VDB Cloud on Globe SI only

[sant0s]

Hi SI-Community

hope you are also still using SI alot
At least I still have to use it quite often and am very happy about that, hehhe.

Anyway, I am testing some volumetric VDB globe clouds.
And for that I use SI only and Olegs VDB Plugin to export (not using the plugin to render).

Thats working damn good and I love the look. Only Problem I have, its working only in Render Region.
As soon as I try to render the frame or make a Preview, it will render the blobby look.
There also seems to be some problems with the texture_map on the vector_map_lookup... sometimes I have to delete all projections and texture_map, create a new one and it works again.
Feels very strange, like a bug ^^

I attached an image to show the problem.



Anybody?

Thx alot and greetings!
Markus

[sant0s]

crap, found the problem
color to vector changed the game! dunno why I used that lookup, maybe because I used it quite often with weight maps
oh and funny benefit, maybe someone can explain that - its rendering million times faster now!

[Bullit]

Hi sant0s. What do you mean by

not using the plugin to render

?

[sant0s]

Hi Bullet,
with Olegs Plugin we had the first option to render VDB in SitoA.
But since some time (quite along time actually ^^) SitoA has its own vdb reader and shader - so I am using that of course

But I have to correct myself. Its working now in Preview and as Render Output and much faster than before, but still have a massive problem...
See the screenshot below. Like seems on the clouds. I have no texture repeat and scale in noise is set to 1.
Any idea what that could be?
Oh, the problem is new with the color to vector. Before with the vector vector_map_lookup in render region I had no seems.
Oh², the seems appear exact at the render bucket square... so must be something strange with the render options?

[Bullit]

I see some holes that seem repeated but i am not sure, some issues you point with arrows i don't see anything wrong, maybe animations show them better.

Just to understand the pipeline you have made some ice particles/clouds, saved them with Oleg VDB and opened then with Arnold?

[sant0s]

jep.
- Pointcloud that has the rough form of clouds/cloud rig.
- create and export VDB with olegs Plugin.
- read, modify and render in SitoA

example is still super technical, so no correct dimensions of auroa, clouds or flare etc
just to get an idea, how strong SI still is, hehhe.
its easy to create very detailed clouds with that technique, too.
And of course, its possible to animate that - will try that and render out some frames next days.

Beauty
http://abload.de/img/earth_clouds_test_beaoau8i.jpg

[sant0s]

hmm, the seams are gone - its only WHILE its rendering and in the Preview window.
Output is okay, so all problems gone so far.

[Draise]

Beautiful. I love the huge clouds all out of scale. You should keep it like that, almost cartoony.

[sant0s]

hehhe, cool that you like it!
I like it that way, too. but I guess, the artist who will use it in our company needs a more realistic look.
anyway, I was starting this morning just because I saw all the 3D clouds on our animatiosn and thought, there must be a way to receive nice 3D clouds without using houdini or maya.
I also made some nice hero clouds, will post them soon.
If anybody has good ways/tips, I am open, specialy about animation

[mc_axe]

Omg this is so.. challenging!
i have no idea on particles... but ill just drop some random ideas
I guess you want to make something like timelapse if you want to animate this, looks awesome alrdy btw.

For animation:
I wonder if there is a way to make clouds interact with mountains (height map)
I wonder if you can drive the main transformation of the pointcloud from weather data (motion vectors or smthing), in order to achiev many local situations and not a general turbulence.
Some variation in colour under huge clouds would look nice (rainy sittuation)

Afaik there are like 3-4 basic types of clouds but you might deside to make layers if you folow that aproach.
Lower clouds in general look like spawn from inside despawn to outside, big clouds act like erupting from inside to the top and then it is again turbulence and a constant despawn rate. Trying to understand Despawn/spawn on clouds is so tricky that you can get hypnotized .

[sant0s]

hey mc_axe

thx! cool ideas!
yea, wanna create something like a timelapse, already have a first test running.
interacting with mountains is simple, could work either on real geometry surface or weightmaps/texture maps. or with a lot of control, like here: https://vimeo.com/37513365

For the weather timelapse, I still have chris marshalls super great compound with some changes so that the clouds rotate and transform.
https://vimeo.com/12483521
and, like in the example above, I also added an option to use curves and have more control.

the color idea is nice and there is a great way to do this by adding an aIBlackbody Node that adds temperature to the clouds. so with a weight map I can control things like lighning, darker parts, etc.

hahhaha, yea - I guess understanind clouds is like understanding waves I am sitting on the ocean every day, watching the waves, crazy stuff going on there, hhehe!

the layering part should happen in the ICE part before exporting to VDB I think. have to try that soon, hehhe.

[sant0s]

just 20 frames, so its working as animation. but i have to render more when I have time.
I did ask in the vdb threat, if there is a way to save the color information and density in one vdb file, would make the lightning super easy!

download link of animation http://filehorst.de/d/blCEcunp

[FXDude]

That's pretty awesome!!

Congratz!

[sant0s]

hehhhe... thx!