Reply To: COLLAB2021 – WIP – adrian2301
First I want to apologize for my lack of presence with you and the clouds. The nature team in general has had less direction / demonstrations for guidance AND the recommended courses haven’t been the right approaches to take for efficiency…beyond that the clouds especially have been something that I say to myself: “Adrian’s got this, he’ll be fine.”
Ultimately the clouds have been one of the weirdest assets in the whole project. I sincerely appreciate your diligence and willingness to explore techniques to achieve great clouds.
Your latest iteration is the most impressive yet. You’ve really applied lighting boy studios’ method to great effect. Regarding transparency, I think the best words to describe what I’d like to see is “painterly” and slightly more “whispy”. Your screeshot above still feels to defined on the edges for me; no variety. I played around with your scene a bit and here’s what I came up with:
Mostly by tweaking the transparency ramp (in the noise frame) and noise-ifying the texture coordinates. The only remaining gripe I have is that the pointed trails are still too sharp. Duplicating the shader just for the pointy bits and intensifying the transparency ramp would fix it I think.
However there are some shortcomings with the ghibli “volumetric planes” method:
- The clouds more or less disappear from a side angle. Only a problem because we want to orbit around the final scene freely. Also it reveals that the clouds are 2D-esque being much disproportionately skinny from the side:
- The clouds get laggier the closer we get. When i navigate my viewport camera into the cloud it crawls..kind of a weird problem I didn’t expect. Not that we need to put the camera in the clouds for the final but it seem like an optimizational liability for the final scene.
If you could adjust the clouds’ proportions to look right from all angles (not skinny from the side) I think we can keep your ghibli version as a plan B. The cloud cards have proven very efficient in the viewport and I want to encourage you to make it your plan A method.
There was one new technique I added to my cloud cards that really helped; a technique I didn’t apply to the bushes/trees. I’ll go over it tomorrow during the stream and hopefully