Fake volumetric clouds with billboards

[Daniel]

I was curious to see what sort of effect could be achieved by instancing a lot of planes with a cloud texture on it to try and get a volumetric look. The result isn't too bad (except for the sharp-looking bits on the right), but it's completely impractical as it takes forever to render. Definitely not worth it just to get a few 3D clouds in your scene. I used the cloud texture to define opacity on a diffuse material. Pretty simple.

This is the texture I used.

[glimpse]

probably having some blob mesh (3d) with a bit of sss & other tweeks might be a better idea? =)

[manalokos]

I did these with several layers and turbulence node applied to scattering.

[Daniel]

Nice test. Can we see the node setup?

[profbetis]

woah! You can see at my own thread (http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=26161) that a few of us tried to get similar effects but got strange surfaces, among other problems... how did you get yours to work so well?

[Daniel]

Yeah, I tried your method too, profbetis, but couldn't get the look I wanted.

[glimpse]

this is seriously Beatiful!
Have You used the sme texture on the last two images?

keep playing, curious where You'll end up, Daniel =)

cheers

[Daniel]

I got these by creating a vertical array of very thin cubes (100 of them), and plugging a turbulence texture (with colour correction node) into opacity. This works for diffuse, glossy and specular, all with a different look. I didn't have time to play with the settings to get something that looked nice, or the time to let it render long enough to clear the noise (4:28 mins on a GTX460), but I figured it would be useful to share as is anyway.

[Dave_Yu]

Tried this using pflow and an instanced card mesh with camera facing particle sprites.

Ok for far clouds but the closer you get it gets really slow and noisy.

Dave