Cloud Tutorial

Blender 3D: Clouds If you have any comments or suggestions for this tutorial or future tutorials, please visit the forum at http://www.forum.darkscarab.com

For this tutorial I will have the worded directions along with the exact keystrokes it takes to get the step done. If you are fluent enough with Blender you may not have to look at the keystrokes line. Each step within the keystrokes line will be highlighted like this: Example. Arrows will indicate that you should be following a menu path. SECTION 1 -- SETUP Let us begin by opening a new scene. -- Ctrl X -OR- File --> New --> Erase All If you have kept the default scene that Blender automatically sets up than you will want to delete the default cube. I normally have the screen set up at front view at the beginning. -- X --> Vertices ; 1

Add a plane. This is what the cloud will be emitted out of after the particle setting is added to the object. Skew the plane along the X-Axis by a factor of 10 and then move your view a bit to see your plane in 3D. A good way is to look through the camera. This way you will know exactly what the scene will look like when you decide to render. -- Add --> Mesh --> Plane ; S ; X ; 10 ; 0(Camera View)

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In order to see the clouds better when you render lets move the plane back by about 5 on the Y-Axis and also by -5 on the X-Axis. In order to see the particles you must be in object mode. After you do that, go to the Physics buttons and hit new in the physics tab. -- G ; Y ; 5 ; Enter -- G ; X ; -5 ; Enter

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SECTION 2 - SETTINGS AND TEXTURING So far we have gotten the set up done for our clouds. After hitting ‘Add New’ a whole slew of buttons and settings appeared onto the screen. Some changes that I am going to make include making ‘Amount’ 2000, ‘End’ 250, ‘Life’ 100, ‘Normal’ 5, and ‘Random’ 1. -- Click Amount ; Type in 2000 -- Click End ; Type in 250 -- Click Life ; Type in 100 -- Click Normal ; Type in 5 -- Click Random ; Type in 1

To see the particles come out of the plane you can either hit Alt-A to start the rough animation or you can split on of the views and turn it into the timeline as you can see at the bottom of the viewing window and above the buttons.

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In order to make these particles look like clouds, we have to make a texture for it. So, let’s go to the Materials tab. Click on 'Add New'. All of the material buttons should appear. Click on Halo. Go into the Shaders tab and change the Halo size to 1, Hard to 35, and Add to .080. You also want to select HaloTex and Shaded. Over in the Textures Tab hit Add New and go to the MapTo tab, turn on ‘Alph’. Lastly you should change the RGB color to white.

Now go to the texture buttons. Under texturing type select clouds in the slide out menu. -- Select Clouds under texture type. Now we have to get the texture settings done. I’ll go right down the list: - In the Colors tab, (this is in the same box that the “Add new” button was in), change the Bright to 2.000 and the Contr to 4.000 - In the Clouds box, select Hard Noise, set the NoiseSize to 2.000 and the NoiseDepth to 6.

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This is the moment you have been waiting for. Go ahead and hit F12 and see what you have just created. If you did yours exactly like mine, it should look similar to this.

The rest is up to you. Go back and change settings to see what they do and make changes where you think you need changes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------For more tutorials, go to http://www.darkscarab.com/tutorials.html If you have any comments or suggestions for this tutorial or future tutorials, please visit the forum at http://www.forum.darkscarab.com

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