Hi, I have spent some time working on a natural looking Fake Volumetric Cloud setup, and I want to share the result, even if there are still some artifacts mainly visible in animations. I have spent a long long time trying to fix them, but as they don’t appear when rendering small parts of the image with Border rendering, they might be due to a bug in the render engine. While waiting for a response about this annoying thing, I think that the setup of the clouds is interesting enough to release it now.
The tutorial is here :
http://3d-synthesis.com/tutorials/VolumetricCloudsTutorial.pdf
The Blend File is here :
http://3d-synthesis.com/Blender_Files/VolumetricClouds_v01.blend
A usefull script written by David Bertin (aka GFA-MAD), used in the tutorial his here :
http://3d-synthesis.com/Blender_Scripts/DotFiller.py
The topic about my trials :
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=141114
Links where you can download some video test :
http://3d-synthesis.com/movies/Cloud_009_DivX.avi
http://3d-synthesis.com/movies/Cloud_009_QTh264.mov
http://3d-synthesis.com/movies/Cloud_010_DivX.avi
http://3d-synthesis.com/movies/Cloud_010_QTh264.mov
This video shows a previous test done with raytracing, and without SSS. It is not covered by the tutorial. It is easy to switch to this method by disabling SSS and enabling Raytracing. The lamps will have to be set to raytraced shadows.
This setup requires a very long rendering time, so I searched an other method, leading to the tutorial. It is only shown for the historical :
http://3d-synthesis.com/movies/Cloud_008_DivX.avi
http://3d-synthesis.com/movies/Cloud_008_QTh264.mov
I hope that you will find the setup useful.
Philippe.