Interesting Cloud Method

Found a pretty cool way to make clouds. Similar to the Mammatus Clouds seen here

  • Ocean modifier with high choppiness and scale
  • Apply and extrude upwards, flatten upper plane
  • Add smooth modifier, factor and repeat up until there are no mesh intersections
  • Create basic volume shader in cycles (absorb mixed with scatter)
  • Add an blue emitter plane as the sky above your clouds
  • set world color to greenish
  • render from below (mine was at 800 samples)

I would love feedback from everyone, and if you try this yourself show me a render!

Here’s my render




I wonder, if to save on render time, the Wave object wouldn’t serve better as the light source rather than as a volume. I like the finished result but see an Emit with Gradient Texture mapped through the Z-axis casting an equally lustrous luster. I’ll play with this soon as I’m’ near a different computer.

I thought of doing something like that soon after I posted! The only reason I did it this way in the first place was because I was interested in doing this based on real life clouds, and imitating that as closely as I could. As well as a gradient texture input to the emit, you could even do some interesting realtime object mapping of a texture onto something animated with shapekeys… deserves investigating! Hope to see something from you!