I scourged around the net trying to find alternative methods to get clouds and volumetric light in Cycles, this is regarding an animated scene and I intend to have moving clouds in the far distance along with the sun shining through as it passes by.
I tried by forming planes after a cloud like texture, but it just didn’t look right… So, I need some guidance to get me on the right track on how to deal with this.
Hi,
I am trying to do a similar thing but I have to be able to look at the clouds from above. I have cheated with a layer-solution using one pseudo volumetric node-setup. In your case I believe you could use the same technique but put the layers in a camera facing direction. If you are interested in my setup I can post it (just don’t have it at the moment).
Ok, this is not very pedagogic since I have not built this very easy, but anyway you can probably see how it works. I have a gradient map of a round cloud (my cloud test to see layer etc). I have also created a mapping that allow it to get changes over the depth.
With the output from the mapping you can use a contrast node to “scale” the feathering on the cloud. In that way you can build a cloud that is spherical in z-axis, but any shape in x-y axis.
I’ll try to show it all in this image. If anyone has better solutions I’m up for it, please. A volumetric node would have been nice.
Interesting workaround! The results you manage to get would be very interesting to see!
I just got back to my main PC, and I decided to just do the clouds and all that in BI then figure out how to slap it over the cycles render! I read something about having Cycles and Internal rendering on different layers, but I suppose that is just wishful thinking!