OTOY Forums

I don't suppose anyone knows of a utility that will generate cloud models? i.e. something I could then bring into Octane in order to render some fairly realistic looking clouds. I am a blender user but I am sure that I can find some sort of converter if you know of a generator for another package. The blender cloud generator produces good clouds but they are only good for the internal render engine.

Cheers guys.

The blender-addon generated clouds are very good. You just have to find the right setting to render volumes.
The addon generates a point-cloud what will be rendered unsing the internal volumetric-system.
Its the same, thats used for rendering smoke.

The clouds in the very beginning of the following video were done with blender+clouds+internal renderer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74L1R2Whr0o

I think they´re good

+1 for smoke&fire&clouds inside of octane!

Yes but I want to render inside Octane, not BI.

Thanks for the reply though.

I was thinking this exact same thing the other day! I was also looking around for solutions. I saw the clouds some other users (and Karba) were rendering and I wanted to do a similar thing. It looks like we could create similar meshes in Blender using the remesh modifier with that cube setting, however getting the overall form to begin with is the challenge. I was going to ask those guys how they got their meshes but then forgot. I was also looking around for a way to convert the Blender point cloud data into a mesh, but to no avail there either.

What about Voxelogic: http://www.voxelogic.com/
Look under Gallery>>> Sam Zeller
This could be a baseline.

Several weeks ago, I made a request thread for OpenVBD support in Octane:

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=29588

To illustrate this, SideFX just posted a CloudFX tutorial using Houdini:

http://bit.ly/128jFhS

In addition, support for OpenEXR 2.0 would greatly enhance the ability to integrate Octane renders with complex volumetric passes:

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=27684

Loads of really great possibilities there. Thanks everyone.

I was also looking around for a way to convert the Blender point cloud data into a mesh, but to no avail there either.

I tried to dupliface a cube on the surface of a modelled cloud. This mesh used to replace the one in the example provided by César in the topic below crashes my GPUs !

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 4&start=20

For making points clouds, there is an old python script made by my friend David Bertin, aka GFA-MAD, for Blender 2.49b.

It is hosted on my site, here :


http://3d-synthesis.com/Blender_Scripts/DotFiller.txt

I renamed the fire recently in txt because some browsers refuse to load directly python files and return a message "CGIWrap Error: Execution of this script not permitted". So, you will have to rename the file Dotfiller.py

As says the name of this script, it fills a volume with dots (vertices), and you can adjust the number of vertices.