Blender Volumetrics: playing with haze/fog and clouds!

im so thankful for this patreon

Oom avera

how to do this box of volumetric on maya,

noor hicaru

cool!. gonna add clouds everywhere now haha

Md Hafiz

Ok.I heard that is 3090.

Long Wang

What GPUs does he use?

Long Wang

awesome tutorial, you never fail when it comes to making some of this stuff seem so easy

Clarity

Great tutorial! I found this stackexchange post which suggests increasing the number of volumetric bounces to avoid dark muddy haze. It seemed to help when I tried it.

Roland Kay

Great tutorial? Btw, where'd you get the cloud textures?

loving cycles x and this thanks!

Chris Ras

Amazing!

Manuel Grewer

IDK why, but I tend to ignore scatter and use principled volume instead, now I see the error of my ways.

VXV

Hi man, great video! Do you have any tipps on managing denoising artifacts? I feel like the detail on some textures are just not consistent enough in animation.

Nice results Ian. I spent waaaaay to long building a cloud generator scene, when I could've made it simple as you've done. Nice one ;-)

David McSween

love this stuff :) now i'll add fog everywhere :D

Michał

thank you very much man! this is one of my best tutorials I have ever seen. keep it up.

So good dude! Thanks for always nailing it with killer content!

ive never seen more perfect timing, I was just going to search for something like this

Engoneer

This is gorgeous man! A thousand of cheers for your wise!!

That's great to hear, thanks!! :D And it's a pack I bought a while back from photobash.org- it's been really useful. https://www.photobash.org/dramatic-skies

Ian Hubert

TIL I've been mispronouncing anisotropy for *years*.

Lonnon Foster

you are super cool as usual

Buck Yau Cheuk Chung

Thanks so much！This is just what I am always looking for !

Absolutely my favorite you've made, I'm curious is that massive file full of clouds from a pack or just photos you've found on the internet?

it's like a lift or contrast adjustment in a color grade. you can have a steeper curve while keeping the desired black point for adjusting the falloff of volumes i also like to use a math node set to power, depending on whether i want crisp or softer edges

Zeke Faust

Loved the tutorial. I spent well over a year doing clouds for an all CG dark ride. What a nightmare. We used Maya to model basic shapes and then a Houdini process to add cloud like details before converting it into a vdb. I would have loved performance like you are seeing. One question: why are you remapping to negative densities? We often did something similar with nose functions but we never went below zero because zero density was effectively no volumes. Is it to control the falloff between the empty spaces and the files in volumes?

That shot at 0:58 looks sweeeet

Shape

great tut, definitely not a cloud tut, definitely.

Oliver Davies

love the anisotropy lesson.

Followfocus

Oh! Hah, just in other Patreon videos and the occasional snippet in social media posts

Ian Hubert

Ooooo. Pretty. (heart emoji)

Jack_Wolfe

Thanks, Ian! This is fantastic, and - as always - eerily good timing for what I'm working on. Get out of my head!

TW Stout

Mind = Blown + Thanks

Doug Brown

Where are people seeing those videos you make? (like you showed at 0:56)

Really great thk

Sérgio Merêces

This is fucking great, and just when I was trying to figure this out. Ian, your blender tutorials are the best. There ist tons of other good stuff on youtube, but your tutorials just have this nice practicality to them! Many thanks!

Manuel Grewer

Lan ,Can you record a scene grading tutorial? expect! !

I've never commented before but for the absolute longest time I've been looking for a good realistic way to make clouds, watched all the tutorials on YouTube and such and none of them feel right.. but what you did had my jaw drop, like you just solved your own issue accidently and I was shocked at how great it looked. Thanks for pumping out good content

Fantastic Ian, absolutely fantastic.

Chris Alldridge

My mind is absolutely just.. blown

Evan Barron

Very nice ! pops up just when I was trying to get some haze on a scene ! About the buzz, I suppose you tried, but wouldn't a hi pass filter or even a multi band compressor (compressing the low frequency of the sound) do the trick ?

This is gold! Thanks, Ian! 😊

Mario Taylor

Ian, always pampering us sir. Thanks! I'm creating a Scottish Highlands landscape scene and I've been struggling to find a nice and efficient way to add mist and high dense clouds to the scene without turning my computer into an oven. Volumetrics processing and render times tend to be prohibitive but I've been achieving serious performance improvement with 3.0 beta Cycles X so I'll definitely give this method a try. Oh and that Albert Bierstadt reference was great!

Dude what would I do if its not you bringing this inspo for the world. Thank you for your effort that is amazing!

This was awesome. Thank you!

Great video! I was trying to make a cloud fly-through the other day, and most of tutorials I could find on Youtube involved manually modelling each cloud; this method looks so much better and is much easier! The performance isn't just from your 3090! I had to render a scene with fog over the last few days on an RTX 2060 Super, and it rendered x5 as fast on the 3.0 Beta compared to 2.93 😁 Also, rendering with volumetrics on vs off didn't make much of a difference in Cycles X, while normal Cycles took a lot longer.

Genius. Proud of Alabama

Thank you Ian! Super helpful and fun as always! And every image you make even a Suzanne in the mist is beautiful somehow, that’s something… Just One (maybe obvious and old news but works for me so I share it) tip to do the extrapolate keyframes thing but in just one easy step: just type in the field value “#frame * 100” (without quotation marks) replacing the number and math operation with whatever you need to speed up or slow down the increment. That gives the frame number scaled or divided or whatever. It’s just one step, and very easy to edit. To decrease a value you add a minus before like “#-frame * 100”. And to make cyclic stuff it’s like “# sin(frame) * 10”. It creates a driver on the spot with the math op linked to the frame number. :-) Keep up the good work!

Pablo Nicolas

For anyone who's going to put clouds into your scenes, note that they are created from a few basic meteorological processes, which are highly dependent on climate. For example, you rarely will see cumulus clouds in winter (or if you do, they will be very squished) because cumulus clouds are formed via advection that results from instability. Winter tends to be cold so therefore less instability. I do a bit of amateur meteorology so it bugs me when I see winter scenes with fluffy cumulus clouds. I tend to just find rough reference photos of an environment in a given season and half-ass the clouds based on what I see or import a VDB. It looks like Tomoyuki Nishita (AFAIK the Nishita in "Nishita sky texture") has put out a couple papers on how to visually simulate clouds: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468502X17300013 https://diglib.eg.org/bitstream/handle/10.2312/egs20021035/short74.pdf I wonder if blender's smoke simulation could be abused with the parameters specified to create realistic clouds.

Clouds yussssssssssss love it Ian! Did you shoot all those dramatic sky cloud images?

Blake Rizzo

huzza! my wish has been granted.

Chunky

I recently found about a free plugin flow map painter for flowing water adding it with this fog will make my pc render easily. getting excited. Incase you need link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D-dvU6Nt6g

I need to seriously consider upping my subscription level.

This was great! I tend to avoid jumping into new Blender versions until they're out of beta, but the performance of Cycles X with volumes looks mighty tempting. Hopefully Cycles X combined with the RTX Quadro 5000 in my laptop will finally let me fly around my nebulas without chugging so much. Have you tried doing any smoke sims? I spent a good chunk of the 2020 lockdown baking sims for a smoke monster, so I'm curious if there have been performance enhancements in that area.

I absolutely love clouds and this will help me somewhat satisfy my never ending hunger for them.

aviphyr

i've struggled a bit with clouds since moving from maya to blender. this is super helpful. thanks!

Stephan

I love that the amount of blender icons keeps on increasing

Samuel Cooper

Ah thanks Zeke! That thread looks super helpful :D

Ian Hubert

Clouds are something I've been fascinated with recreating for years! One of the best resources on creating clouds I've found is guerrilla games' paper on the cloud tech from Horizon Zero Dawn. Basically their approach is similar to yours Ian, stacking multiple layers of texture based on cloud type and altitude. The key is a mixture of Perlin and Worley noises to create those characteristic cumulus bubbles. If anyone's interested, you can see my setup in this thread. The attached eevee render ended up pretty blurry though, since it was on my old computer and I had to use a high volume tile size https://blenderartists.org/t/procedural-cloudscape-generation-in-cycles-now-eevee/694700/58?u=zeke_faust Original paper here: https://www.guerrilla-games.com/read/the-real-time-volumetric-cloudscapes-of-horizon-zero-dawn

Zeke Faust

Love the Dynamo Dream poster in the background, haven't noticed it until right now!

Omg, ani-sop-ty... Gee Ive been explaining it as anus-topy for comedic sakes for ages, now I know!!! 😂🤣😂