Houdini Doodle: Cloudscape

Todays Cloudscape doodle was a lot of back and forth with different settings for clouds. More info below the doodle.

I started with this tut, “Create the Beautiful Cloudscape and Render it with Karma XPU – Getting Started With Houdini ep. 8” using the newer Cloud SOP and Karma render but started to deviate pretty quickly. Couple of issues that I had. Karma kept hard crashing to the desktop, which was a bummer I have been trying to get more into it as a Redshift replacement but it's just too unstable. The Camera Focal Length in Karma was set to something like 50000 which is not real-world numbers so I have no idea what lens I am using. Very odd.

An issue with the tut itself, his use of the Cloud Noise SOP was heavy handed with the Element Size kind of blowing the shape apart. He also did not get into the Scatter Shapes or Flatten tabs on the Cloud SOP which are really cool. I also doubled the Uniform Sampling to get a higher resolution on the clouds. Could possibly double it again I think. Also, I did move the whole project into Redshift as well. (I can’t embed the video for some reason, it kicks back an error. Sorry about that.)

I used a lot of techniques from this tut on making a cloud generator, but interesting enough, most of what he covers is now baked into the Cloud SOP itself which is nice. Flatten, scatter etc…

And here is a screencap showing the difference between 350 and 700 Uniform Sampling.