How to Create Realistic Cloudy Skies in Blender

in this video I'll show you how to create realistic cloudy skies and blender first we're going to create the typical fluffy clouds called cumulus then we'll adjust them to be stret as clouds which are great for overcast or stormy scenes first to make the cumulus clouds add in a cube and make it about 1.5 km high and 100 wide then apply the scale and move it up to about 3,000 M to be able to properly see the clouds you will have to increase the viewport view Distance by a lot by the way the same goes for the camera as well just really quick if you don't want to create this cloud system yourself then it is available on my gumro package as a convenient colle ction of not groups with adjustable parameters to customize the clouds but now go to the shading workspace add an a Warner texture and set its scale to 10 then connect the vector to the object coordinates now it's way too small so add in a vector math note set to scale and set the scale value to something crazy low like this now if you invert the Barner texture you can see that there are multiple blobs across the height of the cube and that is a problem because later each of them will be a cloud and we can't have them sticking up like this so to fix that add in a mapping note and set the Z scale to zero now we have to recover the roundness that we lost by doing that so plug the generated coordinates into a separate XYZ node and plug the Z output into a color ramp with the interpolation set to ease then make all the colors black and add a third one which should be white then multiply the inverted Warner texture with the output of the color ramp and PLU the output of that into a MTH not set to greater than lastly to make them thicker at the bottom Slide the white color to about this place here on the color ramp all right now we have the base shape done so we just have to make it more cloud-like and add more detail to do that add a noise texture these settings here seem to work great and multi with this math note here so after multiplying the Warner with the color ramp but before the greater than to control the influence this has on the size of the clouds add in a bright contrast note and set the bright value to .5 and that made the shape much more cloud-like but now to add some blobbin to the clouds add another multiplay note and connect the vorno texture with these settings here to the bottom and that looks pretty bad for two reasons first you need to invert the vorno and second its effect on the cloud shape is too strong to fix that add another bright contrast note with these settings here feel free to play around with them to customize the clouds to your liking there's still not enough details so let's keep going add another noise texture with these settings and plug it into a bright contrast Noe with again a value of5 also you should set the contrast to three then multiply that with the previous multiply node and now do the exact same thing again but this time with these noise texture settings instead great now we have a detailed Cloud shape but we still need to make a material for them so add a principled volume note and plug it into the volume socket then connect the output of the greater than to the density now you can add a multiplay note to control how dense the clouds should be just as a side note here if it seems that the density of the clouds just isn't increasing no matter how high you crank the multiply node then the issue is that the step rate is too high so just go into the material settings and reduce it the drawback of doing so however is that the render will take longer I'll show you how to speed it up a little later in the video then make sure the clouds have the right size by checking with the ruler tool they should be around 1 km wide but if they aren't change this scale value here until they are lastly when we look at how this type of cloud looks in real life we can see that they aren't just uniformly distributed like the ones we made so to make our clouds let's call it splotchy go back to the base bner texture and duplicate it then reduce the scale and plug the result of the invert node into a map range node afterwards subract the result of that from the base bner texture to control the size and fall off of the I'll call it cookie cutter change the Min and max value of the map range note as well as the scale of the bner texture you can also tweak the greater than at the end to further control the coverage and scale of the clouds all right now you might have noticed that the render is painfully slow so to speed it up a bit you need to enable fast GI approximation and set the bounces to two to make it look a bit more correct and that should do it afterwards just to make the clouds look a bit better set the volumetric light bounces to two as well but now the hard part is over because to change the clouds we already created into other cloud types only takes tiny changes so to make the ultra cumulous clouds just duplicate the clouds we made and put them at around 7,000 M then after you scale the cube up on the X and Y exceed these only the alra cumulus clouds are done for the seral cumulus clouds it's the same but you have to put them at 12,000 M now we can move on to the strus clouds and these require a little bit more work but nothing serious so duplicate the cumulus clouds and make the material a single user for this type of cloud it's important for the cookie cutter to be detailed so to achieve that add a mix note to the vector right here and set the mode to linear light then plug the color output of a noise texture into the bottom color after that increase the detail and set the scale to 10 lastly set the mix factor to something like3 and that should take care of the cookie cutter after that swap out the greater than at the end for a map range note and that will give you a smooth falloff then just Sak the Min and Max values as well as the density of the clouds to make the alter and Sero variance of this threers Cloud just duplicate the normal one and move it to 7,000 and 12,000 respectively and that's all the cloud types done so this is where the real fun starts because just using any single one of them can work in a lot of situations but when layering the different types of clouds together like in this render here it just gives them that super nice detailed layered look all right two things left first if you want to change the seat of the clouds you can do so by changing all noise textures to 4D and plugging a value note into all the W inputs then if you change the value the seat of the clouds will change and second if you want to animate the clouds you can do so by really really slowly animating the seat as well as adding a mapping note to the beginning right here and animating the X and Y location I found that the seat should be animated about 25 times lower than the location because else the cloud animation looks pretty flickery remember clouds move slowly so just keep that in mind but that's it for this video so if it help you out please consider subscribing or check out this video next

Channel: Edin Spiegel

Views: 7,913

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Id: Pv014Tp3l5g

Length: 5min 38sec (338 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 29 2023