Subtitles of the Movie

One of the greatest additions to Carrara a couple of versions ago was Volumetric Clouds. These are Clouds that actually interact with the light in your scene, meaning the brighter the light is the brighter the clouds are, or if the light goes away, the clouds become dark, just like the real thing. Additionally, if the light source is behind the cloud shining toward the Viewer, just like real clouds, you get this really bright edge and then the center of the cloud goes dark. Let's take a look at that. I haven't created a scene yet because we need to be very aware that Volumetric Clouds are scaled to work on medium and large scenes. If you insert a Cloud into a small scene, a Volumetric Cloud, you won't even see it. It's not going to be there, and you'll see why in just a second. I'm going to insert one into a medium scene and then we'll probably close that and insert one into a large scene. Let's use Medium, and we'll open our scene. Our Clouds are over here just to the left of the Natural Primitives we were looking at. The 4D Clouds that we looked at is kind of a Non-Volumetric Cloud because it doesn't really behave and interact with the light the way Volumetric Clouds do. The Volumetric itself is just above it, and I'll Enable that and click on the floor. Now watch what happens. We're taken immediately to the Cloud Modeling Room, the little wrench is illuminated, so we know that's where we are. Let's go back to the Assembly Room real quick. You'll notice that we've got a Hot Point set right there on the edge but this thing is huge. I'm going to press zero on my keypad to zoom out to it. Now you can see I'll deselect it. Our Modeling Box is this little teeny area in the center. These are definitely scaled to work in large formats. Now you can scale this down and I'll do that now. It changes the effects as little bit when you try to pull something like this off, but as long as you know that then changing it's not a big deal. A quick Render will go ahead and show us our Cloud, and it looks like it's barely there. Let's go back into the Cloud Editor. We see in the Preview Area that the Cloud actually shows up just fine, so what's going on? Well, it has to do with the scale of Clouds. Here we're talking about .2 miles versus .2 miles and what we've scaled it down to in our scene, if we go back to the Motion Tab in our Assembly Room, we've got this down to 25 feet; that's the reason it's not showing up. So you need to either put this into a scene large enough to accommodate it, or we can come back in here and we can simply change this down to something that would be like .002 and likewise, but it's just going to be easy, instead of jockeying these numbers around to have a large scene. If you put a Cloud like this into a medium scene, which I do sometimes, the best thing to do Ð let me actually delete that Ð is move it into the distance away from the camera, that allows any camera optics to take place just neat stuff like that. So, we'll go ahead and reinsert one into our scene. I'm going to leave the default settings for a second, we'll zoom out, and you can actually just move this further away from your scene. Let me insert a sphere in our scene. A little shortcut here Ð I'm going to zoom into the sphere and our Cloud is in the background, so if we do a Render now we'll see the Cloud in the distance, it shows up just fine. So, that's one way to kind of cheat the scaling effects of that, but did want to call that to your attention. So, let's look at the Parameters of the Cloud real quickly. We will select Cloud, let me stop that Area Render, and hop back into the Modeling Room for it. Really easy to work with. There are Cloud Presets worth checking out to kind of see how these shapes are created and defined. An important thing here is whether these Clouds interact to all lights. If they do it takes longer to react, or respond in the Render Room. I usually say only with Sunlight for natural outdoor scenes, it's simply faster that way. You can use Global Illumination if you want, especially if you're using these Clouds for special effects like you actually use it as fog in a forest or low-lying trees or something, a little Global Illumination will work for that. We can choose different Cloud types, and this is where you choose it: a Cumulus 1, Cumulus 2, and within these selections, if you're going to do an animation, you do have a chance to animate it. It's not very intuitive, though. Let me show you how it works. I'm going to go ahead and open the Sequencer right now so we can see that. Here's how you animate these clouds. We've got a cloud that we can see right here, and this is a rather large interface, so I'm sorry I can't make that any smaller. I can disconnect that maybe and pull that up. I don't know that that's going to help us out. So, let me go ahead and expand that. Here's how you animate. At Timeline 1, or wherever you are in your animation, there's already a keyframe. If there's not you can create one by choosing Create Keyframe. You can move to the next place, or where you want the animation to stop, in this case it's 4 seconds, and click the Shuffle button. This is going to change how your cloud looks. All that's left to do now is add how much time you want this change to take, from the first shape to the second shape. In this case, four seconds. That's how you animate the Clouds. It's different than any way you animate in your scene, but this way the Cloud shape will change. The descriptors for this, the Density of the Cloud, Underside Flatness, very self-explanatory. You can work with it and simply shape the cloud the way you want to. There are different Noise parameters that you can work with, but over here in the Colors we can go ahead and choose how bright the Clouds are, and this feature is the one I wanted to speak to: Silver Lining. This is when you set the light behind the scene, how the edges of the cloud light up brighter than the interior. You can exaggerate that by pushing up the value a little bit. Real easy to work with. Powerful tool, fun to play with Ð that's Carrara's Volumetric Clouds.