Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Blender Volumetrics: playing with haze/fog and clouds! (Patreon)

Published:
2021-11-07 00:30:13
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

A quick jump into exploring some techniques with volumetrics; a really great way to add atmosphere to a scene. They render a lot faster these days than they did in 2012 and I suspect it's time to give them another look! 

Files

Blender Volumetrics: working with some haze/fog and clouds!

A quick jump into exploring some techniques with volumetrics; a really great way to add atmosphere to a scene. They render a lot faster these days than they did in 2012 and I suspect it's time to give them another look!

Comments

Oom avera

im so thankful for this patreon

Anonymous

Omg, ani-sop-ty... Gee Ive been explaining it as anus-topy for comedic sakes for ages, now I know!!! 😂🤣😂

Victor Fredin

Love the Dynamo Dream poster in the background, haven't noticed it until right now!

Zeke Faust

Clouds are something I've been fascinated with recreating for years! One of the best resources on creating clouds I've found is guerrilla games' paper on the cloud tech from Horizon Zero Dawn. Basically their approach is similar to yours Ian, stacking multiple layers of texture based on cloud type and altitude. The key is a mixture of Perlin and Worley noises to create those characteristic cumulus bubbles. If anyone's interested, you can see my setup in this thread. The attached eevee render ended up pretty blurry though, since it was on my old computer and I had to use a high volume tile size https://blenderartists.org/t/procedural-cloudscape-generation-in-cycles-now-eevee/694700/58?u=zeke_faust Original paper here: https://www.guerrilla-games.com/read/the-real-time-volumetric-cloudscapes-of-horizon-zero-dawn

IanHubert

Ah thanks Zeke! That thread looks super helpful :D

Zeke Faust

Course! Another useful technique is vector displacement. It helps keep the tops of the clouds crisp instead of falling off so smoothly like you'd normally get with a gradient defining the height. I believe Kent Trammell has discussed this technique before

Samuel Cooper

I love that the amount of blender icons keeps on increasing

Stephan

i've struggled a bit with clouds since moving from maya to blender. this is super helpful. thanks!

aviphyr

I absolutely love clouds and this will help me somewhat satisfy my never ending hunger for them.

Justin G Minich

This was great! I tend to avoid jumping into new Blender versions until they're out of beta, but the performance of Cycles X with volumes looks mighty tempting. Hopefully Cycles X combined with the RTX Quadro 5000 in my laptop will finally let me fly around my nebulas without chugging so much. Have you tried doing any smoke sims? I spent a good chunk of the 2020 lockdown baking sims for a smoke monster, so I'm curious if there have been performance enhancements in that area.

Bryon Lape

I need to seriously consider upping my subscription level.

chunky8bit

huzza! my wish has been granted.

Blake Rizzo

Clouds yussssssssssss love it Ian! Did you shoot all those dramatic sky cloud images?

Nate

For anyone who's going to put clouds into your scenes, note that they are created from a few basic meteorological processes, which are highly dependent on climate. For example, you rarely will see cumulus clouds in winter (or if you do, they will be very squished) because cumulus clouds are formed via advection that results from instability. Winter tends to be cold so therefore less instability. I do a bit of amateur meteorology so it bugs me when I see winter scenes with fluffy cumulus clouds. I tend to just find rough reference photos of an environment in a given season and half-ass the clouds based on what I see or import a VDB. It looks like Tomoyuki Nishita (AFAIK the Nishita in "Nishita sky texture") has put out a couple papers on how to visually simulate clouds: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468502X17300013 https://diglib.eg.org/bitstream/handle/10.2312/egs20021035/short74.pdf I wonder if blender's smoke simulation could be abused with the parameters specified to create realistic clouds.

Pablo Nicolas

Thank you Ian! Super helpful and fun as always! And every image you make even a Suzanne in the mist is beautiful somehow, that’s something… Just One (maybe obvious and old news but works for me so I share it) tip to do the extrapolate keyframes thing but in just one easy step: just type in the field value “#frame * 100” (without quotation marks) replacing the number and math operation with whatever you need to speed up or slow down the increment. That gives the frame number scaled or divided or whatever. It’s just one step, and very easy to edit. To decrease a value you add a minus before like “#-frame * 100”. And to make cyclic stuff it’s like “# sin(frame) * 10”. It creates a driver on the spot with the math op linked to the frame number. :-) Keep up the good work!

Jason Ryu

Genius. Proud of Alabama

Clayton Orgles

Great video! I was trying to make a cloud fly-through the other day, and most of tutorials I could find on Youtube involved manually modelling each cloud; this method looks so much better and is much easier! The performance isn't just from your 3090! I had to render a scene with fog over the last few days on an RTX 2060 Super, and it rendered x5 as fast on the 3.0 Beta compared to 2.93 😁 Also, rendering with volumetrics on vs off didn't make much of a difference in Cycles X, while normal Cycles took a lot longer.

MagnixGames

Dude what would I do if its not you bringing this inspo for the world. Thank you for your effort that is amazing!

Luis Silva

Ian, always pampering us sir. Thanks! I'm creating a Scottish Highlands landscape scene and I've been struggling to find a nice and efficient way to add mist and high dense clouds to the scene without turning my computer into an oven. Volumetrics processing and render times tend to be prohibitive but I've been achieving serious performance improvement with 3.0 beta Cycles X so I'll definitely give this method a try. Oh and that Albert Bierstadt reference was great!

Mario Taylor

This is gold! Thanks, Ian! 😊

Stephane Mélo

Very nice ! pops up just when I was trying to get some haze on a scene ! About the buzz, I suppose you tried, but wouldn't a hi pass filter or even a multi band compressor (compressing the low frequency of the sound) do the trick ?

Evan Barron

My mind is absolutely just.. blown

Jeziah Alvarez

I've never commented before but for the absolute longest time I've been looking for a good realistic way to make clouds, watched all the tutorials on YouTube and such and none of them feel right.. but what you did had my jaw drop, like you just solved your own issue accidently and I was shocked at how great it looked. Thanks for pumping out good content

song shi

Lan ,Can you record a scene grading tutorial? expect! !

Manuel Grewer

This is fucking great, and just when I was trying to figure this out. Ian, your blender tutorials are the best. There ist tons of other good stuff on youtube, but your tutorials just have this nice practicality to them! Many thanks!

Joel Godin

Where are people seeing those videos you make? (like you showed at 0:56)

Doug Brown

Mind = Blown + Thanks

TW Stout

Thanks, Ian! This is fantastic, and - as always - eerily good timing for what I'm working on. Get out of my head!

Wolfers

Ooooo. Pretty. (heart emoji)

IanHubert

Oh! Hah, just in other Patreon videos and the occasional snippet in social media posts

Oliver Davies

great tut, definitely not a cloud tut, definitely.

Shape

That shot at 0:58 looks sweeeet

Bernhard VonZastrow

Loved the tutorial. I spent well over a year doing clouds for an all CG dark ride. What a nightmare. We used Maya to model basic shapes and then a Houdini process to add cloud like details before converting it into a vdb. I would have loved performance like you are seeing. One question: why are you remapping to negative densities? We often did something similar with nose functions but we never went below zero because zero density was effectively no volumes. Is it to control the falloff between the empty spaces and the files in volumes?

Zeke Faust

it's like a lift or contrast adjustment in a color grade. you can have a steeper curve while keeping the desired black point for adjusting the falloff of volumes i also like to use a math node set to power, depending on whether i want crisp or softer edges

Jeziel Flores

Absolutely my favorite you've made, I'm curious is that massive file full of clouds from a pack or just photos you've found on the internet?

zmar7

Thanks so much！This is just what I am always looking for !

Lonnon Foster

TIL I've been mispronouncing anisotropy for *years*.

IanHubert

Hot damn I know!! Render performance in the past few years has gotten absolutely wild. Ah! Sorry I didn't explain that bit. Yeah I set it to negative for the clouds for exactly the reason you said, so that 50% of the space would be "no clouds" :D

Alfonso Palma

This is gorgeous man! A thousand of cheers for your wise!!

Engoneer

ive never seen more perfect timing, I was just going to search for something like this

Jason Aeschliman

So good dude! Thanks for always nailing it with killer content!

yt m

thank you very much man! this is one of my best tutorials I have ever seen. keep it up.

Michał

love this stuff :) now i'll add fog everywhere :D

David McSween

Nice results Ian. I spent waaaaay to long building a cloud generator scene, when I could've made it simple as you've done. Nice one ;-)

Sebastian Blatter

Hi man, great video! Do you have any tipps on managing denoising artifacts? I feel like the detail on some textures are just not consistent enough in animation.

VXV

IDK why, but I tend to ignore scatter and use principled volume instead, now I see the error of my ways.

Chris Ras

loving cycles x and this thanks!

Chris Mok

Great tutorial? Btw, where'd you get the cloud textures?

Roland Kay

Great tutorial! I found this stackexchange post which suggests increasing the number of volumetric bounces to avoid dark muddy haze. It seemed to help when I tried it.

Clarity

awesome tutorial, you never fail when it comes to making some of this stuff seem so easy

Long Wang

What GPUs does he use?

Long Wang

Ok.I heard that is 3090.

Md Hafiz

cool!. gonna add clouds everywhere now haha

noor hicaru

how to do this box of volumetric on maya,