How to : fly into realistic clouds?

I’ve been playing with the Volume Generator to produce some very realistic clouds.
What I want to do is put a logo animation in the middle of this cloud field ( obscured at the start ) and fly a camera through to reveal the logo footage.

The problem I have is when i add a camera and move it through the correct axis to fly it through it , the fractal behaves in an unexpected way, some clouds move away and some towards the camera.
Scrolling the whole volume doesn’t give the desired effect either because then the clouds pop in and out of existence

I’ve attached my project file, if anyone has an idea how to do this, I’d be excited to learn!

Hey Joeri,

This is definitely a hot topic, and an often-requested ask from clients.

There are some tricks you could do with a particle system with cloud sprites, and trying to keep the particles out of going directly into camera, but I also have been hoping into getting into Volume Generator-based cloud fly throughs. I haven’t taken the time to get into it myself, but if I do, I’ll be sure to share!

If anyone else gets into this, please update us :slight_smile:

Hi, All.
Just to to bump up the topic. Is there any good news on this issue? I’m having absolutely the same problem. Besides, procedural volumes seem to render on top of everything else in the scene i.e. there’s a sorting issue.
That’s why combining procedural volumes with everything else in the scene is only possible if the volume is not obscured by any other geometry. Very annoying… :frowning:

Bump!

+1
Notch Team, will you please comment on this issue?

Here is a tutorial using Houdini and unreal.

Might be useful : )

All: This has been logged with our development team and they will be back in touch. Tx. L

We have fixed the issues with the ray marcher for volumetrics when zooming into the volume - will be in next release.

In general there are a few ways to approach this effect.

  • Yes, you could use the procedural volumetrics. It makes it easy to model them and light them etc. The only problem is that it is very limited on the area you can model, because it voxelises it. You can overcome this to some degree by moving the bounding box with the camera, as it regenerates the voxels every frame and the effect (with fractal noise) can cover an unlimited area, you’re just choosing what portion of space to voxelise.
  • Using particles is a good approach. For the cheapest possible solution, baking out meshes from elsewhere with vertex lighting and using them to emit particles gives a great compromise of speed and quality.

Maybe we need to look into a way to spawn particles from volumetrics, so you could get the best of both worlds? In future…

Hi, Matt.

[blockquote]– Using particles is a good approach. For the cheapest possible solution, baking out meshes from elsewhere with vertex lighting and using them to emit particles gives a great compromise of speed and quality. [/blockquote]

Wouldn’t it be handier to bake lighting to texture directly in Notch and use the resulting lightmap to color the particles emitted from the surface of the mesh? Maybe there’s already a way to do it?
This way lighting the clouds might become way more interactive. What do you think?

[blockquote]Maybe we need to look into a way to spawn particles from volumetrics, so you could get the best of both worlds?[/blockquote]
Right. Then all we need is to sample color inside the volume based on volume density (or whatever attribute it may be…) and map this color onto the particle sprites. That would be great! :slight_smile:

-Andy

Wouldn’t it be handier to bake lighting to texture directly in Notch and use the resulting lightmap to color the particles emitted from the surface of the mesh? Maybe there’s already a way to do it?
This way lighting the clouds might become way more interactive. What do you think?

Yes, sure, you could use a UV camera and bake lighting there, then apply it to the mesh and emit particles from it. Good idea.

Right. Then all we need is to sample color inside the volume based on volume density (or whatever attribute it may be…) and map this color onto the particle sprites. That would be great! ?

We could just raycast lighting for the distance field, that would give the best result!

you need clouds, call me up