Getting a semi-cloudy sky rendered w/o terabytes of ram

[TobyGaines]

Without the render power to render a sky for each frame, I'd like to render one cloudy dome image instead. I've managed to render a 16k dome, but only with the wimpiest of clouds. Any ideas on how to render just bits of cloud at a time? Some way to automate a single cloud around, that changes in each new position, then I can comp them together - maybe if there's a world-coordinates feature it'll be easy, I'll try that ; but if any side is clipped, it won't work...

T.i.a.

[DonRomano]

You can instance vdb clouds. It'll take less memory and you'll be able to render more of them. Make a few different models and instance them with a point cloud and then you're good to go ! With a RTX 2080 I've been able to render billions of voxels with instancing in redshift, so I assume if you render with mantra it'll be able to handle many voxels if they're instanced !

[TobyGaines]

6 hours ago, DonRomano said:

You can instance vdb clouds. It'll take less memory and you'll be able to render more of them. Make a few different models and instance them with a point cloud and then you're good to go ! With a RTX 2080 I've been able to render billions of voxels with instancing in redshift, so I assume if you render with mantra it'll be able to handle many voxels if they're instanced !

I was going to try vdb, but I'm using the sky tool, and don't have enough ram to create the high-quality volume in the first place ; I will think about individual clouds, but I will need at least a dozen different ones in order to avoid being repetitive.

I think I can make one cloud that changes with translation, using Mountain to displace the original geo, and offsetting its noise by the translation.

Thanks DonRomano!