Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Fly Thru.........1

After 6 days of non stop rendering i had come up with a sort of cloud fly thru sequence......

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Cumulus Cloud with Multiple scattering

So after working on the shape and animation of the cloud i felt that something  is missing with the look of the cloud,which is nothing but the multiple scattering of light that happens within clouds.
Below is a render which illustrates the cloud animation with the light scattering through the clouds.


 The main aim of this project is to develop a cloud system which involves no simulation but still allowing the artist to have a complete control over the look and motion of the clouds .The only issue with this system is slight jittering of metal balls that happens while keyframing the ramps.need to fix that issue.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Cumulus Cloud Modeler-Revised

 My previous post was on cumulus cloud modeller which had some issues with  sphere/shape randomization and didn't have much artistic control .so i thought of  revising the tool.
Most of the cumulus clouds will have a  sort of tubular structure with cauliflower kind of towers.
so i split the cloud  structure into
           1) Cloud Base
           2) Cloud Tower


Reference Image illustrating Cloud base and Cloud tower


              I implemented  the cloud base with three set of sphere layers copied one over the other with a horizontal tube as base.

             Similarly cloud tower is implemented by spheres copied on to vertical tube  which in turn is copied on to a line which is half the length of the cloud base tube.

              The radius of the Base,Primary and Secondary Spheres defines the entire shape of the cloud and we need a kind of control over each and every sphere.so i thought of linking my sphere radius with a ramp which actually gave me a fine control over the cloud shape.so i set individual ramps for my base cloud shape and Primary sphere radius as well.

Screen Grab of Cumulus Cloud Modeller Asset-Cloud base Parameters
Cloud Length-sets the length of the cloud
Cloud Mode  - used to switch from sphere mode to Metalball mode.
                         while modelling the cloud user can switch to sphere mode in order  to visualize the shape properly and when done with modelling user can switch to Metalball mode which will give a faster update while generating volume with cumulus Volume generator.


              
The overall shape of the cloud is controlled by these ramps.
Screen Grab of Cumulus Cloud Modeller Asset-Cloud Tower Parameters

Here is the working video of the cumulus modeller and its used in combination with cumulus volume generator( which is responsible for generating the pyroclastic look of the cloud )and i discussed about the volume generator in one of my previous post.

Below is the  animated/rendered cloud using the cloud modeller and Volume generator with low sampling divisions and hence it misses a lot of pyroclastic features.