Tips & tricks: volumetric clouds

If you are using physically sky to illuminate your scene, you’ll soon find, that sky engine lacks realism. The sky engine in Cinema is rather old and it shows.

Rendered objects are to die for, shadows are deep as Mother Theresa’s soul, reflections are shiny as gypsy’s teeth, and refractions are breathtaking as ice cubes in you whisky. But what about sky and horizon? Not so much…

You could add some clouds on to the “sphere” that is sky, and that will add some realism, but not much. Especially when you zoom in or out with your camera. Sky simply does not move… it’s completely static.

But there’s another option: volumetric clouds. You can add these wherever you want and as much as you want. What’s great is that they are an actual part of the scene, not just “painted” on sky sphere. This means that if you zoom in or out with your camera, clouds will “move” correspondingly.

So, let’s jump right in :