September 11, 2011

Clouds

Perhaps it was a month ago, maybe even more, that I had an idea to generate clouds. I've seen it done with plain images, or stacked layers of perlin noise, both of which are interesting methods. I had an idea, however, to make clouds as they are made in the real world (or at least, as I believe they are). Water vapor in higher density is more opaque, and will appear white and fluffy. Lower density yields more transparent wisps of cloud.
Mah fluffeh clouds

I used this concept to generate vapor objects, which change size and transparency as they get closer and farther away from each other. Originally I used circles for the clouds, but I found that transparent circular gradients looked nicer. They move at different rates, separate and combine, and I have to say that I'm fairly pleased with the result.

Mista Roy's edit
Mista Roy made an edit, adding another layer of cloud, and changing the background color. As it was a bit laggy, I reduced the number of clouds, and I think that it still looks much more realistic and less cartoony than the first version.

1 comment:

  1. This here ( http://paris.cs.wayne.edu/~ay2703/research/publications/getPDF2INMIC2005.pdf ) is a surprisingly fast way of generating very Photoshop-filter-y cloud spans if anyone is interested. Basically multiple layers of bilinearly-scaled noise added to each other.

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