Cloud simulation

Another busy day for me I’m afraid. I just thought it would be a good idea to update my blog. I’m going to be talking about the cloud simulation which I have created in 3D studio max.

The aim of this shot was to pass a camera through a dense region of clouds at 300fps.

First of all I’m going to be talking about the theory of how all this works. In a real world situation light decays in strength by the distance it has travelled. So in this situation, the clouds top half would be almost translucent where as the bottom would be nearly opaque.

Knowing that a photorealistic look of a cloud is dependent on decaying light we can now move on to the simulation which was created in 3Ds max.

The simulation was created with particle flow which a 3D plug-in particle generator for 3D studio max. I started out by creating a curve that was going to be the path for my camera. I then extruded a cylinder along the path. I then applied a noise modifier to the cylinder. Finally I added a smooth modifier to the cylinder.

I then opened particle flow selecting the cylinder as the object base for my particles.

I created a special material that was applied as an opacity map to the particles. I then applied a target direct light to the scene making sure that the object (cylinder) was lighted from behind. With the objects visibility turned off only the particles would render.

I simply then created a camera and animated it along a path. The finished render took 60 hours which was then colour graded in After effects using curve operators.