35 replies to this topic

[Chinaski]

I just got back from a vacation, and on the plane ride home, we passed over a spectacular cloud cover. Here are some pics that may be good reference for people here. These images MAY NOT BE USED FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES. Reference only, please

[hotbuttertrucker]

Nice pictures. Wish I had them for my last project. oops that was a commercial spot. But really nice texture and lighting on the cloud forms

[isotrope]

Awesome matte painting skills! You should work for Reuters.

Seriously, those are really gorgeous pics, Chinaski.

[Chinaski]

Awesome matte painting skills! You should work for Reuters.

Seriously, those are really gorgeous pics, Chinaski.

Hee hee. Should be noted that I did very little to these pics in PS. Only curves and minor color correction. This is pretty much what it looked like out of the window. Also while these clouds looked great, they didn't make for a smooth plane ride.

[silatix]

the better the clouds the worse the turbulence is. cool stuff, good luck not finding your work in any commercial work.

[jasfish]

good luck not finding your work in any commercial work.

[Chinaski]

That's why I'm only posting half rez, compressed! I'm saving the high-rez goodness for myself.

[Sao_Bento]

You must have sat in the seat that doesn't have 20 yrs. worth of activator smeared all over the window.

[Ratbaggy]

You must have sat in the seat that doesn't have 20 yrs. worth of activator smeared all over the window.

that's not activator! you know the story ... the one 90% of people say if it happend they would make love to the person next to them ... yeah anyway ... carry on.

great pics.

[Chinaski]

I took a few hours today to see what methods might be best for reproducing these types of clouds.

I focused on 2 methods (using Cinema 4D here), one where the general shape of the cloud is built and then filled with particles, varying the size of the particles, and the other, where I used cloud maps to precisely control the placement and size of the particles. I think the cloud maps worked the best. Here are some comparison frames.





The hardest part is getting the edge noise to look right. No matter what type of noise I tried and whatever settings I used, I just couldn't get it to look the same as the reference pics. I played around a lot with # of particles, size of particles, etc, too. These are the best solutions I could come up with for now.

[Sao_Bento]

Earlier, I was going to (jokingly) ask you to go ahead and re-create the clouds with TP, or pyrocluster. You beat me to it. Nice job though, looks really good.

[Symbolic]

Great. Thanks for the resource.

What is the best way to do clouds in Maya. Fluids? Particles? Any resources on this issue?
Thanks.

[djkorova]

Those 3d clouds are sweet man, i think the volume fill method worked best...

[silatix]

i kind of want marshmallows right now

[the_Monkey]

Beautiful pics chinaski.
Have you done any cloud animation? Sorta time-lapsy cloud growth and dispersion?
I have some old TP examples, but have been wanting to convert them to MoGraph/TP.

I got a break this next week (woohoo!)... I'll post 'em here when I get a chance.

-m

[Chinaski]

I have animated clouds but not time-lapse. Just a little evolution on the noise. I'd love to see what you were able to do, as I'm not that satisfied with these. Out of curiosity, why are you converting them to Mograph/TP? Does pyrocluster even work with mograph?

[the_Monkey]

I have animated clouds but not time-lapse. Just a little evolution on the noise. I'd love to see what you were able to do, as I'm not that satisfied with these. Out of curiosity, why are you converting them to Mograph/TP? Does pyrocluster even work with mograph?

I wanted to convert them to a MoGraph/TP combo to take advantage of effectors and parametric controls.

I had a job about a year ago where I needed to animate a cloud with a triangle cut out of the center of it. The center triangle had to rise through the center. It was pre-Sky Module and quite a bitch. As you can see, in order to get the definition I had to create "fat" volumes on the inside and smaller volumes on the edges. My solution at the time was to do polygon emission (which would set the particles size proportional to the polygon it was emitted from), but it was sloppy at best. *shrug* It worked and we hit out deadline, but I always wanted to go back and clean things up... make it more flexible and modular.

-m

[the_Monkey]

Alright...
This last week had some of the best weather NYC has seen all summer so I spent most of the time outside with real clouds, so no new cloud experiments. However, I do like to throw a little something in the pot whenever Chinaski contributes to keep things interesting. So I whipped up a quick-dirty animated cloud example:


(movie) (c4d file)

It's just a single cloud mass stripped down for speed (pretty fast for pyro), but you can add shadows and such later as you need them. This example uses a rolling particle emitter and some friction. The friction is only there to keep the particles "clustered" towards the end of their lifespan so that they don't stray too far from the main group. For more specific cloud shapes (especially ones that require flat bottoms) I usually have two or three different TP Groups with slightly different pyro settings that follow spline paths (in which case the friction isn't needed).

-m

[brink]

Wow nice clouds. How do you use cloud maps? Sorry if that's a daft newbie question, but now that I've got Cinema I can'ty stay away. Thanks

[Chinaski]

Wow nice clouds. How do you use cloud maps? Sorry if that's a daft newbie question, but now that I've got Cinema I can'ty stay away. Thanks

Not a newbie question at all. I'm using those maps to place cloud particles on cards, using the b&w values to control position, size, and velocity of the particles. The specifics of how to do that are different for each application. In Cinema 4D, you would use matterwaves.