Fly through volume clouds in maya

[audun]

Hi Gurus
Im looking for approaches to create fly through clouds in maya. Ive been looking at both particles and geometry but havent really broken the barrier yet. My clouds need to be animate realistic. If anyone have tips or sources to go to please share. Ive go about 2 weeks to finnish this, and it does need to look really good - ie. self shadowing would be nice. The feel Im after is like clouds passing by / through the camera. (to be comped on some live fotage -both foreground and "middleground")
So if anyone has good ideas now's the time !

If this already been up on the list please forgive me, I couldnt really find it in the archives.
Audun

[joojaa]

here's a link that might help you just choose the clouds ahead tutorial.

If this fails then use the new volume primitives with some nice textures (but its much slower).

One other idea is to ouse arrete nature tools for the clouds but id say it isnt neccesery. Never used them myself.

[thedunadan]

Sureley no self shadowing clouds, but hardware rendered sprites can work very well for cloud flythroughs. You won't notice the clipping much if at all, when you fly throught the clouds. With a bit of motionblur they will render very smoothly and one real advantage is as well, the very fast rendering speed and that you can match colour and alike interactively against the live footage.
I don't think maya is up to the challange yet to render volumetrics for clouds, as it is missing a ray-marcher material and therefore it can't achieve the results like Arete Digital Nature tools or Afterburn. If I'm not wrong rendertimes of these are horrible as well (3- 10h per framein complex scenes...)

[joojaa]

Yep i agree its much better to fake it than wait!

But even theeskinds of materials have their uses sometimes. But in my oppinion they are reserved for those who can afford a huge renderfarm, and have ample of personell to back it up.

[jtk77]

Afterburn style system would be great.
but heck i'm a dreamer.

[deke-kincaid]

JTK: didnt you goto siggraph? You will be able to create awsome afterburn like clouds with maya 4.5's 2d and 3d fluids in the next month or two.

Also another method of "faking" clouds is this method:
http://aw.aliaswavefront.com/pit/maya/maya...txt/tutor6.html

[jtk77]

yea.. haha I KNOW..
we'll see when we see.
I guess the fluid dynamics can do rocket trailes too. Looking forward to it.

[audun]

Thanks everyone.
Seems I'm better of with arete after all. The director on this project is very specific about the look of the clouds in this shot. I like the dynamic control of particles and the amount of control in the psycloneVolumeShader. Its only 10 second long, but I still have lots of stuff left to do with it. Dont mind waiting for a few renders, as long as I can work on something else in the meantime. Fortunately I've got 5 dual render machines just standing here. The pricing is not that bad either ($495 + $195 a render node)

For the Tom Kluskens Tutorial, think I did that one some 18 months ago in 2.5? only this time the render did not at all resemble the result I got back then; Theres intersection lines between the spheres all over... Maybe they've done some rendering "optimalisation" to produce this artifact?

Im just curious; anyone had good experiences with the volume gas plugin, or is it dated by now?
http://www.highend3d.com/files/screen.3d?g...asNT\_-v3.0-.zip

Also sprites and the "thick clouds ahead" seems to be good ways for addtional clouds.
http://cade.scope.edu/cadestuff/courseware...ails/cloud.html

Thanks again everyone
Audun