I need to start working on a Camera Fly through of complicated clouds (Volumes) and was wondering if anyone had any links to any tutorials for using Paint FX and Or Fluid FX for nice Clouds that have interactive lighting abilities.
Any leads would be appreciated Greatly!
it's all a matter of render times. how much do you have per frame?
Santa Barbara studios made the best looking nebula for Star Trek movies using sprites in Dynamation. You can use really simple expressions to create interactive lighting with as many light sources as you like. Or, you can download an eval of Stroika Dynamics @ www.kolektiv.com and skip the whole expression part and use Maya lights to illuminate your sprites in hardware.
If for some reason, you really need to get software rendered clouds, Maya's cloud particles are incredibly efficient as compared to many other volumetric rendering solutions. And since fluids use the same 3D textures as Maya's volume noise, you can usually pretty similar looks in terms of texture quality at a fraction of the speed.
But of course, there is no substitute for rendering a nice fat fluid box with some painted density and an an animated whispy texture with self-shadowing. The results are soooo nice.