My last look back at my work for The Wonderful Adventure of Nils project. There were scenes where the characters on the stage needed to look like they were flying through the sky. So I looked into the best method to create some fluffy clouds for this scene.
Firstly I found a method that would apply a texture that gave a cloud effect when applied to a polygonal object. This effect was created using a samplerInfo node (controlled with a remapValue) layered on top of a Cloud texture and plugged into the transparency of a lambert:
Then a cloud texture displacement map was plugged into the shader group to add grain to the cloud. This is the final graph network:
And this was an initial test render:
I quite liked the effect, but after modelling and sculpting polygon clouds and applying the texture, I thought they looked too blobby!
In the end I decided to go for fluid clouds which produced a much more realistic look. I found a very useful tutorial on fluid clouds and along with the help of this blog post did a lot of tweaking to the settings to get the look I wanted.
This was the final look:
I also had a go at doing some stormy clouds and lightning, so from another great tutorial I used a volume axis field to create cylindrical movement, then using locators made some simple dynamic effect lightning: