I roughly modelled where the smoke should be with the green object.
No matter what i try i dont get the fog to look the way i want to.
I tried Volumetric Materials, Smoke Simulation, nothing works. (well it works but it looks like crap)
There are some good tutorials out there, but nothing suits me.
What i basicly want, is to model the fog outlines, and then animate it.
When i use Volumetrics, the edges of the smoke are to sharp. When i use a Gradient texture on the density, the edge is smoth, but as soon as i change the geometry, its f****d up…
I’m not sure if this can give you exactly what you want, because you said you wanna animate the fog and I don’t know how much control you need , but have you tried creating the volumetric shader using noise patterns? There are several videos about that on youtube
Playing with different noise configurations should make both reference images you posted possible. The first one might require a base mesh roughly following the terrain, as matching up the noise and the landscape perfectly is probably almost impossible.
Unfortunately I couldn’t look at your file, because the access is restricted.
i just edited my first post, maybe you should be able to open the file now, i screwed something up with the properties.
I guess the first video you posted could bring me new knowledge. The second one i already knew.
i know about using the noise textures for the fog, but as soon as i change the geometry of my ‘‘fogbox’’, things get funny and i end up with hard edges, where the geometry ends. I tried to fix this with gradients, but i seem unable to get it working the right way …
I thought I found a solution earlier, but I was mistaken and ran into the exact issue with hard edges you were describing.
After some further investigation I believe, that there is some limitation with the deformation of texture coordinates for volumes.
I was certain there would be some way (be it modifiers, shape keys, texture meshes…) to do what you want by using the generated coordinate space and then deforming the mesh, but nothing seems to affect volumes.
In the screenshots below the same gradient setup is deformed by a shape key, when using an emission shader (first screenshot), while being unaffected, when using a volume shader (second screenshot). It’s the same with deform modifiers.
So, unless I’ve missed something (and please someone tell me, in case I have!), there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to modify the volume shader smoothly with the mesh itself.
