Procedural Cloudscape Generation in Cycles (now Eevee!)

(Blender Foundation CERTIFIED TRAINER) #41

Please release a tutorial. Your cloud tool is amazing! Should be implemented as core function.
Cheers.

(Simon Thommes) #42

Glad you like it :slight_smile:
I was planning on making a tutorial with the next version. Now with the amazing feedback I am getting, I definitely will.
Iā€™ll probably wait at least for the beta though, there are still a lot of bugs that are preventing me from progress.

#43

this is amazing! were you at all inspired/influenced by the horizon zero dawn clouds? They presented them in detail which is handy http://killzone.dl.playstation.net/killzone/horizonzerodawn/presentations/Siggraph15_Schneider_Real-Time_Volumetric_Cloudscapes_of_Horizon_Zero_Dawn.pdf

(Simon Thommes) #44

Wow, thanks for the link! Iā€™m not proud to admit itā€¦ but I didā€™t look at much reference at all.
I saw a graphics demo of horizon and that might have inspired me, I donā€™t know, was long agoā€¦
But this might be useful for future updates, skimmed it, good stuff

#45

no problem! I have to admit I had fantasized about trying to set something similar up in blender and just never got around to it. I hope its useful! (then I can play with it haha)

(Duncan) #46

hi, personally my only problem is that I can not render JPEG AVI

(Simon Thommes) #47

Please keep in mind that Blender 2.8 is still in its alpha state. Some things might not work as intended or not at all for a while. The file format has nothing to do with the shader itself thoughā€¦

(tysonhh) #48

Hi there again. Iā€™ve been doing some tests freezing the clouds by setting the time mod to -10000. The results are good, but Iā€™m seeing an issue (itā€™s probably an evee thing). Here is one of the tests. It almost looks phenomenal, but I see a noticeable flicker in the shadow of the clouds:

Iā€™ve tried setting the shadow samples up to 128 as well, which seems to reduce flicker, but it also reduced the contrast of the shadows to light areas, which I like so much. Any ideas?

(lolwel21) #49

How are you getting the clouds to render in EEVEE? Whenever I try to plug any texture into the Density, the volumetric effect disappears altogether.
(Iā€™m currently using the recent Beta release).

(Ismail Almalieh) #50

Hi, can any one explain how to use the (wind direction) input?

(Simon Thommes) #51

You set the wind direction as a vector (x,y,z)
e.g.: (1,0,0) gives x-direction
(0,-1,0) gives negative y-direction
(1,1,0) gives 45Ā° between x- and y-direction

(Erik Barbar) #52

You made wonderful tool
thank you very much.

Is it possible render it with eevee with transparent bg.?

or is there any way workaround?

thanks and kisses :wink:

(Simon Thommes) #53

Thanks, Iā€™m glad you like it :slight_smile:
I donā€™t think itā€™s possible to render volumetrics with transparency in Eevee right now, it might be in the future though.
The only workaround I can think of is rendering the clouds with a black/green background and keying out the alpha. But that is kind of poorā€¦

(Simon Thommes) #54

You can try this:

(Erik Barbar) #55

haha yes
i just wanted to past smth for newbies as me, that one way to add alpha is in compositing with luminance node
seems that its better to do it in blender then in after effect

2019-01-14_111314.png947Ɨ515 51.7 KB

(Erik Barbar) #56

I have look at it, but the problem is probably that bounding box for volume is solid mesh, which is not transparent in Workbench renderer which should deliver alpha.(

(blendegg) #57

how to use in eevee?
i want skydome like unreal engine.

(Zeke Faust) #58

I havenā€™t been to these forums in ages. Everything looks different! I logged in to post some procedural clouds I made this morning for fun, when lo and behold this thread popped up under the ā€œsimilar topicsā€ suggestion. Crazy.
Our setups are very similar Pixelshatter, must be parallel thinking! Although I admit your node network is much bigger and more intimidating than mine

image
image.png2559Ɨ1013 323 KB

Hereā€™s how mine turned out. Iā€™ve read the horizon zero dawn paper before and was very curious to try their modeling methods, which translate to blender nicely.
I find clouds very fascinating somehow and have always tried to create them in blender, but always leave disappointed. I think procedural generation can sometimes produce results that are repetitive if youā€™re not careful, plus the shading for clouds can be a bit tricky.
Hopefully the new Principled Volume shader will help take some of that weight off

(Simon Thommes) #59

Great work! They look really nice

Someone told me about the horizon zero dawn paper. Havenā€™t reworked my shader with that yet but it seems to be a gold mine :slight_smile:

(beep) #60

This doesnā€™t work with latest builds from march 2019. Results is empty image. Both in preview and render view.