Martin wanted particle clouds for a few scenes in 1_01. This is only a shaded render.

So, what do you think? Too fast? Not random enough? Or something else?

ohhh ohhh ohhhh
wonderful wonderful wonderful

BEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFUl

Can you tell I LOVE it ? - Fabulous!!!!

PERFECT

What Nancy said

THAT'S what was missing! It completes the shot. However, with all that cloud cover, it's going to be dark down below.....which I don't think it is. Maybe a few gaps for the sun to get through?

Also, I hope we get around to improving that wing flap cycle.

Great cloud layer!


That's one lame wing flap... See what you can do, Ken.

ummm... umm...while you're at it - could you add some pseudo-arm bones ? maybe please? just a bicep, forearm, hand - no IK, squetch required, would love to be able to make those wings look like pseudo arms (lotta chutzpah I'm feeling this morning)

Hey that's a good looking mist.

Wooh that looks good Mark

There's no rigging in the wings, as Nancy points out. There is a muscle pose for the wing flap, who knew the goose was going to be flying, thought it was just wing flapping on the ground. Original rigging, I was told the rigging wasn't needed. This is going to be a problem if rigged, hair feathers will go crazy, cause of the length of them. I had to groom the hair in the poses so the feathers weren't going every which way or the hair feathers will have to be redone again. If we are going to rig the wings, we may want to consider getting rid of the hair feathers.

And thanks everybody, at least I know I'm on the right track.

I'm rendering one of the other scenes now.

Here's another scene.

Would there be a way to get a more defined appearance to the clouds? Something more like fluffy cumulus clouds?

Who knew it was gonna be dancing ? (I dun need no stinkin' feathers)

The new movie is nice too - It obviously obscures the castle more - but perhaps that's a good thing to wait for the reveal later on in the movie. Might be nice if the goose dives into the cloud bank at some point in the first one and maybe out of in 2nd?

Both shots remind me of low hanging clouds as well as early morning/evening San Francisco bay area fog. I like it. I like it.

The goose does go into the clouds in the first, I just didn't render it that long.

The scene after the first one, goes into a first person view of the goose revealing the winkie village, in the clouds and then out of them.

The second one I posted, is at the end of the sequence, no goose. Obsuring the castle is the point of the clouds.

Fluffy clouds will be a tough one, maybe a different image will help.

I don't know about rigging them Nancy. Maybe a new one could be done for that.

The second movie is cool too. I would suggest that the clouds don't move so fast as it makes them seem smaller (big things move slow).

I should be able to slow them down.

Well, I slowed it down, but I got some popping in it now.

[edit] updated, got rid of the popping.

I will take whatever rigging I can get - unless you intend on making those wing flaps better using muscle poses (as it is done now). There's no bones in the wings at all. Even the rooster's got a wing bone. Two bones would be even better. No constraints, no limits, no ik, no squetch needed.

I will just keep limping along. Well, actually the goosies will keep limping along with their wings outstretched or crumpled.

But the clouds look great.

I'll add the wing bones, like the rooster.

I've just worked on the wing flap in muscle mode. Also, there's previous animation that might be effected by rigging changes. Would it be better to save as a new model?

Yes new model would be fine - would love 2 bones per arm if possible

Is it one big emitter that is making this now? Several smaller emitters?

I recall a cloud technique shown here several years ago where one small emitter followed a curving path to spit out sprites during the preroll and then they hung there in a cloud-like shape.

Yeah, the slow clouds are nice now. You may want to change the direction of the wind to match the flags on the castle.

Don't commit any changes you did to the poses, Ken. That will affect animation already don't. Adding bones will not, since they won't be keyframed, and the wing poses are muscle motion that will still work whether they're rigged or not.

Nancy, added a goose_rigged_wing model to svn. Still weighting, but should work pretty well for you now.


Robert, it's one big emitter. I've done testing following a path in the past, but I did use it here. In order to get the scale on the clouds, you'll probably not see to much of a difference.

Ooooops. I have already. I needed to alter the flap pose to get better shape to the wings.....couldn't do it in the action. I don't think it'll affect you though. I also added some tail bones.

WONDERFUL Mark - Thank you thank you thank you (works terrific)

I was just say, altering the pose may affect existing animation.

I would say just by looking at how nice the new wing bones work - that you could now get a very nice wing flapping action using the bones and not affect previous animations (I know I used flapping wings pose slider in previous animations).

Pretty funny how we're talking about goose wings in the cloud thread.

Speaking of wings........Ken, I hope you didn't mind, but I updated the hair feathers.

adorable - I take back what I said before - I need those feathers.

He still needs some grooming.

Nope, don't mind. Do all the grooming you need. I didn't alter the flap pose drastically, so I don't think it'll effect the existing animation work.

Cool.

Get this, I tried a little experiment. I did a smartskin on one of the wing bones, and instead of moving cps, I groomed the feathers on the wing........ IT WORKED!

Just think, controlling hair by moving a bone around..........Pretty Cool!

Indeed! I didn't even know you could groom in a smartskin window. I'm sure that would have some applications.

I'm rendering a test and will post in the wip section of the forum.

Nice work, Mark!

These clouds look fantastic. I agree with others when they said the first tests were a little too fast in their movement. Other than that, they're beautiful!

Thanks.

The effect you're getting here is beautiful!
I've been experimenting with clouds to get some sort of volume shading effect. The best way I could come up with is changing the cookie-cut map to have a gradient shading with a nicely broken alpha "cloud shape"...
... in the animation I uploaded, gravity is set to (0,0,0) so the particles don't move, but the idea is the same.
I used grids to emitt different shades of particles. To get the different shades to work I incorperated different poses to control the particle color and size and emission rates for each patch on the grid. You don't need all of that control for this scene, but I was seeing how far I could push this experiment and A:M. The movement of the grids is controled by paths. This was only labor intensive in the rendering stage. I really didn't need as many emissions as I thought so the amount of particles in the scene is way more than my computer wanted to handle. Because of the shape of the cookie-cut map, you don't need very many to make it look like a cloud. I will try something lower rez later.
By the way... I can't find the project to upload it for you, but I have the grid model/with poses. Let me know if this will help out any. If you want the TGA of the clouds cookie cut textures, I can upload or send to you via email, but you could actually make the one I made by copy/paste of the images I have here.

That is just pure genius ! Way, Way Way to go there..... once more , Superb!

I found the project for the fake volume clouds. It's a 3.81 MB zip file. It uses A:Mv14... it may work in v13, but I don't know.

::CAUTION:: it will emit a LARGE amount of particles so I have two choreographies to choose from... Chor1 has one cloud (you'll have to change the camera POV to get a good angle.)... Chor2 has the multiple clouds with a nice backround sky image.

Thanks Rich, very cool of you, a good amount of creative thinking must have went into this special of special effects...... I'm still amazed at the workings of this most realistic clouds....

i´ve experimentet with clouds a few hours by myself lately and i think i really got a good result... the sprite system has two emitters, one with a white cloud particle png and one with a grey one.... .the technique is similar to entity´s clouds, just a bit more movement within the cloud itsself and smoother edges because of the pngs and fading in the particles at birth and death....

here´s a 6 second sample of it and zip-file including project-file and images, for those who´re interested...

Wonderful R&D on clouds going on here! They all look interesting and they all look like they'd have a place in the cloud repetoire.

I agree about the clouds. Very good work.

Very impressive Sebastian. I like it.

Sebastian:

I am really impressed by what you did. I tried to make a PNG with nice fading edges like yours but couldn't quite get the hang of it. Would you mind sharing your technique?

Thank you

Eric

did you download the project file? i think the trick is to give the particles a good amount of spin and animate a fade in and out for the particles so they don´t only appear and disappear... select the "opacity over life" in your emitters properties and then animate it... in my case the opacity starts at 0% with 0%, goes up to 100 at 10%, holds that till 90% and then fades back to 0%... the time is descripted as percent because you animate the "over-life opacity" so you can change the life of your clouds an still have the same fading percentwise...

oh, i misunderstood i think... you want to know how to make the particles itsself in photoshop... the smoke particle is made very easy: create a new empty photoshop document without background, say 400x400 pixels. fill the layer with a blue color so you can see what you´re doing (since the smokeparticles are white it would be a blind flight). create a new layer. take the brush tool and choose a soft edged tooltip, size 200. set the opacity to 10 or something like that. then brush a spot, you will barely see it. create a new layer, choose a smaller tip, like 20 or 30 pixels width. brush some wild lines, it´s totally unimportant how that looks at the moment.. choose a bigger tip like 80 or 100 pixels and click some soft white spots in that layer. then choose filter/distort/wave... set the number of generators to 1 and play around with the wavelength and amplitude (higher wavelength and lower amplitude is what you want). apply the filter. duplicate that layer, distort again. do the same procedure another time, maybe once again... and there it is. make sure that no layer is cut of by the documets edges, if it is, just take the rubber tool to make soft edges. hide the blue layer and then save as png.


here´s the photoshop-document so you can take a look at it.

Vielen Dank Sebastian. Die Wolken sind wirklich Erste Klasse!!!