Clouds w/ Hypervoxels

[Bells of Freedom]

I need to create photorealistic clouds in LW. I've been tweaking Hypervoxels a lot and can't get it to look right. I need, fluffy, puffy, wispy clouds. How do I do this?

I've got Skytracer for the background, but I need "3D" clouds as the camera will be flying by them and/or through them.

Thanks!

[bmckain]

I've tried a lot of things and never really got anything that I was happy with. The closest I came was using OGO_Taiki and considering the render times it just isn't feasible. I ended up rendering one frame and using it as a background image for aircraft scenes. So I will be interested to see what kind of responses you get.

There is a possibility using Textured Environments in 9.x would work. You can do some great nebula that way now. Might work for clouds but I haven't tried that yet.

[Meurig]

A fluid solver would create the best results, but it would have to be some third party application like Dynamite, which is very impressive but very costly.

Basically it would take a HELL of a lot of work to get clouds that stand up to being flown through with HV's.

[Bells of Freedom]

Thank you for the responses. This is good to know. I was afraid of this. I may end up having to purchase Vue 6 Xstream. Realistic clouds are a breeze (pun intended) in Vue 6.

[BillS]

A breeze... yes. Quick isn't a word that should be used in a sentence where the topic is rendering though.

[Bells of Freedom]

BillS,

True. However, I will say even though Vue's renderer is pretty slow, metaclouds render a bit faster than LW's HV's.

Out of curiosity, do you have experience with Vue Xstream? I've used Vue Infinite since version 5, but haven't touched Xstream yet. (A little off-topic, I know.)

[BillS]

Yep I've played with it a fair bit when I first got it. Its got some quirks and your right. Meta clouds are LOTS faster than HV and look a damn site better to. But at higher res they can still be a bear to render. Here are a couple that I did in Vue and XStream.

4124 4125 4126


The middle one was a quick XStream test rendered in layout.

[Bells of Freedom]

Wow!! Those are gorgeous! I especially love the lighting. Anything special that you did for lighting?

[BillS]

Nope. That is just sunlight in all the shots. I have found that mid day shots are harder to get to look right. Early morning or evening are easiest to do without blowing out the shots.

[Rigel]

Beautiful pictures Bill. But really, how the heck did they get up there to build that gazebo? And how the heck is anyone supposed to get up there to visit it?