FXGuide talks to two of the guys behind some of this year’s SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival entries, including some great details with Damian Nenow on his impressive geometric clouds in 3dsMax.
Most people would do clouds now as volumetric renders, but I didn’t want to use a volumetric solution because it’s hard to control them and know the final shape. So I created them first as low-poly geometry based clouds. Then, using the Vertex Color Tool in Max, which is an almost forgotten tool, I could use the vertex color data to illuminate the clouds in the way I wanted.
The way it worked was I created these low poly elements, then covered them with thousands of sprites. They had alpha channel textures on them. You can then add photorealistic textures, like photographs of fragments of actual clouds, or you can add hand-drawn ones, which is what I did. So that’s why they look pictorial. I was able to get very fast render times – between 10 to 30 seconds just using a simple scanline renderer.
The Vertex Color tool is far from forgotten in Scientific visualization arenas, we use it regularly here. I can easily see how it’s not particularly useful amongst “normal” animation people tho.
via Behind the scenes with the Siggraph CAF winners | fxguide.
