req Cloud Mesh + Textiure

[Peregrine]

I may be wrong, but I don't think there are any cloud meshes. I believe the sky is actually just a texture.

 

 

 

Sound like a cloud would be pretty difficult to make in 3DS Max too.

 

 

Actually, a cloud would be VERY easy to make in 3dsmax. Well, the model at least... getting it to look good in Oblivion, that's an entirely different problem. I don't know if Oblivion can even support the falloff shaders you'd need to make the transparent edges work correctly. Remember, clouds aren't solid objects, so I have a feeling anything Oblivion could do would look really cartoonish at close range.

[Konfusion]

sigh...the dust clouds don't work...

 

Is there any way of making a mesh, with white particles floating around in the middle, bumping into each other and stuff? That would make it look like a moving cloud or something...

 

EDIT: Merged your posts... I shouldn't have to tell you about double posting by now.

 

- Switch

[Shuugruk]

I'm not really sure what you are trying to do there, but creating clouds should be a no-brainer, as long as you don't want to get highly detailed, realistic and volumetric clouds, that the player can walk through. Basically just create a stretched sphere, box or whatever geometrically simple shape you can imagine and slap a transparency map onto it. No need for falloff/occlusion/transparency-shaders. Use multiple layers of scaled or slightly rotated shapes to get better visuals and more details, although that will quickly lead to quite the performance hit.

 

And no.. there are absolutely NO meshes for realistic clouds. That would simply be insane, as they would quickly reach a completely impossible polygon-count. (The ones you see in pre-rendered images or animations are usually volumetric particle-systems and they take FOREVER to render, unless you start using tricks for faking those, as well. Heheh...) The most simple way is the one above, another way would be creating fog-volumes or volumetric particle systems or making really good use of shader programs. I think the latest beta version of OBMM 0.9 comes with an highly experimental shader program editor for Oblivion - keeping that in mind and after some further development and thorough trial-and-error, you might be able to come up with a good vertex/pixel-shader to 'emulate' real volumetric clouds, that you could even walk through. But if you just need them to move or look somewhat good at a distance, I'd go for the simple approach and use simple layered shapes and alpha/transparency maps, maybe using a little scripting to move them around and such. (Don't know if Oblivion supports animated textures, which would mean you could probably animate the transparency maps and 'fake' cloud movement, but then you could just stick with background images, as well.)

 

Again.. I'm really very, very sure that you will NOT find a realistic looking cloud mesh anywhere, as that would just require insane amounts of polygons and therefore would kill performance quickly. It wouldn't be volumetric anyway, unless you turn it to be a container for volumetric fog and that would surely get any current gaming hardware to it's knees - seeing as good raytracing hardware even needs at least a couple minutes to render a single frame containing true volumetric fog/clouds or whatever. If you're really keen on using a cloud mesh, then just grab Blender or whatever tool you prefer and stick some spheres together, stretch and scale them until you have enough of them to get what you're closely looking for. But I'd suggest going for any of the 'faking methods', especially when you don't want the player to be able to walk through them. Aynthing from using the simple transparency map approach to the more complicated particle effects and ultimately custom vertex/pixel-shader programs, which would need additional simple meshes, as well.

 

You'll have to fake that somehow. =)

[Konfusion]

EDIT: Merged your posts... I shouldn't have to tell you about double posting by now.

 

- Switch

I would appreciate it if the tone were not so annoyed. I tend to have browser-problems in the dorm. I am sorry if I double post, I definetly do not do it on purpose...

 

I'll see what I can do with Blender...I'll try finding a tutorial, as I haven't made any models so far - or textures for that matter...