Swell - Free 3D Procedural Cloud Generator

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1

I’m wondering if anyone knows really good and free procedural cloud generator?

I have used a free program called Swell (I have uploaded it here) to do some clouds and it does fairly good looking clouds too, but it is rather limited and cumbersome to use. Clouds cannot be exported out in any other way but by screen capture. It’s also capable of simple cloud animations…

Here is a simple cloud I did while just testing it

http://uploader.polorix.net//files/393/Swell/Cloud.gif

If interested you can download short 960 KB video of me fooling around with it… http://uploader.polorix.net//files/393/Swell/Swell_demonstration_XviD.zip

2

have u tried terragen?

3

Does this has the capability to Import export with Blender?

4

@ rusted: Surely you mean terragen 2 demo? No I haven’t tried it but maybe I should if it has some good exporting capabilities for clouds… Do you have experience of terragen 2 in this matter?

@ kkrawal: If you are talking about this swell program, it doesn’t support any kind of exporting. Only way to get that cloud picture out of it is by screen capture. I did a crude and simple test video with swell and blender (there are only 2 different cloud pictures used, also some cloud planes are badly overlapping etc). You can watch it from here: http://uploader.polorix.net//files/393/Misc/Clouds_flybytest.avi (750 KB)

5

S-T-S
Saw this on the indigo forum a few days ago.
http://www.indigorenderer.com/joomla/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2129&start=0
They get better on page 5 of the thread.
Anyones guess when or if it makes it into Indigo though.

6

why not to use Blender’s Cloud which can be animated?

7

@ yellow: Wow, that’s going to be really good addition to Indigo. I think that the smoke picture on page 2 is really good looking too.

@ kkrawal: I haven’t found any acceptable way of doing realistic clouds in blender yet. there are many tutorials about them, but I think that none are doing great job of it.

Here are couple tutorials about this… I think that none give agreeable results.

  1. SSS/Sculpt clouds
  2. Shaded particles cloudscape
  3. Cog’s particle clouds tutorial
  4. Procedural texture clouds tutorial (for distant clouds)
    5. Storming sky (this is not a complete tutorial, but still quite good)

    Especially if I want to do a animation about flying through the clouds (like in my short test video) none of the above are good for that. Tutorial number 4 is quite good when you just add more of those skydomes with cloud textures and make them nested. After some tinkering it gives quite good looking distant clouds with volumetric look.
8

hi,
i have used terragen 1,yes i think render size is limited(800x600?),i dont know abt license.u can render to tga etc.
bryce 5 is free(i dont know if its enough for ur purpose)