Creating Procedural Volumetric Clouds with Blender Eevee

we are kicking off the new year with an AV project about creating volumetric clouds this came from the freelance project a short type animation took place in the sky and we were scratching our heads how to do it most efficiently and you know with cycles it's a pretty slow render process if you if you use cycles volumetrics and so we tried out Evie and it actually has a very capable workflow that I'm gonna show you today so that's where it came from historically volumetric rendering has been around for a long time but it's not the fastest thing in the world it's actually quite slow either you need to wait a long time rendering or you need a very powerful computer or very expensive equipment to make it run somewhat efficiently so when volumetrics entered Evie that was a very exciting kind of surprising announcement for me I mean being so difficult to compute in other engines it's like all of a sudden we get a we get an implementation in a real time oriented renderer so that was very exciting and of course things are approximated so cycles is going to be more physically accurate but it's still very capable and we're gonna we're gonna dive into that though the way this stream is gonna go it's going to be kind of two parts the first part is going to be creating kind of a an individual cloud cluster and that's what we're gonna do the meet of B figuring out the shader and dialing in easy settings and then the second part we will apply it to kind of a broader sky or cloudscape as i've been calling it or so as far as reference I've got several images from unsplash.com here's the type of cloud cluster we're gonna start with this is visually what we're going to be creating first just an individual cluster and then this is going to be kind of the the latter portion of the project to create something kind of like a sunset very vibrant type coloration in the clouds but let's go ahead and get started with the first part of the project I will switch over to blender yeah so we are starting in a blender 2.8 what version by using 2.8 to alpha we are actually going to use the default cube 2 we're gonna leave everything in this scene in fact which is very rare almost bye-bye reflex I get into a blender scene and I delete everything but we're gonna use everything that's in here and the cube I'm going to rename cloud surprise surprise and the light is going to be these Sun first things first we're gonna switch to the shader editor because everything's gonna be done in the shader really no individual modeling no edit mode so I removed the the image the file browser and the image editor we don't need those everything's gonna be procedural and node based so the first thing I want to do is give this cube some context meaning a sky we switch over to render view I'd like to turn these little widgets off I'm gonna switch the context of our shader editor to world and we're going to create a gradient because we look at some of these pictures a sky gradient typically you know starts at the bottom like a a lighter less saturated blue and then as we reach higher into the atmosphere it tends to kind of darken and become saturated so we're going to put a gradient in our blender scene to represent these skies so shift a to add texture gradient texture I'm also gonna hit ctrl T and that is only possible because I have the node Wrangler tool enabled if you don't go to your preferences add-ons and look for node Wrangler make sure that's enabled just some standard tools I mean really that should probably be on by default at this point everybody uses it but ctrl T will automatically add the mapping node in the texture coordinate node so if we plug this into our shader now with shift ctrl click also another angular tool we will see that our world has the gradient from black and then a small gradient spectrum into the white and we want to rotate this around so that it's going from top to bottom and we should be able to do that with either the X or Y rotation value of the mapping it looks like it's going to be Y I'm going to go negative 90 now we've got it up and down so this means we can add shift a converter colorramp and then select for the white maybe I should make this a little more instead of negative 90 let's make it 90 and then we've got black on the bottom white on the top this just correlates visually I think a little more intuitively so on the bottom we are going to make that a white color and slightly into the blue spectrum and then the upper flag the white flag we're going to make also blue but very saturated blue maybe darker too alright so now we can see that that gradient did I like to switch to b-spline for this I'm gonna pull it down so now we've got a spectrum started now if I'm gonna look at this cloud camo STUV the time I'm gonna be looking at the cloud head-on like this and so I want more of that blue to be visual and I'm gonna move in the Z location down nope that's right I've rotated it so it's gonna be maybe the X yeah it's gonna be X all right there we go this is kind of the context that I want the cloud to exist in so why are we using the cube well that's the only shape that supports volumes so if I switch back to my object shader node context we don't need the principle be SDF for this I can just delete it and add the shader principle volume by itself now this does not yet plugged into the surface material output it gets plugged into the volume and once we do that you can see that we get a very simplified pixelated volumetric shape inside the cube and whenever we add the same material which we might as well name it to cloud and we add a mesh monkey add that same material it doesn't matter that it's it's shaped this way the the volumetric system only interprets cubes cube domains and so we got anyway currently I assume at some point the development will will mean we can have to have modeled shapes that can support volumes but currently that's not the case right so with the Q shape let's also think about the type of you see it kind of flickering and stuff like it's really pixelated so in the render settings we are using a V of course make sure you have that engine selected so you get access to the settings and you'll see volume metrics down here so the tile size default of 8 pixels is very it is not applicable for the kind of detail we're gonna want out of the clouds even for a preview level so I recommend 4 pixels for preview and then of course when we render final final shots we want 2 pixels because that's the lower the pixel value the higher detail authenticity there will be but we are going to preview it at 4 because 2 pixels gets a little bit slow samples at 64 will be fine but the max that we go to is 256 that's where you get the cleanest type of volume but for preview purposes 64 samples is going to be fine volumetric shadows we will want to enable those even though maybe I'll do that in a little bit so we see a little bit more of an effect right so one thing that confused me when I started using volumes is that you add it and it's a dark grey color whereas our materials are typically a very light color it's kind of confusing as far as the energy in the scene what if we add a shader principle be SDF yeah so I guess I don't understand why the principle be SDF is set to 0.8 as in almost white but then the volume is set to 0.5 I just find that a little bit confusing because we want the cloud to be white and so my first inclination is to crank this all the way up to white and we still are not past gray and the reason for this as far as I can tell is that we need more energy from a light source from a lamp which we left our point light renamed its Sun because once we change that to a Sun type it's going to be a strength of 1000 which is way too strong but volumes by nature you know absorb some of the light and so you get like light emissive qualities depending on the strength of the light source itself if we go down to I think 10 is a decent value we've got our volume the right color now let's start to address the shape we're going to do this with another gradient texture so shift a texture gradient the reason being that in the different types of gradients there is a spherical gradient but before you get there let's just plug this into not the color but the density right where black dark values are going to be no density and then white values are going to be full density so with this you can see we have a gradient from full density on the right no density on the left however ctrl T to add our texture coordinate and mapping nodes and we're going to use the object coordinates because we want the the source origin of this material to be in the center of our object and so we're going to now switch to the spherical type and now we get a sphere inside the cube and the reason we're doing this is to start with a very basic form of your cloud like at the absolute basic shape and then add different procedurals on top of that to modify according to that basic shape so a good example of this is probably if we look up Toy Story cloud so very much this is a good example of like a simplified cloud shape where you've got these kind of bulbous spheres crammed into each other with a very definitively flat bottom side let's see if we can see that in you can yeah you can kind of see it in these images I guess depending on the weather that can be different but generally you do see a flattening yeah here's a good example they all sort of just flatten at the bottom all that to say we're going to kind of start with a Toy Story ish at least in our mind we're gonna start with that kind of shape and then make it into something more realistic all right so with our sphere this is what we will form into the final shape of our cloud our basic shape of our cloud also you know while we're at it might as well add a converter color ramp to the end because this is where we can very easily adjust the density like if I want it to be a like a crisper shape obviously clamping that spectrum is going to help also when it comes to density this is where we can turn on the shadow so we've got a sphere but as you'll notice as we orbit around you can see that the sphere doesn't have any shading and because the light source does not have the shadows enabled so if we turn on volumetric shadows I don't know if you can see but they are actually turned on but the way you kind of dial in how much shadow there is is with the density so in our color ramp we can take the white flag above a value of 1 so HSV go above 1 and now we can definitely see the shadows all right so that's where we can kind of control outside of the bounds of what maybe you expect you can go above these values listed and start to manipulate that density a little bit more differently all right so we've got the density set up we've got it you know we have an adjustable color ramp to dial in the density which will be a frequent thing we touch all right so yeah as far as the shape we want that flatness which is created by the dew point as Jake enlightened us to yeah so to get the flatness on the bottom we are going to add a vector vector curves node after the mapping in between the gradient the reason being is if I switch to the Z vector curve and drag the bottom corner over to the right just a little bit and then pull this shape up you'll see we start to get a dome this is the kind of shape I want to start with now whenever I i'm not a math wiz whenever it comes to these vectors i just kind of play with stuff until it works bringing this down will flatten the bottom and the curve gives it that that plump round shape so this is the basic shape we're going to be forming our cloud around and also you know if it it can kind of bottom you that it's not Center I'm sure that has something to do with vector math that I don't fully understand but um I'm gonna move in the Z value up all right so that is it is more centered here's something that kind of annoys me as I orbit around our cloud I don't like that from above the gradient is all one counter so basically the gradient only looks good from one angle which I would plan on rendering from this angle but as I create the thing I want to orbit around so what I'm going to do real quick sort of a preference thing is I'm going to switch back to the world and instead of using our generated texture coordinates let's use our window so the window texture coordinates is our view like projected straight through the scene and so now if I hit backspace key that will reset the node and I can quickly let's see which one do I rotate is it why is it Z will go negative 90 all right so now I've got this gradient this exact same no matter which way I look at the cloud let's go back to the object context excellent so next we're going to incorporate a vermintide texture to give us those kind of spherical clumps on top of the cloud we'll go to texture and add a Voronoi texture and the way we're going to incorporate this which is again an approach I've been using a lot it's very common when it comes to procedural creation is the ability to manipulate the texture coordinates themselves which is these blue purpley blue outputs like these noodles so I can actually add a color mix RGB even though this is yellow it can function and if we incorporate I'm going to use the object coordinates the same as the original gradient texture node and we're going to use the distance plug that into our mix type and so the mixture by itself if we go down and up you can see what's happening this is the Voronoi texture by itself let's see how can we make that a little more clear let's first make the scale lower like one so here we go here's a bunch of here's the spheres that we can add a converter color ramp node afterward and you know change by dragging up the black flag the spheres get a little more compact and you know this is definitely an example of where maybe let's try 128 samples alright that gets a little bit clearer this is the full mixture 100% Voronoi and this is why we want to mix it with the underlying shape and not have it just fill the volume like this and this is where I find an overlay blending type to help alright so you can see that it it doesn't quite fill up the whole space but it does manipulate the existing shape in a more like limited fashion and as far as how is the shape looking at this is where we can dial in like how big do these clumps need to be I think maybe a value of one is a little bit too too big so let's go to how about two that looks a little bit better it starts to look more cloud like and here okay this is where it makes maybe a little more sense to talk about the shadows because you can see that our shadows are actually more of a black color which in the sky I hope this is true whenever we look yeah you can you can see the shadows of the clouds are very similar to the color of the sky because the sky is illuminating the as a fill light the clouds very very clearly and so we we don't want the shadows to be black while the sky is blue and so this is where we need to kind of do a trick so we're going to switch to the world again so the strength is I crank this up to like four you can see that our shadows start to turn blue that's what I want but the world itself the color is getting too bright so there's still different from each other and the way that I can bypass this is to duplicate shift ctrl D duplicate the background node add a shader mix shader' and then we're going to use we're going to add shift a input light path node all right this is where we can tell by taking the camera ray plugging it into the mix factor whatever is in the second slot is going to be visible to the camera whereas the actual lighting in the scene is going to be from the slot look from the first slot so the background the second one can be the color that I like but then the original background can be the full strength that I want to achieve the color of the shadow so that's now we're getting a more consistent color between shadow and sky however the density of the cloud right now is is looking a little bit too transparent I guess let's switch back to the object context right so we've we've kind of done level one of the shape of our cloud and honestly this is some somewhat of a stylized looking cloud like if I flatten the bottom a little bit more wonder if I can do that more starkly you know it could we could get close to a Toy Story like shape of the cloud but we're not going for that we're going for more realism and so the next level is going to take us into that higher frequency detail of the cloud and the way I want to try that first is by adding a noise texture and it will affect the vector coordinates of our Voronoi right so kinda the way I think of this is level one is the gradient sphere that we turn into a dome level two is the Voronoi texture that makes it into plumes and then level three is the noise that breaks up the plumes into high frequency detail so we're gonna do that with a noise texture and color just like we did before add a mix RGB to mix that into the vector coordinates of our Voronoi texture so right away you can see we start to get something more cloud like but I want to change this to be a value of it's like one I think and the detail I do like to crank up to ten so the mix type we're in the same situation with the Voronoi whereas if I crank this all the way up there's no remnant of the Voronoi plumes left anymore you know like that ball structure is completely gone so we want to use overlay to only affect that ball like structure maybe add a little bit of distortion for some like wispy type clouds however we're it's kind of getting hard to see the detail so I'm gonna switch to two pixels if you ever want to check what kind of detail you're at with the volumes you will need to increase the tile size actually decrease the tile size and increase the samples and that is not quite the effect I was expecting that well let me address something else real quick the density I think is still a little bit too transparent so sometimes if you increase the density the the details will show up a little bit better as well so let's change that I mean I haven't really been going above - let's try three all right now we're we're definitely seeing those shapes a bit better usually with the overlay whenever you crank it all the way up to one like it's a crazy effect like it's way too strong but in this case it's not really work in that great what if we try let's try linear light I'm kind of going off-script because this is how I approached everything else that does look a little bit better yeah that does look a little bit better we can also change some of the vector curves what I really want is like a flat shape on the bottom something more like this so I'm going to go back to the vector curve see if I can mess around with those values and get a more specific shape of course this would be great if I wanted to start duplicating things around and like you know Lego Lego constructing my cloud together but if I want to just do it with one object it's going to be possible with the vector curves so this is this again the vector stuff I play with it I can't tell you like moving this point here is exactly why it's doing what it is on screen but I just know that playing with these ends up getting the result alright let's try the Y oh I remember the Z there was what was that doing with the Z earlier all right so that's gonna if I pull this down it kind of makes the middle of it taller there we go so now I'm getting it taller in the middle but as far as okay pulling this to the right will shrink the bottom I know in the y and z axis is where I can affect like the width I mean I like that I think it looks pretty cool the only bummer though with it is it with it flickering like this I'm sure you can't really tell the high detail that's going into this so I should do a proper render but I told myself I wouldn't do renders because my my desktop sort of freezes and I didn't want to ruin the stream I'm gonna try it and hopefully it doesn't break I'm gonna save my scene also something to keep in mind if if you find yourself reaching the border of your box then you can always scale up whenever you're using these object coordinates you can scale the cloud up and then control a apply the scale and that will take your cloud back down to its original size but extend the bounds of your your cloud so I have more room basically to tweak the the cloud shape but I'm actually pretty happy with what we've got so far also don't be afraid of the mapping coordinate so I can scale the Z alright so that kind of shrinks the overall size you can oh that's right yeah we can scale down another way to just you know scale the width is adjusting the x y&z scale values which we're gonna look at more closely in the next part of the project the cloudscape but um yeah this I tried to keep this as simple as possible but we can definitely go deeper in terms of complexity so maybe I will I will do that because I'm gonna use this material to start the cloudscape as the basis of the cloudscape since that's gonna be a larger scale let's just up the detail level a little bit and what I like to do is add multiple levels of the Voronoi like bubbles like the ball-shaped so you have one initial shape that's that's very bulbous like let me just turn down that linear light so you've got one level that's let's say level like 1.5 whoops and then you can add another level of even finer Voronoi balls so let's duplicate ctrl I'm just going to duplicate all of these actually because I will have the noise texture affected I find that the balls by themselves can be a little too noticeable so I always want to make them a little wobbly with noise Tetris that's what I'm gonna duplicate shift control D all of those and then let's see I'm going to hold shift right click and drag to make this a little more readable they're all using the object coordinates but now they're not intersecting so much and the second layer I would simply increase the scale of the Voronoi so let's go like three also the scale of the noise so let's go to five that's a good be a good starting point and then we can overlay those on top of our other shape increasing the complexity hopefully the visual interest of our cloud alright so let's see what that looks like off and on I think I might make them a little bit smaller actually there we go we've got a mixture so your big cloud plumes and then your small cloud plumes and then we turn up the factor on the linear light noise mixes with point let's try point two point two there we go now they're all a bit noisy although the pattern now is a little bit too consistent the fun thing about this is you know we've got all these color ramps that we can go in and tweak it's so flat on top though I want to flat on the bottom but I do not want it flat on the top so yeah just I'm tweaking basically this setting it up this way gives you a lot of opportunity to tweak the way you want yeah I do think this looks pretty good he looks like a convincing cloud alright ctrl s to save and maybe I should do a render I did say I want to do that so let me save this scene look at my camera I really like that angle I was just looking at it so let me use local camera orbit around till I get this shot yeah I like that alright let's do a proper render hopefully I'm not gonna hopefully miss the stream doesn't kind of freeze on me but I'll save it we'll make it let's do 75% of 1080 and also yeah before again something to keep in mind is I'm going to go to solid view and then once it's in solid and not preview rendering that's when I'll change the settings to two pixels and 256 samples and let's render maybe I'll see you on the other side ah I wasn't even that didn't take long at all so that's seven seconds alright um interesting that does not quite look as good as it did in the viewport maybe brings up another point that it is good to do final renders to make sure that you're getting the effect that you want in this case it looks like the density is actually too much so I should dial the density back down let's try that slot number two and let's go back to I'm gonna try previewing all right it's definitely slower stream seems to be okay alright so let's see what the deal is here maybe the value I remember I never really went above three when I was playing around with this project rehearsing this project so let's go to two or let's let's try leaving that at three and then just spreading apart these flags all right let's try that all right now that's kind of the opposite direction so we had one too thick two too thin let's go to slot three and hopefully get it just right oh I made the value one that's probably why I actually I feel like the cloud cluster is just it looks more like a head of broccoli rather than being more Wiss I want a little bit more wisps pinis what's the best way to go about that because now I'm get to that point where we're losing the shadows so maybe maybe rotate the Sun will help oh yeah that's probably the bigger problem actually mmm don't love ancien because it it's kind of that problem where I leaned too much on the preview and then once I've rendered the full res I'm disappointed and that is a it's definitely a problem to be dealt with maybe increasing some of these em the noise presence in our Voronoi textures like point or alright it's definitely breaking up the structure nicely as you're something about the cloud that feels flat right now - right it could just be the angle I'm looking at let's see okay I think that's looking better excellent that's gonna be the end of the first part of the project all right we're gonna save that next part of the project is going to be the cloud scape and you know the the Keith part about this is just to demonstrate how it can be used on a broader scale and also I wanted to it was kind of fun to get the discoloration the really bright oranges and and reds we're going to open that file where is it this one actually the one that you got is called the pact version pact yeah so this is the kind of thing we're going to create next we're going to use that cloud we created the first part just modify it to be used as the cloudscape in this scene anyway it's fun it's a much broader shape obviously like clouds stretching for miles and that's we're gonna create so I'm just gonna delete the cloudscape itself and let's save the file as record Eevee cloudscape oh one all right so with that saved I'm just going to jump over to the scene we just left record et Cloud one I'm going to select that cloud object ctrl C to copy go back to that other scene clouds Cape don't save and control-v to paste it now when we render we should get our little cloud in this new context first thing we'll want to do is scale this thing really really big because we want the illusion to look like the clouds are going on like I said for miles and miles all right so we've scaled up our cube really really large and this is just arbitrary a little bit you know I'm not I'm not scaling up to a certain value but I'm gonna put the front of the cube just in front of the camera I mean for now I'm gonna dial in the position later and then ctrl a to apply the scale and this will keep our clouds oh yeah okay so our cloud is still in the middle but our cloud shape is not really in the middle there we go now I should see the cloud as it was all right so that's the cloud original shape and in a larger context so we can modify this to be a full a full sky of clouds all right so let's modify this cloud I'm gonna rename the object to cloud escape first thing that we're gonna do is I'm going to turn the X&Y scales down to zero because once we do that we no longer have boundaries when the latitudes of the the clouds so it's just stretches as large as the as the shape the domain that's always scaled this cube really big however we've got a very distinct pattern in the in the sky right now we want to mess that up we don't want it to be quite so even and I'm gonna start by maybe taking the scale value down of our first Voronoi oh wait also the cloud layer is very very thin so maybe the Z scale needs to go up as well there we go now we've got the clouds kind of reaching into the sky a little bit higher and yeah I'm gonna need to change the Voronoi the texture scale significantly how about the noise texture let's take that down actually what way down by point I'm actually going to mute the different parts of this okay here we go I'm gonna get back down to basics alright yeah so I'm back down to my basic shape so I can tweak this and get where we want the problem I'm looking at this right now is all the cloud shapes are very very similar I want them to be very much not similar alright so we're gonna start and go really low right something like this maybe scale alright so now I've got some randomly placed um plumes and that's good but that means I'm gonna need another layer of verno after that right so like we can add the second layer unmute that and that's part of the problem it's way too high in scale but this way we've got okay and remember no we weren't doing that were we here's another kind of layer of complexity we can add into this as we can use a texture as a factor for that second cloud layer right for the second layer of Veronal and this will help by using a noise texture similar over here so shift ctrl D to duplicate that I know it's hard to it can be hard to follow complex shader nodes but principally I'm just using a noise texture we'll use the black input black and white input we don't need the volume knob but we're inside alright so we want to use this as a factor for how much that second layer of verrano affects the first layer so the scale at 0.5 is way too high honestly I needed I need a good okay that that's gonna help me kind of get an ideal idea for scale maybe something like this add a converter color ramp this is where we can dial in with a I like b-spline for this alright so let's see what that looks like also we need to make the the value just 0.5 which is kind of where we had it initially so let's change that RGB value 2.5 use that as the factor in this second overlay alright now we can see what that looks like in the volume but the shaders compile under whelming okay here we go so if we just take this down we can see that that is starting to affect the clouds a little bit more it's got very much a stylized vibe going on in the clouds I think that's because our noise textures are really really fine like it kind of has this pastel painted look right so like all the edges being finally broken up like this kind of gives it a painterly quality so you know this might be a kind of style you want to explore for me you know typically default to realism so we'll continue past the stylization try to get back to realism and I think the issue it has to do with the scale of the noise so yeah I just modifying that it's looking better but I think still on this original noise texture that's also probably - it's definitely - pluming doesn't look realistic enough why is that this is very flexible so I like to try several different things you know mess with the shaders but also you can rotate this around rotate the cloudscape object around and try and find you know a position that you like a little bit better so some of these cloud plumes are just way too strong okay so if the plumes are too strong perhaps we don't need a linear light for the noise let's just make it a mix so now we're going to rather than only manipulating the round balls we're going to blend between the noise itself maybe instead of the second Voronoi what if we just make this a noise texture let's just try that shift s texture noise I do remember Simon Simon Tom's the shader guru immediately that looks so much better that is more what I wanted but he said that you if you use a lot of noise textures it's gonna slow your scene down so that's just something to keep in mind okay we're getting somewhere you probably ate some interesting like cloud forming time lapses this way too alright I think this is gonna be a decent job alright so increasing obviously the noise texture scale will make it finer clouds ohh detail up to ten alright that's looking pretty good I think I'm gonna leave it at that because really forming the actual clouds was not I think the interesting part of this alright let me rotate it around I think I liked it where it was alright we're gonna leave that now the thing that we're missing the fun part in my opinion about this is achieving this coloration because this is a perfect at the right time at sunset or sunrise where the sky is still blue it's got a beautiful gradient from like a light almost almost at Oh pish kind of blue yellow mix D saturated and then it it stretches out to be this kind of darkening rich blue love that gradient but contrast with the extreme oranges purples and yellows it just makes a very striking image that we probably have all seen the way that I achieved the coloration here is just with a simple gradient texture so I like this I wanted to show you how to how to go about this for that effect choosing the cloudscape let's go into the material and we're going to use texture radiant texture I'm controlled T and then I'll just use the object coordinates we don't need a second texture coordinate node alright and so for this we are going to look at how this plugs into not the surface but the color of our principle volume and we'll wait for that to load but so you can see what's happening alright so we've got the gradient remember how this looks and black on one half spectrum to white but we want to use another spherical gradient and we should see a white circle in the middle and spreading out to black which we can change the color all right if you can't see it it's probably because it's just in one of the low-density spots so let me try instead to scale this down like 0.1 there we go so now we start to see the the white circle in the middle and you can probably guess what we will use is a color ramp and take an instead of white to black we're going to make it a kind of bluish purple to red to yellow and then we will position this spot as we see fit maybe scale down a little bit more point zero five yeah I think that's gonna look pretty good alright so instead of black we want a purple or a more purpley gray color something like that also this might mean for the light that we need for the sunlight we might need to desaturate it a bit since we're gonna be doing the color and the shader not in the actual lamp itself all right so we've got a purple I want to make that a little bit darker so we look at our reference the clouds stopped being white they're not being illuminated quite as much by the Sun some of them but then the ones that are being illuminated have that really bright red color so that's why we're getting darker clouds on a lighter sky alright so the second I'm going to hold ctrl and left click in the color ramp to a red color swatch you can see that my blender window is lagging a bit because all the calculation we're doing getting a little intense alright and then for the white maybe add another flag and make that the orangish yellow and then we can move this into position so it starts to become that type of effect and then when we render it finally hopefully it will it'll look the way we want you can also you know right now it's kind of like a bull's-eye but we can modify these coordinates just like we've been doing with a noise texture so I'll grab these two nodes shift D to duplicate them not shift control D but just shift D and we will make those mix should probably swap these alright to plug that into our gradient texture and what this will hopefully do is just break up the monotony of that that target pattern we can look at it from above also it might help to put another flag if we look at the if we look at the reference basically I'm trying to talk out my thought process you know we do have somewhat of a radial pattern like it's the Sun is obviously coming from screen left and so it's hitting a lot of the clouds in that that brilliant orange and then it's fading off into the darker gray D saturated clouds but there's also a little bit of brightness in some of these clouds back here too so the way I'm trying to emulate that is maybe adding another flag this way maybe a little less saturated there we go just trying to break it up make that more vibrant perhaps and something to keep in mind is that your color does affect the density right so if in addition to just the density setting by itself right if we want to increase the density you know that we come up into like the value change that to three our clouds get thicker harder for light to travel through more presence in the shadows however we can also do this I meant to - we can also do this with the color itself so if I add a color mix node change it to multiply and then change this value to 2 that is also going to change the density change the appearance of density if we it's maybe a little harder to tell if there but yeah if I start going above 1 like 3 it starts to be also increase the density pretty noticeably once you go above 1 so just keep that in mind you can kind of depending on your your needs you can affect both of those from color or from the density setting and I'm I'm not thrilled with the way this has come out which is unfortunate hopefully you get the idea I'll do a render and then we might call it done of course like most things in blender I can tweak this all day but I mean the main point is that is the fact that AV can be used for these broad cloud scapes which is pretty cool anyway what was I gonna do alright render a final version let's go to 75% make sure that our tile size oh yeah so we've been at a really low tile size it should automatically look better once once I crank that up you can see how my blender window starts to slow down significantly but we're kind of getting that brilliance that brilliant color back alright let's do a render till 34 35 seconds isn't too bad alright so I think that's gonna be it I think we've beaten the absolute death out of evey clouds today hopefully it's peak interest enough for you guys to try it Eevee is very capable as a as a cloud generator like honestly if I was creating even a cycle scene I would probably I would definitely first try to create it in evey and just composite that over the cycles renders because you can create a very very good effect with EB clouds alright there's gonna be for quiz questions alright let's get started number one Eevee volumetrics are faster and more physically accurate than cycles is that true or false I'm gonna count one two the answer is actually false Eevee is faster but less accurate less physically accurate remember anything to do with Eevee is an approximation just like video games like it's all cheats and fakes so that it can run in real time cycles and you're physically accurate renderers are doing them as accurately as possible so it's going to be it's gonna take much more computation time to achieve number two V's volumetric rendering is limited to which primitive shape I should just get like a timer shouldn't that got me that was pretty good yes the answer is cube I don't know if it'll always be that way but for now no matter which mesh object you use it's always gonna render as a cube as a volumetric cube number three what is the maximum sample count for rendering volumes I don't remember if I said this explicitly but I definitely set it to this for final renders so what is the answer - max sample counted is a number we have 256 well done no one no admits that one and I think we just got one more number for besides the density parameter which other parameter can influence volume density all right yes so most people got the answer the answer is the color the one that I was looking for was just the color parameter just one specifically named in the shader sorry yeah it was definitely the leather chair pleather chair alright so that is it anything else to say no just have fun enjoy hanging out with you again I will see you next month and what's coming up next actually next we've got the creating a procedural eyeball material in February 11th after that we've got a heavy equipment modeling backhoe highly detailed hard surface traditional polygon modeling we've done I've been doing a lot of shading procedural shading things so I feel like it's time to try something else but if you like modeling really detailed complex things you will not want to miss this and I'm gonna we're gonna work together I want it I want to get collaboration on that project but that's enough I've taken enough of your time have a great rest of your day good night

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 150,830

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender tutorial, cg cookie, blender 2.8, blender how to

Id: lPAYX8z9i8M

Length: 48min 36sec (2916 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/bro2017]

Awesome. But, does anyone know a good clouds tutorial for CYCLES for results like this??!

Thank you!!!