Fluid clouds and the Maya ocean shader

Here is a quick comp of the clouds with a water effect I’ve spent some time trying to get right. The water shader obviously needs a lot of work and I need to go back increase the opacity of the clouds since some of the detail has been lost.

Fluid cloud test

I posted an image recently of some clouds I’m working on for this fly-by idea I’m realizing. Shortly after I posted the image a friend asked me how you would go about creating large billowing clouds (the kind you see from and airplane). A quick answer would be “just create a large fluid container and adjust the Perlin texture”. That solution only leads you to extremely long and painful render times, trust me……please. The key is to keep the fluid contain as small as possible (in the Y direction) probably in the 2 to 5 scale and scale up the noise texture. Also, when scaling up the texture you’re going to need to play around with the frequency ratio to gain some of the “lumps” back into your clouds.

This is the previous image with scale adjustments as well as other adjustments to make it less dense.

Fluid clouds v2

Here is a quick render of some clouds I’m doing for a small fly by animation (don’t you just love fly-by’s. I’m juggling this one with the Becks beer project. This is a little easier because everything is being done in Maya (in terms of the animation).