The above video is a slide show of viewport renders from a few evenings ago. I am working on a project that needs clouds and I thought I would give fluid container clouds a spin. Playing with clouds is lots of fun! The render times are quick and there are a fair amount of preset styles to technically guide your artistic desire. If you’ve ever played with Maya fluids you’ll be familiar with a lot of the attributes because clouds are essentially pre-emitted voxel data paired with a distinct look gained through the fluid container’s attributes. The opacity ramp can be changed just like any Maya fluid to help thin out or thicken up the clouds. The clouds get their texture through noise. usually “Perlin” or “Billowy“. The clouds I was playing with all came with a larger fluid container that encompassed the “cloud” container. This container is set to create a haze gradient that starts out transparent at the top and gets thicker as it descends in the Y axis You can dramatically change the look of the clouds by colouring the “haze” container. This container is essentially the infinite sky the clouds are painted on. This sky isn’t technically infinite though as it’s confined by the dimensions of the container.
The container is actually quite small when you import the cloud presets. I had to scale mine up 20-30 times their initial size before they were large enough to encompass the render view. Before you go and scale up your clouds you should know that there are several ways to “scale” clouds. You could…
- [A] increase/decrease the physical space the clouds occupy
- [B] increase/decrease the physical size of the cloud within that space
- [C] increase/decrease the entire simulation size essentially scaling all elements equally
To Achieve [A] you would increase the size X Y Z values under the “Container Properties” roll out in the “cloudLayerShape” node.
Scaling the clouds within the space [B] is done by changing the “Frequency” slider under the “cloudLayerShape” node’s “Textures” roll out.
The simplest form of scaling [C] will just give increase the general size of the simulation making everything “bigger”. You can just select the fluid containers in your viewport and scale them to get this done.
That’s all for now :)
(http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/cloudsF NULL.jpg)