Houdini

Houdini Cloud FX tweaks

Side FX added a new Cloud FX toolkit a version or two ago, and I recently had a chance to mess around with it. Their Cloud Rig shelf tool is pretty great out of the box… pick a shape, turn it into a cloud, done. The Cloud Noise and Cloud Light SOPs that are built into the rig setup can get some pretty good results, but it’s not exactly what I wanted… I was looking for a solution that would be a little less dependent on the volume container resolution, and more based on textures instead. It’s not necessarily the greatest solution for swirling, dynamic simulations, but for more-or-less static clouds, it gets resolution-independent nice results that are quick to generate. Maya’s fluid shader supports textures by default, but the Cloud Shader that Houdini uses doesn’t have much in the way of textural control, so I had to make some customizations, and that’s what this post is about. Check the link below to keep reading…

(more…)