Hey guys,
I want to do a neat looking lowpoly cloud for a videogame, it doesn’t has to look realistic, it could be this “super mario galaxy” style…
I tried it using metaballs, but it didn’t worked out the way i wanted it…
I have no problem to model such an object in highpoly, but lowpoly seems very problematic…
Have you any thoughts?
Thanks a lot,
Luke
Try using Alan’s Cloud Generator, and bake the textures to the billboards.
Or really simple is just using an image of a cloud (with alpha) on a billboard and then just animate the size of the billboard a little so it looks like the cloud is slightly changing shape as it goes by?
What do you mean by billdboards?
Billboard is a way to emit particles of an emitter (like halos, objects, etc). You can take a plane with a cloud texture for example and let it “fly” around, etc.
Search for an image of a cloud or yet better make your own cloud with the generator, make a picture of it (with alpha) and use it as a texture on a plane. With alpha enabled you won’t have just a rectangular but your nice looking cloud.
I don’t know what you want to do exactly but you could then make a huge blue plane object as sky and let it emit the clouds in different sizes etc.
Let’s say that you want a forest of variously-sized trees, on the cheap. One way to do this is by “painting” the image of a tree onto a rectangular plane. Alpha is nonzero where the tree is and zero where the tree isn’t, so the edges of the plane are never visible. Set a constraint on the plane so that it always points toward the camera. Now, duplicate that plane as many times as necessary and place the copies at-random throughout the scene. Presto! Instant forest. Computational cost? Nada.
You can do the same thing with clouds. I even saw one blend-file (dunno where now) that “bolted together” several planes back-to-back into one unit, and used curves to vary the relative opacity of each of them. The effect was that of roiling, angry storm-clouds, caught by the occasional flickers of sunlight, and the whole thing was very convincing.
You can get very imaginative and get away with it. After all, Dorothy was whisked away to the Land of Oz using a two-story tall cloth sock. And it worked.