Eevee Volume Displacement for Easy Clouds [Blender 2.91] | English

>> Hey. What's up, Blender users?

I am Jonathan.

And in today's video, I will show you how we
can use the new volume modifiers in Blender 2.91

to easily create clouds in EEVEE.

This is especially useful because now
we can see our cloud in the viewport

and are not limited to node-only setups.

This video is pre-recorded and uploaded.

So if in the meantime any other
creators published a tutorial

about the same topic, I'm sorry.

And with that said, let's
get straight into the video.

And by the way, if you enjoy my
content, consider subscribing

because I upload a new video every Saturday.

To create a cloud with the new
volume modifiers, we, of course,

first need a base mesh that
represents our cloud.

And I'll create this one with metaballs.

So let's add in a metaball
and maybe scale it down.

And now, with Shift-D, we can
just duplicate it and move them

into a shape that roughly represents a cloud.

We also don't need much detail in the shape
because we'll later use displacement modifiers

on our volume to create all the
little details in our cloud.

So once you have a basic metaball
shape, let's select it and press Ctrl-A

and choose visual geometry to mesh.

This will convert our metaballs to a mesh.

And now, we can use this empty volume object
together with the mesh to volume modifier

to create a volume out of this mesh.

And as you can see right here, we
also have a volume displace modifier,

which we will use to later add all
the little details to our cloud.

Now, this modifier has some settings,

but the most important one is
definitely the voxel amount one.

We can use this slider to control
the resolution of our volume.

But for now, I will keep it relatively
low, to about 64 voxels, because, that way,

all the volume displace modifiers
will all load pretty quick.

So, let's start with the first iteration,
and let's add in some of the bigger details.

So let's click on new and then this
button right here, and choose clouds.

I will use a scale of maybe about two.

We can also adjust the depth
for some finer detail.

We can now play around with the strength slider.

But be aware that if you slide
it too high, Blender could crash.

This happened to me in the past.

You can also see that the volume
is clearly displaced on an axis.

This might become apparent later.

But right now, we will keep
the strength pretty low.

So this shouldn't be an issue.

Great. Now that we have some bigger
details, we, of course, want to add more.

So let's add in some medium ones.

Let's again select clouds
but now maybe a size of one.

And you can already see that we get
some finer details around the edge.

This is great.

And we can now also adjust the strength,

maybe even into the negative
direction, to get a cloud shape we like.

And just like in the normal displace modifier,

you can also choose an object
to control the texture mapping.

And this is already looking good,
so let's add even smaller details.

You can now see that we have to turn
down the strength a lot, to maybe 0.25.

Great. And if we now up the
voxel amount to maybe 128,

we can really see all the detail in our cloud.

Okay, that's great.

But there are still some things left to do.

Let's firstly go into rendered
mode, add in a sun lamp right above,

and give it a strength of maybe 10.

We will use this sunlight
to just light up our cloud.

To make this more pretty, let's
also enable volumetric shadows,

and let's turn down the tile size to two pixels.

And we can already see that our cloud
is starting to look like a cloud.

But clouds often have a flattened bottom.

And we can easily do this with just a few nodes.

So let's select our volume, click new,
and let's add in a gradient texture.

For now, I'll set the tile size back to eight
pixels so everything renders a lot faster.

We can now plug the factor
into the density slider.

And with CTRL T, add in a texture
coordinate and a mapping node.

You can see that nothing is
really happening right now,

so let's select the object coordinates.

And now, our gradient is cutting
off our cloud in the middle.

But this happens on the wrong axis.

So let's rotate it 90 degrees on the y-axis.

And now, we can see that
our cloud has a flat bottom.

But this falloff is right now pretty harsh.

So let's add in a mix RGB
node, as well as noise texture,

and mix the vector with the factor of the noise.

And if we now adjust the slider, you can see

that we can make the falloff
a bit more interesting.

We can now, of course, adjust the noise size
and make it more noticeable with a color ramp.

Now, all that's left to do is maybe
add in a math node, set it to multiply.

And now, we can make the cloud a lot thicker.

Great. Let's change our tile size
back to two and preview our cloud.

And this is already looking pretty good.

But, of course, we are still
missing our sky background.

So let's add in a camera, clear out everything,
and rotate it 90 degrees on the x-axis.

And now, we can just move it
back and have it face our cloud.

And now, let's add in our world background.

The easiest way to do this is to
add in another gradient texture.

And you can see that, again,
it is on the wrong axis.

So let's rotate it 90 degrees on the y-axis.

Change it to easing to have a smoother gradient.

And let's add in a color ramp, and now
make the one handle a light blue color

and the other one a dark blue color.

But you can see that we are
only seeing the light blue one.

And this is because all the
dark is left on the top.

But we can easily change this
by adjusting the X location.

And now, we have our nice
gradient in the background.

Awesome! And now, we have a
very simple cloud in Blender.

And we can even just use this
mesh, scale it maybe up or down,

to easily create variations of our cloud.

For example, just like this.

In the end, I would suggest you to turn
up the samples right here, to maybe 128,

and also turn up the voxel amount.

Keep in mind, this voxel amount is
relative to what you did in your scene.

Okay. Great!

And that's basically it.

This is how we can now easily create
custom clouds and volumes in Blender EEVEE.

Right now, I would only suggest you to
use this in EEVEE because, in Cycles,

some interesting visual bugs can
occur, like blockiness in your volume.

I hope this tutorial was helpful.

I hope you learned something.

And if you did, consider liking and subscribing.

And you'll see us in the
next video next Saturday.