Nm-8 Skies
PROCEDURAL CLOUDS
world background node setup
for complex shading in eevee and cycles
NM-8 Skies is a set of 10 world-backgrounds with parameters for:
NM-8 Skies is a set of 10 world-backgrounds with parameters for:
- sun color and angle
- cloud color
- sky color (plug in a sky texture)
- cumulus (how bulged the coulds are)
- translucency (light shines through clouds)
- godrays (beams through the clouds)
- parallax depth
- bump
- offset (for wind or camera movement)
Additionally, you can use a "camera-movement" node to link the camera position to the offset of the clouds. that way they move with the camera and seem much more integrated into your scene.
And there's a "planetmap" node which gives you mapping coordinates for a planet-image-texture (for example the moon).
The mapping coordinates rely on a normal as input, to define the direction where the image shall be placed. And a scalefactor to define the size of the image on the sky.
In a natural night scene, the sun can be understood as a moonlighting the clouds. Sun direction would, therefore, be a good vector input for the planetmap-node, which shall map the moon texture.
Have a look at the video to see the node setup in action. Mean render times are about 8 seconds per Frame with full HD. You can render them with 1 sample per pixel, which already gives crisp and animation-stable results. Choose from a library of 9 world presets and adjust the colors and parameters to your scene. This library will grow in time, customers will be noticed when an update occurs.
Why use this shader over others?
The quality is the big difference.
It calculates a shading normal for the clouds, to know a much better light distribution, than other prodcts. Therefor you could call mn8 skies a 3d cloud shader.
While others are 1-d cloud shaders. Their lighting has no direction, their clouds dont have lit/shady sides, no bump effect and no cumulus parameter to change the bulging of vapor.
"shading" means it reacts on the light and the direction from which this light comes. in other products, the clouds look the same no matter where the light comes from.
nm-8 skies is shading the clouds 3 dimensional, which enables the following effects:
- dualcolored clouds(depending on the shadingnormal the cloud may have shady cloud color, or suncolor)
- cumulus (a 3d shadingnormal enables to bulge puffy clouds)
-translucency (light penetrates the clouds based on their thickness and shadingnormal, so that only lit sides of a cloud are translucent, shady parts are not. again other products dont even differ between lit and shady sides...)
-bump (a shadingnormal helps to get some concrete relief into the cloudsurface)
-godrays: the sunlight casts beams through the clouds.
and there are some further features unrelated to the shadingnormal:
-cameramovement: the clouds follow the camera movement, so that you can integrate the background spatially to your scene, rather than have a static wallpaper on a firmament thats infinitely far away.
-planetmaps will help to easily map image textures (of planets) onto the sky, by simply using a normal node.
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