Probably you are ending up with a negative number for Density, which tends to do that sort of thing. Odd powers have the property that negative numbers stay negative, while even powers will always be positive. You can probably make it work by sticking an absolute value in right after the Power node.
Thanks Bobo. I tried it and it didn’t seem to work, but maybe I did it wrong. Certainly would be nice to be able to drop that down with a bit more fine-grained control for making sparser clouds. I’ll experiment and see if I can get the same effect another way.
b
Definitely getting the hang of it and playing around with various render settings to get some nice results. I’m trying to render with standard particles as well as voxels so I can mix/match to add a bit more sharp detail but I’m getting some shadow artifacts showing up. Pls. see attached - you can see it on the left side of the frame: looks like streaks/banding. I dug around the help files and have tried setting the shadow map to 2048 and draw/self-shad are both on bi-cubic, but neither seemed to help.
Any thoughts on how I can avoid this? (btw: these two objects are generating about 9.3M particles - not sure if that helps at all).
Also found what might be a very minor bug in the beta: using the KT frame-buffer add ons to access some parameters like “shader parameters dialog”. That one opens fine, but it always opens it as a floater, and when you close it it becomes hidden and has to be manually un-hidden every time. I tried setting it to “dock” mode but same thing happens as soon you use the frame-buffer shortcut button to access it: becomes a floater, and then becomes hidden.
Thanks - and thanks once again for the great tutorial, this is really handy stuff.
Please note that the tutorial has been updated with some examples of animating the Noise and Cellular offset to create “developing” clouds.
Same page, includes two Quicktimes of the bunny cloud to show the effect of both approaches.
software.primefocusworld.com/sof … _The_Cloud
In the PRT Volume object there is a pair of spinners that affect the randomness of the particles (RandomCount and RandomSeed). RandomCount is the number of unique random numbers that are used for the pool of particle positions. They can’t be truly random because then the same particles would not be created each time the object was evaluated.
If the RandomCount is too low, obvious patterns will develop. I recommend a minimum of 1024 for this value. What are you currently using?
Thanks Darcy - that did the trick. The value was set at the default value, which was 128 - considerably lower than your advice. Maybe that should be set higher by default?
Thank again.
b
great tutorial! thanks for taking the time to put it together!