Particle-Based Clouds

Important - For this tutorial I will show the worded directions along with the exact keystrokes it takes to perform each step. If you are fluent enough with Blender you may not have a need for the keystrokes line. Each step within the keystrokes line will be separated by a semicolon. Arrows will indicate that you should be following a menu path.

Section 1 - Setup
Step 1:   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, you will want to delete the default cube. I normally have the screen set up to front view at the beginning.

-- “X”>Vertices ; “1”

My Screen now looks like this…

Step 2:  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 slightly to see your plane in 3D. A good way is to look through the camera. This way you will know exactly what it will look like when you decide to render your scene.

-- Add>Mesh>Plane ; “S” ; “X” ; “10” ; “0” (Camera View)

Step 3:  In order to see the clouds better when you render, 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 have done this, go to the Physics buttons and hit New in the physics tab.

-- “G” ; “Y” ; “5” ; “Enter”

-- “G” ; “X” ; “-5” ; “Enter”

-- “Tab” ; “F7” ; Click the “Physics Button” ; Click “New”

Great! We now have the particles hooked up to your plane. Right now, however, there are no particles to be seen. To see them you will have to make a few changes to the particle settings.

Section 2 - Settings & Texturing
Step 4:   So far we have set up the basic scene for our clouds. For this tutorial I am going to show you the clouds whilst stationary. As you can see, where the New button used to reside there are now two tabs worth of settings. On the Particles tab hit the Static button. Little dots should appear on the plane. To make the particles come off the plane go to the Particle Motion tab and then change the Normal setting to .250 and the Random setting to .100.

-- Click “Static” ; Click “Particle Motion” Tab ;

-- Click “Normal” ; Type in “.250”

-- Click “Random” ; Type in “.100”

Step 5:  In order to make these particles look like clouds, we have to make a texture for them. So go to the Materials tab and click on Add New. After that all of the material buttons will 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 MapTo tab, turn on Alpha. Finally, you should change the RGB color to white.

Instead of doing a keystrokes line here, I have these screen shots for you to look at and match on your blender file:

Step 6:  Now go to the Texture buttons. Click Add New. Under Texturing Type select Clouds in the slide out menu.

-- “F7” ; Click “Add New”

-- Select “Clouds” under texture type

Now we have to play with the texture settings:

- 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”. to “6”.

You can see these settings in the picture below:

Step 7:  This is the moment you have been waiting for! Go ahead and hit F12 on your keyboard to see what you have created! If you have duplicated all my settings perfectly, your results should look very similar to the image below.

Step 8:  The rest is up to you. Go back and change settings to see what they do, and make changes where you think they are appropriate. Also, if you want the clouds to move, you must turn off the Static button that we clicked at the very beginning of Section 2. After that you can go into the Animation Setup (At the very top where it says “SR:2-Model" click the scroll down menu and select Animation) and you can see the particles come out of the plane as you move down the timeline.

That’s all for now! If you have any comments or suggestions feel free to E-Mail me.