how to make realistic clouds in blender in 20 minutes

in this video we're going to try to be making some realistic clouds in the blender let's get started all right so first off we want to add a basic human and if you don't have this option to add in a basic human you can go to edit preferences and here just search for rigify and uh you just have to enable this add-on it's a pretty good way to reference the scale and everything let's add in a plane scale that up a little bit and then go to edit mode and just subdivide it a bunch so we got some more geometry to work with now you want to hit F3 on your keyboard and search for select random this will bring up this little menu down here and here you can basically control the fall off of the selection so this will just select some random faces here and then hit contrl Plus on your keyboard to expand the selection and whoops I went one too far it looks pretty good now hit c contrl i on your keyboard to invert the selection and then X to delete the faces all right so this will be our base that we're working with and now what we want to do is start to shape these little Islands into Cloud shapes that we will then use for the smoke simulation basically what I did here is just uh use the random selection once more yeah something like that just expand that and now we can start to actually extrude these uh faces in different directions that looks pretty good let's keep doing this oh and for the selection just just hit alt e and then you have some different options for your um Extrusion extruding but I like to use the extrude individual faces and we'll uh remesh all of this later so don't worry too much about the uh geometry you can also use the uh wireframe mode or the solid mode from top and just select some random Parts like this and then extrude those all right let's go ahead and give this a solidify modifier and the reason for this is if I just disable this one and add the remesh modifier you'll see we get these really weird artifacts here because the geometry is kind of messed up from our extruding but if we add in the solidify first it will kind of fix that so yeah use the solidify modifier contr a and hover our Mouse over this um modifiers to apply them this is looking pretty okay let's do some displacement on this just add in a displace modifier hit new and then hit this uh button right here to go to the text T Tab and here we can do uh let's see clouds texture and scale that up a little bit play around with these values here let's remesh that once more but let's use a slightly smaller value here to get some more geometry let's apply that and go to sculpting mode and uh when you go to sculpting mode you have to keep this object selected like this and um yeah you see sculpting I like to use this brush right here the snake hook brush gives you a lot of control can just start shaping these a little bit adding some random variation like this right let's just go back to layout mode and here I'm going to show you a different method that's kind of cool uh if you take a look at some of these clouds you will see that you have these fluffy Cloud tops and then at the bottom it's kind of more displaced on the um X and Y AIS so it's kind of like flattened out but displaced if that makes sense so basically what we're going to do in edit mode we're going to select the bottom parts of this Cloud shape like so we're going to go to the data Tab and we're going to hit plus under the vertx groups and then we're going to hit assign here to assign these vertices to this group and uh what that allows us to do is adding a new displacement modifier and we can actually reuse this texture right here so just hit this drop down and select that now you can see it's displacing all of it and we just wanted to displace the bottom in this displacement modifier we have the possibility to use a Vertex group and this is our group right here and we can also invert this if we need that for some reason and now you can see it's only displacing the bottom Parts here but um we just wanted to displace along the um X and the y axis so we're going to choose X here now you can see it's just displacing it along the x-axis Let's uh duplicate this and then select the Y AIS you can actually apply this and then change the scale of the texture here decrease the strength a little bit like so and apply that all right so let's add in a remesh modifier again and set it to a low value to get lots of geometry then let's go in with another display modifier let's reuse the one that we had here so now we're displacing all of it not just the bottom here if we do something like that and then add in a second displace modifier but without any texture so we'll just displace everything along its normals and set that to a low value we get these pretty cool Cloud shapes you can see the difference here that's without and that's with the second displace modifier looks pretty good let's apply this let's add some large scale displacement to this yeah I think that's looking pretty good but I want to go ahead and do the bottom displacement thing one more time before I move on with the simulation let's stick with that and before we remesh it one last time to add some more small scale detail what we want to do is separate this large mesh that we got going on here into smaller parts so when we do the smoke simulation we can simulate these different parts separately and that will allow us to get more detail without having to simulate all at once and the way we're going to separate these parts is by going into edit mode using L on our keyboard to select linked and then hit p and separate by selection since uh these are kind of connected we're going to have to separate them by hand so let's grab a chunk that's maybe this size separate by selection that's about a good size for us to work with it's good to keep everything organized a little bit and now that we've separated them the origins are kind of messed up a little bit so you can see like this it's rotating around a weird point the easiest way to fix that just by selecting all of this then hitting object set origin origin to center of mass surface you can use volume as well but I I just go with surface now the origin makes a lot more sense okay let's hide everything except for this one and start working on some final touches here before the simulation so now we want to add in some more small scale detail since we separated it like this going of messed up the geometry a little bit but I think we're going to be able to fix that by adding in a solidify modifier like so now let's add some small scale detail to this let's add in a displays modifier use the good old Cloud texture add some more depth to it and then we're going to have a final displacement modifier that to a really low value to get these round shapes like so feel free to just play around with these values here till you find something that works for what you're trying to do I'm going to bring these other clouds back in and I'm going to go ahead and copy the modifiers from this one to all of these and that will take a little bit cuz we're doing lots of remeshing and and stuff but just let it uh run and it's going to be fine make sure you got all of these selected and then shift select the one with the finished modifier stack and then hit contrl L and hit copy modifiers once it's done you can see we got the same amount of details from this one applied to all of these select all of them then hit contrl a visual geometry to MH and that will basically apply all of the modifiers for this on so we just got everything locked into the uh mesh okay now we got the cloud shapes and they're looking pretty good now all we have to do is work on the smoke simulation right let's keep those there and add in a cube this will be our smoke domain and let's size it up to kind of fit one of these clouds in it now that we've fixed the origin we can just select it and then hit shift s and do selection to cursor that will jump this object to the center of our scene rescale this one a little bit all right so let's make this one a smoke domain so what we want to do is go to the physics Tab and hit fluid and then select domain that will make it uh see through as well let's uh start with a resolution of 256 nothing will happen yet because this one isn't emitting smoke we're going to have to select fluid let's keep it as geometry you could also experiment with inflow but I found that geometry works pretty good right away way we can just fix some things here under the flow Source drop down we want to set the volume emission to one so it emits smoke inside of the object as well and that might give some weird artifacts where there's like a streak here but in my opinion that didn't really hurt the final product I think it kind of made it better so I I'm not going to worry about that let's hide this object for now and it's still going to emit smoke even though it's hidden and here it might be useful if we can actually see how our Cloud will look when it's rendered so change the render engine from EV to cycles and if you have a GPU you want to select that then we're going to give this Cube which we can actually rename smoke domain we want to give that a material and then we can go to the shading tab make sure we're in rendered view remove this principled bsdf and add in a principled volume connect that volume output to volume set the color to white and let's increase it density a little bit here we could just add in a sun lamp to get the lighting but what I like to do is add in an hdri this is basically an image that will light your scene uh very realistically so we basically just download one of those hdis then go to world add in an environment texture connect that to the color here and then we just open it here just like that but I don't want to be able to actually see the background here I just wanted to light the object so what we can do to fix that is add in a light path put that here MI Shader plug that here duplicate the background so now we can switch between hdri and just this plain gray background and we can use this light path node to have the HRI light up the object but not be visible we're going to use the is camera array plug that there and yeah there we go let's also do some changes under the uh render settings we can increase the volume paths here to something like eight should be enough if we go back to layout here and go to rendered we can actually see what we're working on this looks fine but it's very low resolution so you can even see the kind of Blocky texture here with the voxels and the way to fix that and add some more detail is to just bump up the resolution here so I'm going to go with something like double that see what it turns out to be so if you didn't know you can use like a math stuff in the the value boxes here and uh look at that that looks pretty good okay so this is a little bit close to what we want but now this volume here is just directly representing the original object here as you can see and we want it to actually move a little bit like smoke and expand and get displaced like a smoke so you get those nice organic looking motions in the cloud like this to do that we're going to use some forces and have it simulate a couple of frames just like 10 frames or something and that will allow it to change in a very natural way so first of all we might want to use a turb turbulence force field to add some random turbulence to the cloud let's try a strength of 25 and a size of one in order to be able to bake this and see what it does we want to go to the Smoke domain object and in the physics properties we want to change the cache which is basically the bake uh we want to set it to only cach like 10 frames or something and let's actually bring the resolution back down to something more manageable so we can see what it's doing but not spend that much time baking it for every little change we do set it to modular and hit is resumable so we can pause it and resume the bake and now if we just set the frames here to only go to 10 we can actually hit bake data and we get this little progress bar here and it will go frame by frame and simulate the smokeing now because we have quite a low resolution here simulates pretty fast but then when we're happy with all our little changes we increase the resolution to like four times this and hit bake and that will give us our final product but for now let's see what this turbulence does to the smoke all right so now that it has simulated 100% we can view this in rendered mode and hit play and we'll see some whoa that goes pretty quick can go to the 10th Frame here we can see what the turbulence does basically it makes these displacements here in the smoke that looks a little bit too strong I think so let's set it to 10 instead of 25 and I think we can cut the size in half another thing we can try is to add some initial velocity to the smoke and uh you do that in the actual object that emits the smoke so just go ahead and enable initial velocity here under this drop down here we can add some initial velocity to the Smoke in different ways so we can do by axis here so we might actually want to add some said velocity let's do like five I think and we can also do some normal velocity that will basically make the smoke go outwards from the object free this data in the Smoke domain increased this a little bit it wasn't all that slow then we hit bake data and we just wait for this okay so now it's done simulating and we can hide this and see what it looks like yeah so it's a little bit difficult to see the details here so I'm actually going to increase the density here just for now so we can see it a little better on frame 10 it's way too distorted we could uh decrease the strength of the Distortion or we could just set it to end at frame five or something that will actually save us some time I think for the final simulation I want to keep the size of the turbulence at one and I want to add in some vericity and to do that we have to free this data I don't know how to pronounce that but yeah this one this thing vortic V vorticity we can put this to something like 0.5 and that will basically make it a little bit more noisy I guess um so it should add some uh small scale details let's have the simulation end at frame five make this high resolution just like that okay so this is going to take like um at least 10 minutes to simulate but I'm uh confident enough with these settings we made here so I'm just going to go ahead and hit big data all right so that took about 15 minutes I would say and then now if we go to frame five this is what we have here you can see that glitch I was talking about with the streaks honestly I don't mind it too much if you uh really don't want that uh I think the way to fix it is by disabling the volume emission now I'm going to show you how to actually save this Cloud as a VDB and uh then we're just going to repeat this process for the rest of these shapes over here all right so when we bake it every single frame is saved as a VDB file and the place to find those files is under the cache drop down here and you see we have a file path right here so you can just copy this or you can just go to your project folder right here and it will be in the cach fluid folder right here so here we have a couple of different frames this will be the first frame and this will be the last frame so I'm just going to hit control C on this one and create a new folder and I'm going to call that cloud vdbs and I'm going to paste that right here just to keep everything organized I'm going to name this one Cloud one now we can go ahead and free this bake and this VDB will still be saved in our folder that we created just hit free data and to do these ones just going to put this one here grab our next one shift s and hit selection to cursor then we're going to fit the domain to the shape of the cloud and you can use your numpad here to switch from side to side make sure everything looks good this one doesn't have any fluid settings so we're just going to select this one then shift select this one with all the settings and hit crl L copy modifiers and this should bring everything over to this one and then just hit bake data again and repeat it for all of your Cloud ships all right guys so now we're back another day and I've made these different Cloud vdbs now I'm going to show you how to actually open these in a new blender project and then I'm going to show you some basic shading and some rendering techniques to make it render a little bit faster okay so now we have a fresh blender scene I just deleted everything and in order to bring the clouds into the scene we're just going to hit shift a then go to volume and then import open VDB then just locate your VDB files and select uh one of them one thing you'll notice is that the origin will be a little bit messed up and you can actually change the origin in a VDB file so if you need a substitute for that you can just go ahead and add in an empty then parent this volume to that empty now instead of moving this can just move the empty but I just uh keep it like this all right so first of all let's go ahead and choose cycles for this and if we go to rendered view just have this black cloud here let's add an hdri in order to like this volume you just go to the shading tab then switch from object to world then add in an environment texture and just plug that right here then just open your HRI that you downloaded before then switch back to object shading and add a new Shader let's increase the density here a little bit so we can see the detail and change the color to be white Under light paths we're going to increase the volume scatter to somewhere around four and8 you can go higher than this but that will increase your render times quite a bit so I usually just keep it at eight now you can see it's looking a lot brighter and to fix the performance a little bit so it's actually workable we want to go to the volumes drop down and then set the max steps to somewhere between 8 and 32 and this will basically clamp the amount of light paths we have inside of the volume and then we can increase the step rate to 10 now you can see it's rendering quite fast here if you increase this step rate too much you'll notice some details missing for example here if we go 10 it looks like this then back to one see it has a little bit more details so it might be good to keep this little lower I guess so you can just play around that value find a balance between the look and performance that's looking pretty decent but what I like to do is work on the shading a little bit more in order to get a more realistic result we're going to add in a volume scatter plug that into the volume here right now you can't see anything so we're going to have to add in an attribute node and under the data tab here we can see which attributes we can work work with so right now we're going to use the density and just plug that factor into the density now we should be able to see our clouds again then we're going to use the light path node in order to calculate the anisotrophy anof trophy depending on the density of the cloud so we're just going to have to do a little bit math here I didn't figure this out myself I used this video from Samuel Krug and it works great so I'm just going to copy this and show you uh what it's going to look like when it's finished I can link the original video video down below as well if you want a more in-depth tutorial for this so this is the Shader from the video if you need a different result you can play around with these values here so for example this will be sort of the density and these two values here will control the anisotrophy and this will also work better if you increase the volume paths just keep in mind that that will uh tank your performance a little bit okay so this is pretty much what we're left with thank you guys so much for watching and I'm going to upload these clouds to patreon with some other clouds I've made and if you get stuck anywhere just comment a question below this video and I'll try to answer as many of you as possible yeah thank you guys for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: FxForge

Views: 56,723

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Id: 5-c8fLQFgSo

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2024