Most CG Clouds Aren't Great, Here's the Solution (B3D)
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- čas přidán 11. 09. 2024
- Special thanks to Fabio on my discord for coming up with some of the techniques that we worked out over the last few weeks!
I stream on this channel every Wednesday/Friday @9:30PM GMT!
Today we're finally solving the issue of clouds in blender either looking like utter doodoo, or taking a million years to render. These clouds look 1. Photoreal, and 2. Render in a manageable time. These aren't particularly optimized for animations, but they won't burn out your computer.
Free VDBs:
Disney Cloud VDB: disneyanimatio...
JangaFX clouds: jangafx.com/so...
Instagram: / mentally__renders
Artstation: www.artstation...
Discord: / discord
Patreon: / samuel_krug
Hardware:
RTX 4070ti
R7 5800X
32GB RAM
This is one of those tutorials that are so well explained, so complete and so useful that you bookmark them and keep coming back to for years.
That is just what I was looking for, been trying to get good looking clouds but never achieved that realistic look, this nailed it to 100%! Big up
Yess!!! most of the time the volumes come out too dark
I came up with same shadow density technique when I lookdev this cloud a week ago, but i didn't came up with ray depth feature, that's why I got my cloud looking like a cotton. Thanks for sharing, that's looks dope.
good on you for that one, certainly helps the look
I've spent the better part of two months looking for a realistic cloud shader, I've made one myself that is semi decent but nothing close to this, thank you very much for providing the world with this, needless to say I'm subscribed now
16:05 You can right click Max Volume Bounces and Copy it as New Driver. Then you should right click Map Range's From Max value and Paste Driver. This way it automatically updates every time you change max bounces. Or you can apply it other way around so shader updates Blender settings
Good point, I didn't want to get into drivers because this is meant to be more accessible to beginners, but yes, that will work
Finally a perfect shader for cloud! Thanks man !
wtf this looks absolutely INSANE!
Thank you very much Samuel Krug!
TIP: music background was too loud compared to your voiceover...for me.
awesome video man
Awesome work. The lightpath node works wonders but can be really difficult to parse. Appreciate the explanation here.
This is genius. It looks as good as the new redshift multiscattering capability. And cycles ? Amazing!
Cycles is written by the same guy who used to develop for Arnold. I don't see why Cycles can't have the same rendering methods as other render engines. Maybe other than some small features here and there, the rendering methods and he algorithms are well documented and established in graphics coding community at this point.
Oh, man, you should've posted this half a year ago!
Last year, I spent six months working on an animation for this dogfighting competition I help run. The finale had two aircraft way up high in the air, flying around not just a massive cloud, but around THIS massive cloud - the WDAS one. I spent a week or so trying to perfect the cloud look, while keeping renders stable. This result is far better, and (seemingly) much faster than what I ended up with.
Fantastic result, very clean resolution! I always make my volumes in houdini but the clouds shading in blender is not easy. I sometimes remap my density with afloat curve to make the edges harder maintaining low values on the inside to allow the light through.
thank you soo sooo ssoo sooo sooo much
Amazing. Thank you for this!
YESSS! This is what I've been looking for! Thank you!
Great tutorial. But one question, you start with a cloud shader node. Where did u got it from? Cheers, Axel
how do you get the cloud shader i couldnt get it
I'm really confused, is this not what the volume nodes should do to begin with? or at the very least, a different default... with the way that it's programmed now, the default assumption is that after x number of bounces, the light is completely absorbed, but in real life, it's more likely that a certain percentage of rays will "miss" the rest of the particles and pass through unchanged, and a certain percentage will indeed get completely absorbed. Thus, the result from a terminated light bounce should I THINK be a weighted average based on the density at that point, rather than simply 0...
I feel like people have made estimation graphs for this calculation at this point, where as the density tends to infinity, the absorption increases until 100% of the light is absorbed. wouldn't it be more realistic to have a lookup table of these values built in for added realism?
14:50 use the light ray depth variable to tell the ray to emit the outside something to prevent ao.
Amazing work, thanks for sharing!!
Thanks so much for making this, can't wait until your cloud shader is out; ps this is RMazer
This will be so dang helpful for my landscapes! Vielen Dank fürs Teilen, Herr Krüger (since you're learning german and all hehe)
Great tutorial as always Samuel!
hey samuel, great tutorial !
i used those clouds with this shader in my scene, but they dont work well with a principled volume which i used as ground fog. the fog looks very jaggy together with vdb clouds in my scene, do you have a idea how to fix this ?
Cool
The bg music are really loud though
Nice! Thanks!
Hi, Great tutorial, are there any good ways to change the color of the clouds without sacrificing the detail?
Thankyou
This is really cool
Thanks man great video… I learn something new….. but a little advice if your going do these kind of tutorials it’s important that your instruction are heard clearly, but some of the music is to loud and very distracting… I’m a musician and I love music all kind… but music doesn’t fit well when you’re trying to hear and learn complicated software… just just my opinion…. But thank you for the great tutorial.👍🏾
Thank you so much
Hello, which node is "cloud shader"?
Hey Samuel, I got stuck at 19:25 when you "combined" all the nodes, I'm not sure how you did that, is there a hotkey that I missed
Hey, thanks for the awesome video :D
I'm having some trouble when I add the light pathnode to my nodes like you do at 6:25. I've triple checked all my nodes & light settings & they match yours, but when I plug the map range node into the math node it makes the entire volume vanish. I get the cloud back with decent results when I turn the map range's To Min up to 0.1+ but I feel like I'm either losing a lot of the volumes mass, or realism of refraction.
Are there any settings that you might have in your default settings that weren't touched on in the video? If you have any insight it would be amazing. Thanks!
WAIT I'm a bufFOON I had the To Min & To Max swapped!
Great tutorial! One question, if you work with your own volumetric meshes they don't contain the density (grid) parameter. I assume in that case the Attribute node doesn't do much?
can you export this into FBX?
11:12 when i inplug the density attribute, the cloud just desappear :/ I don't have any "cuby" cloud, just the background...
I thought it was interesting to get this...
Do someone know why ?
thank you for the video btw :)
I have the same problem, did you get the right solution?
@@bombnut7092 nope but all the other things are working and i could rendered it ^^ but no "cuby" for me :)
The same thing was happening to me. The solution for me was to ensure that "density" is in the Name field for Attribute. That bit was missed my first time through, and "density" fixed it.
great
Do u use basic sky texture for the world ?
Crazy
where did you get the hdri or sky background?
By the way, your tutorial is amazing. Nice work
The atmosphere shader is something I made
@@samk9632
The atmosphere shader looks good, so far I only use the native nishita model.
You don´t happen to have Embergen do you?
I think you should look in to that otherwise, would probably be a great addition to your atmosphere system if you want to push the clouds a bit further in shaping, forming.
You already know the inside out of how to shade them..
czcams.com/video/TcX65Gs27KI/video.html
nice!!!!!!
Dude that's great but I just can not get the nodes at 16:17 to work, it just doesn't kill the AO. (triple checked everything) Any suggestions are welcome, thanks!
same here unfortunately
great results! pls reduce the background music! too distracting
oh your specs in description, that's explains why my potato machine crashes blender...
BRO I NEED THIS BUT IN REDSHIFT OMG
Hey! How did you add the color to the shader group? Great tutorial :)
just hook the colour inputs of the volume scatter nodes in as a new input on the node group
Thank you, great tutorial!
What's your lighting setup?
nevermind...
Two things.. this tutorial would be better if you showed how you made the cloud object to begin with and two if you got rid of that piano wow and flutter noise in the background that's making it hard to hear what you're saying.
tutorial would also be better if you paid attention, he showed where the cloud came from because he didn't make it himself
If you want reference images I've been taking them on my phone for the last 2 years and probably have over 100gb and like 2k + pics lmao
please make milkyway with geo node xD
if you mean the night sky, you can just go to the world settings and add a panoramic image of the milky way, its what i do
@@sumicmusic no I mean the actual galaxy
And the weather down rigth is mostly cloudy...
I think there is a UFO hiding behind it :)
Can this be replicated in C4D?
What the Hell are VDBs?
Best shader ever for clouds BUT! it wont work with a lot of volume in the scene (a lot of clouds) -> my solution was to adjust step rate very high (volume step rate is in my scene now 20, render time limit 1.5 min and for the disney cloud its a antisot. of 0.7 & shadow 35; different clouds (smaller and less volume) have antisot. 0.5 & shadow 8) & other clouds from jangafx
btw the clouds are all veeeeeeery big in the scene when importing and i scaled them also down a lot but had no difference in look (if you think about that 4 example)
Please please STOP PUTTING MUSIC IN THE BACKGROUND when you're speaking!
1. Music is personal and whatever you choose it will annoy some people.
2. It also serves no useful purpose; it is NOT an enhancement to a tutorial, it is nothing but clutter. This is education not a music video.
3. Some people who are autistic - like me - will have great difficulty understanding what you are saying, even if the music is very quiet.
I wanted to watch this but had to give up as it was a struggle to understand what was being said and the music you chose was also intensely irritating to me. I hope you will consider cutting the music in your video editor and uploading a version without it.
maybe just put it on mute and turn on subtitles ?
What's the point of music? Irrelevant, distracting, and we have our own.
The clicking music track is quite annoying, please remove.
Followed.
I wonder where my comment did go on this? I was about to answer your reply, but it´s gone here from what I can see, did you remove it or could it be personal settings?
I used to plug my light path ray depth to absorbtion channel, a bit differentely than yours since you go with the density channels.
I did some setups like yours, adding an absorbtion shader to mix with the two different scatter shaders may also bring some interesting shading in there, and with curves as well..it kind of boosted up the scatter roundness in a volume, don´t have anything to show here yet though.
Though absorbtion of light´t isn´t happening in real clouds I believe, only scattering, but the result is a kind of removal of AO I believe when plugin ray dept to absorbtion channel, with map range to adjust, but I am not sure if it´s necessary.
Sample of a lot of backscattered light..
blenderartists.org/uploads/default/original/4X/4/1/a/41a5a53f8c177dd67180021c5e59903244f411c0.jpeg
And..if you don´t have it Samuel, do look in to embergen..since you seem to love clouds as I do :)
czcams.com/video/TcX65Gs27KI/video.html
I have zero idea what happened to it, it just poofed out of existence lmao
@@samk9632
Thanks for the check of that, vaporized it got:)
love most of your stuff on your channel, should have followed you earlier, I love solar flares too you know, planetary clouds, ordinary clouds..so much of that in common.
will make a comment on that magnetic solar spot/pole effect on that vid.
Planetary clouds I have yet to try out in blender, I like the fractals that are so easy to use with build in weather fractal, a set of fractals for Lightwave that is free by Denis Pontonnier, so easy to scale and adjust cloud layers, and there are other cloud fractals like Gardner clouds, so those are nice for planetary volumetric clouds, I will try and record some of that if by any chance it´s of interest just for the textures sake.
But for VDB cloud rendering, Lightwave native cpu engine is however horribly both in performance in OpenGL, and rendering speed, as well as lacking multiple volume bouncing, so you can never get these effects with Lightwave native engine.
There´s the free octane plugin I still haven´t installed though that may help overcome some of that.
But otherwise I am trying to transition more to blender.
The WDA disney asset thread is located here..
blenderartists.org/t/vdb-wda-disney-cloud-scattering-tests/1227871/8