oliS

thank you very much for taking the time for such a detailed explanation...again your approach is pretty interesting and maybe i will have a try if I got enough time to do so..I think if I´m working on this stuff again more questions will come up;) I´m pretty curious for the look of your clouds! you have to tell when we are able to see it anywhere..at least if you are allowed to tell... cheers oli

hi mike! that sounds pretty interesting..looks like you were exactly doing what i wanted to do. I got some questions because im not an houdini expert at all;) Did you use some sort of base shader to build your cloud shader from or did you do everything from scratch by yourself and how do you break up your shader in the different lighting components? have you any reference tips on tutorials or anything else on such a topic? The other thing that sounds pretty interesting to me is your lighting. I experimented a lot with pbr and pbr lighting (means environment light and area lights) which gives a nice lighting out of the box but is pretty expensive in rendering.. I ended up with frames taking like 18h for a rendering that was anything else than noiseless... So do you work mostly with spotlights and dmaps and what lightsources do you use to create your photonmaps from? And the last thing;) did you investigate the cloud light and did you use it in any way? please enlighten me;) oli

Yeah i came across this also and built it into the cloud shader. It reproduces some nice features, but seems more like a proof of concept than a production ready shader. Is there maybe anything else where one can also better fake the extensive scattering that clouds do? Currently I´m trying to fake it with blurred dmaps, but maybe there is a better method?

Hi , at the moment I´m experimenting a lot with Cloud shading and currently I´m using the default houdini cloud shader that comes with the cloud tools. This shader is pretty basic and lacks a lot of features. Searching the web I came across this great Thesis that is all about rendering clouds in realtime which you can find here: http://evasion.imag.fr/~Antoine.Bouthors/research/phd/thesis/thesis.pdf I was wondering if anyone already implemented all those great things into any houdini volume shader to get all those nice SSS effects?