Thick rolling clouds.

[mightcouldb1]

Hi there, I'm trying to create some cool thick rolling clouds. I've experimented with the pyro shader a bit and the pyro node. So far I've changing the boyancy of my sim so that it freezes, unfortunately I can not get that sweet art directed shape that I want. I also tried using meta balls copied to points, and the billowy smoke shader. That gets me closer to the shape I am looking for, unfortunately the procedural animation that I added to the points looks horrible. I'm pretty open to suggestions if someone would throw me a bone. I'm still relatively new to houdini, and would much appreciate any help!

Thanks!

[TheUsualAlex]

Hi,

While I think for things like rolling clouds you might best do it as a procedural animation in SOP/POP rather than DOPs. Although if you need some fluidic motion of the closer rolling cloud, I supposed DOP can be considered, but would be more like a later choices. One of the important thing about rolling cloud is how you're animating your Normal and Up Vector beside making sure you have a nice particle motion. The next thing up is the noise in your volume shader -- something along the line of 4D turbulence noise since a 4D noise (3D + Time) can give you a nice roiling feature.

I haven't used the meta-ball + Houdini's volume shaders, as I am still on the ancient i3d land with custom shader... So not quite sure how well the smoke shaders worked...

[bhaveshpandey]

yes..for clouds I guess the best (time/computationally efficient) way would be POP/SOP or their combination..

If at all you need some Fluid movement details you could always Advect the particles using a low res smoke sim (to find out more about this just search for Advection or Advect in help docs..