Rendering Clouds with SSS

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cloud.jpgFitchmicah has posted a nice setup for rendering clouds with SSS on BlenderArtists. There’s another example in the Test section by Cyborg Dragon (without .blend or explanation), but I think fitchmicah’s looks better.

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    • Cubedude04

      Something new to try out tomorrow

      Thankyou!

    • Lasphere

      Cool! :D

    • renaat vervaeke

      Alltough it’s not that fluffy as a cloud, the “volumetric” effect is there:)

    • http://www.kulma.org basse

      eww….
      looks like bad cut out.

      .b

    • http://nicknamfx.blogspot.com Nicknamz

      looks like an impressionist clouds.. interesting ;)

    • http://www.parastudios.de Paratron

      Hmm, i’m not very inspired by this…
      Have seen better clouds in Blender.

      SSS isn’t the perfect solution for everything, guys xD

    • urandom

      Couldn’t this be somehow combined with the fluid dynamics to produce accurate clouds?

    • Ankit Pruthi

      along with sss, more techniques have to be good…and yes..clouds made from particles look much better

    • Ankit Pruthi

      i mean more techniques have to be used..

    • BlackBoe

      I honestly think the usage of SSS for clouds should be experimented with a little longer before putting up this article as the definitive announcement, cause honestly… it’s kind… not… cloudy looking.

    • http://www.cginsomniac.com Brian

      An excellent start at clouds. SSS could work well with this. I do think some more transparency and perhaps blurring on the edges of the cloud could help the realism.

    • Renato Perini

      I’m wondering where the sky simulator from the GSoC 2006 is gone.

    • Jeepster[]

      hmm…
      what basse said ^

    • TK-421

      yeah, looked good until I enlarged it. You can tell its a mesh object.

    • freen

      to all the detractors:

      This is a start. A proof of concept.
      You can do better?
      Can’t wait to hear from ya!

    • BlackBoe

      To Freen: There’s no point in being snide about it.

      I didn’t say it looked terrible, I just honestly don’t think it’s a very good demonstration of the technique.

    • http://wookieebuddha.com/ Howitzer

      This would make for some good cartoony clouds though.

    • http://micahfitch.com Micah

      Hey,
      I want to say that part of the reason this image looks a little funny on the right edge is due to lens distortion. The original image was rendered with a 16 mm lens and the cloud was only in the upper right corner. Instead of rerendering it in the center, I just cropped it. Take a look at the other images on the blenderartists post, and if you have better ideas, give them up, or if you’ve seen better clouds in blender, post them!

      I didn’t make the clouds to be ultra realistic, I made them to look cool. I mean, here are some clouds that look fake even though they’re real: http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/nebraska/looming-presence.jpg

      Anyway, some constructive criticism would be helpful to me and the developers as well I’m sure.

      Thanks,
      Micah

    • Dani

      Hi,

      haha, those are some really weird clouds for sure, Micah! Really astonishing, sometimes nature just makes things weirder than we could do on our computers :)

      Anyway, try making the mesh simpler, and take it to the compositor to blur it. In the blend I posted in your topic, I used the inverted ZBuffer to make the clouds fluffier when they’re close and less fluffy when they are far.
      Then I noised that with the displace node.

      I’ll try another technique tonight but right now I don’t have the time.
      Dani

    • Kram1032

      maye, you could add a blend with a normally transparent material :D

      I like the toony effect.

    • TK-421

      sorry, didn’t mean to be mean about it.. but i guess it kinda came across that way.
      i’m not saying i could do any better, i just didn’t know you weren’t going for ultra-realistic.