm, box is not the default - linear is. It’s faster than spherical and with a production-scale resolution the difference in detail is not noticable anymore. Spherical should be used for low-res sims though.
Ok thanks Paul I will try that. I never touch this setting. By default it was set to linear, not box but I will try sphere!
Ok I see thanks Svetlin.