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Marc Whitelaw, a renowned asset-maker, Instructor, and Lead Artist at ILM, continues his series of photorealistic cloud simulations with a new fascinating specimen that, at first glance, looks more like a real-life photo than something made by a human in 3D.
According to the creator, this stupendous cumulonimbus volumetric cloud was simulated in Houdini 20.5 using Karma XPU, a selectable engine within the Karma renderer that utilizes both CPU and GPU at the same time. Besides Houdini, Marc also employed Blender Cycles to render the asset on not just one, but two RTX 4090 GPUs. Most of the denoising work was done after the rendering, during the post-production stage.
While the project is entirely new, the working progress behind it is incredibly similar to the one described in Marc's comprehensive Houdini Cloud Simulation Course, involving the use of Houdini's Pyro and Blender Cycles. If you'd like to study the secrets behind the setup and learn how you can create similar simulations yourself, we highly recommend purchasing the course via the artist's official website.
You can also check out Marc's three-part video tutorial describing the basic setup for rendering cloud VDBs in Houdini 20 using Karma:
See more of Marc's works here and don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
This pack can help you get that realism that 3D often lacks with various different water stains captured from real surfaces.