I followed a lot of cloud tutorials on youtube, but everytime i compared that to actually clouds they always fall short. Either they are to bulky or do not have the typical whisps, or feel somewhat superficial. Its hard to describe but the giant beauty that spans the skys in almost infinite depth i was not able to achieve yet.
Therfore my question. What are the best ways you found of making clouds?
I used to follow this one tutorial below, when I’ve just only started learning Blender:
And here’s one more that I’ve just found, which also could help you:
Cheers,
Sergey
It’s not trivial to make great looking clouds.
AFAIK there are 4 ways (and you can mix them).
You can sculpt or otherwise create cloud shapes with traditional modelling, then turn them into volumes.
You can procedurally create cloud shapes in Geo Nodes, then turn them into volumes.
You can create them entirely procedural (in the shader editor),
or you create them with a fluid solver (do a simulation).
1st method needs a lot of manual work.
2nd needs some brainpower.
3rd needs a lot of brainpower.
4th needs a lot of computation power.
There is a 5th way, that is buying an addon that does the job for you.
Like these:
PS: in my experience, the simulation method yields the best results but these are costly, takes a lot of time to get the sim right and the resulting vdb’s need to be high resolution to get the small details right.
Please refer to this
There is one Main reason for why blender often fails, at least for larger low cloudscapes covering the sky, it´s in the fractal textures, they are horrible.
Same goes for many of the cloudtypes seen in vue, where one could spot a render from vue based on what fractal types is used, this is where Terragen is setting itself apart with more realism …partly thanks to the fractal types that are designed to work for clouds, where vue´s is Not, mostly just noise fractals based to work for terrains.
In blender we can´t even use the cloud fractal to drive the density of a volume item, that is a bit absurd really.
The cloud fractal can be used in displacement, and in volume displacement, and in fluid emission texture, but Not in the density channel for volume materials.
And we like have like 8 fractal noise textures to choose from, including the one we can´t use.
Now compare 8 against over 80 noise fractals for Lightwave, which by the way have a couple of very excellent cloud fractals, like weather, gardner clouds, and much more, they are single node fractals and all you have to do is set the right cloud turbulent scaling, wind scaling and many other parameters especially designed to work for cloud density generation.
Some samples of the fractal textures, blender developers should look at Denis Pontonnier and his free Rman Collection textures, though his site is down and may not come back now, the Rman Collection is open source I believe and could be “hacked” as Denis did.
Otherwise, for large single cumulus clouds or cumulonimbus, you can use the free houdini apprentice version and export out the vdb generated fluid simulations, no restrictions there, apart that you can only use it for personal projects.
Otherwise blender does a pretty darn good job of shading the volumes with multiple scatter, and GI, in my opinion even better faster than houdini.
Rendering VDB files like that in Lightwave however, natively not possible to get a decent look, you have to use octane render plugin for it to start matching blender cycles.
So…sorry for that many Lightwave renders, but it shows a bit of the textures you can use.
So for VDB fluid clouds, single cumulus types, VDB´s…and I would go with blender.
For lower cloud thinner height clouds of large coverage in the sky, I would go Lightwave or Terragen.
None does it all…Had the blender development team adressed the poor sets of fractals for blender, that would have perhaps changed some things…and by that I do not mean a huge nested set of fractals plugged in to eachother, but single type nodes that does it specificly for clouds.
Apart from that, Lightwaves volume item is easier, faster to set up with texture amplitude, curves, and handling softness in my opinion.
Each texture can be inverted in one click without adding invert nodes, this pertains both Lightwaves nodal set fractals and layering textures, you can inside the node editor choose to use either layered fractal sets within the nodal editor or nodal sets or both at the same time.
This one is actually promising in blender, it´s setup for eevee though, which I rarely use, so I have to check if it converts well to Cycles.
Appending seem to not work for me, I might be doing something wrong…but I opened the blend file in blender 3,4 alpha, and it works.
The main node could use a bit more settings, if one goes in to the node and make a channel for some of it, like texture location, some detail control as well.
Addons I know too little about though, maybe there is the place you should look for larger cloudscapes.
Experimenting with transparent/overlapping layers can help give a sense of depth.
Does anyone know this?
have you tried it?
I have, but I can see the clouds in the background sky but I can see them on reflections.
If you have tried it, could you confirm my issue or just me and for you everything is ok?
Solved…it was just to edit the camera clip end distance… I’ve to put 100km to see the full clouds.
Anyway…it seems that the documentation link is broken.
Ciao Marcatore, I didn’t try it yet. Thanks for the camera clipping advice! 
