Best application to create and render clouds and skyboxes?
polycounter lvl 10
Hello.
What is the best program out there to create clouds either with placing VDBs around or generating it procedurally inside and rendering them as skyboxes with realistic lighting and atmosphere settings?
Replies
Terragen imo for procedural clouds. But it takes alot of tweaking, deep node system diving , lots of forever rendering and post compositing . Usually it's good in one sector of a sky and absolute crap in other. So compositing is a key thing anyway. It has spherical camera to render . A box is a worst shape for a sky really , most visually inefficient. Especially texture wise. Try dome or cone.
Anyway a photo camera is still a better way to do sky IMO. Look at Forza horizon 5 for example. A series of sky photos morfing each to next one is a most ingenious way to do it. You would waste more time rendering it in 3d soft and never get it same good.
Terragen looks like a cool solution. There is a bit of procedural noise look but it's managable.
I can't use real cloud photos unfortunately since I need very specific types of weather with some interactions with other models.
I second not to use skyboxes anymore. Skydomes are the way to go. You can use hdris at it out of the box so to speak.
Terragen is cool. But every 3d package with volumetrics should do the trick too. Blender for example. It's not even more work, dependant of what you want to achieve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5ShmTT2zeM
Blender is good and super fast to learn for cloudy and foggy renders. But blender has an ongoing bug that isn't fixed for years where two or more volumetric objects like VDBs overlapping causes glitches in the render where they all show up blocky. Checking out their renders now, terragen seems to have nailed it and also has the equirectangular camera that allows skybox renders too.
Vue, or Eon software seems pretty nifty. If you arn't afraid of procedurals then :https://info.e-onsoftware.com/home seems a good solution.
I used Vue for a few years decade ago and non stop hated it . Nothing worked as intended there. Always a kind of fairytale or somewhat more procedural style and it took really forever that time. Non stop bugs and glitches all the time. Haven't even tried it since. People did wonders with it although.
Nowdays I believe a key thing is compositing and GPU renderers , not a specialized software.
Do the skybox clouds need to be animated in-game? Or is it mostly static?
If animated, you'll likely need a very performant solution that relies on a layered shader and a combination of static and scrolling textures. You don't want it hogging resources.
There's no out-of-the-box solution for this afaik.
As an example, this was done with a custom engine and a specific shader, mixing static and scrolling textures. http://ericchadwick.com/img/mmo_worldbuilding.html#volcanicbeach
New Terragen Sky
https://mailchi.mp/planetside/terragen-nov2022