Blender - Creating painterly clouds

Zimzelen

I'm currently working on an animated background for a game which would include painterly clouds forming into a spiral in the style of the third image, but I'm still very far away from the desired result. The way I'm doing it now is twisting a tube into a pointed spiral and using a displace modifier with a voronoi texture for the cloud waves. For the material I use a volume scatter setup.
If anyone has any pointers or advice on what direction I should improve this on to get the desired result, I would highly appreciate it.

This seemed more on the Technical Talk side to me but if it isn't I'll move the topic to the 3D Art Showcase and Critique.

throttlekitty

Quick question: Is the camera locked to this view, or is this a full environment for a first person view?

Zimzelen

It's locked to the view, so I have more freedom on making it look good from just one angle.

Also I'd like to add that although the spiral shape is a reference I would like to stick to, I'm much more interested in getting the right material and texture for them.

Zimzelen

I'm taking another look at the setup I started with from the BlenderGuru and I might just drop the spiral object and try to build a scene.

Eric Chadwick

Are you creating a video sequence that will loop behind the play area? Or do you want a realtime effect that renders "live" in-game?

I don't know Blender specifically, but I'd suggest trying a distortion material on a tube. Some examples of distortion for animated clouds etc. in my Sketchbook thread.

The tube can be a lot less specific in shape. You could also distort the vertices over time. See my tree shader.

RN

There's some reference here showing some geometry layers with texture scrolling, also called texture "panning":

http://ericchadwick.com/img/mmo_worldbuilding.html#volcanicbeach

The scrolling can be done by animating an offset (a numerical value) that's applied to your U or V coordinate.

Some previous threads too, maybe they help with ideas:

https://polycount.com/discussion/163397/halo-5-skybox-art
https://polycount.com/discussion/153902/creating-a-current-gen-3d-skybox-map/

throttlekitty

I've been kinda rolling this around in my head, but I have more questions about style and presentation. The last image you updated with is decidedly not-painterly, but I see what you're getting at with the sprites/particles there- I think that would make the painterly approach difficult.

I was also thinking along the lines of scrolling textures + vert colors, maybe morphs to scoot geometry around. If it were me doing this for realtime 3d, I'd probably start with exploring shapes from a sculpted tube, and augment it with cloud cards, like this. The benefit to the cards is that you can easily build volume and have soft edge-like effects kind of like how we do hair. This also gives you lots of room for scrolling layers. I'd probably lay these over sculpted peaks if i wasn't spending more than a few minutes on it too.

Zimzelen

Eric Chadwick said:

Are you creating a video sequence that will loop behind the play area? Or do you want a realtime effect that renders "live" in-game?

I don't know Blender specifically, but I'd suggest trying a distortion material on a tube. Some examples of distortion for animated clouds etc. in my Sketchbook thread.

The tube can be a lot less specific in shape. You could also distort the vertices over time. See my tree shader.

It's going to be a background loop and just like you said I intend to animate it with distorting the material. Your examples are really impressive though, I'll definitely try and recreate some of your methods.
Right now I'm like how it move but I still need to add more details and improve it generally. This is a darker part of the screen which doesn't need as much of the spiral effect.

RN said:

There's some reference here showing some geometry layers with texture scrolling, also called texture "panning":

http://ericchadwick.com/img/mmo_worldbuilding.html#volcanicbeach

The scrolling can be done by animating an offset (a numerical value) that's applied to your U or V coordinate.

Some previous threads too, maybe they help with ideas:

https://polycount.com/discussion/163397/halo-5-skybox-art
https://polycount.com/discussion/153902/creating-a-current-gen-3d-skybox-map/

Thanks for the references, the volcano especially gave me some good ideas on how it should look like.

throttlekitty said:

I've been kinda rolling this around in my head, but I have more questions about style and presentation. The last image you updated with is decidedly not-painterly, but I see what you're getting at with the sprites/particles there- I think that would make the painterly approach difficult.
I was also thinking along the lines of scrolling textures + vert colors, maybe morphs to scoot geometry around. If it were me doing this for realtime 3d, I'd probably start with exploring shapes from a sculpted tube, and augment it with cloud cards, like this. The benefit to the cards is that you can easily build volume and have soft edge-like effects kind of like how we do hair. This also gives you lots of room for scrolling layers. I'd probably lay these over sculpted peaks if i wasn't spending more than a few minutes on it too.

I guess I wasn't sure what to call it the style I am going for apart from 'not realistic' or stylized.

As it is a static view with a background loop, I have a lot more freedom to tweak it any way I want. With your post I've rethought on how to build my scene with parts instead of just one giant object, but I am curious how you build cards with volume? Right now I'm creating these clouds with shaped cubes and a displace with a volume material.

Zimzelen

Some more clouds with different lighting angles.

Zimzelen

Hi again, I went through a whole bunch of other ideas and compositions and the final variant was decided. I'll  have to rework and add to it of course but the general look and color pallet is just what we need.
Thanks again to everyone who gave me pointers on how to tackle this!