> It looks to me that the shape of the cloud is governed by the shape of the
> container. In your case this is a flat box. Looking at the cloud from a
large
> distance (or when it is scaled to a smaller size), the box shape becomes
> visible. IMHO, if you adjust the size of the container then you can make
any
> shape of cloud. So, making a hammerhead shaped container and filling it
with
> "cloudy media" shoud get you where you want to be.
>
> -- 
> Maurice
>
> Quote of the minute:
> As a goat herd learns his trade by goat, so a writer learns his trade by
wrote.
>


  I tried something somewhat similar, but it requires the "cloudy media" to
have a uniform density, which may look ok from great distances, but wouldn't
work well up close.  The media in my inplementation isn't uniformly dense,
which allows the thickening of a cloud toward the center and a few other
different effects (visible shafts of light, realistic "puffy fringe"up close
for flyby animations, etc).  I originally tried isosurfaces and blob
objects, both of which I felt looked less realistic.
  My current attempt at thunderheads centers around using MegaPov's blob
pattern, which allows me to model the basic shape of the thunderhead using a
blob... seems to work so far, but after playing with media in Pov 3.5, you
quickly noticed difference between 3.1.  Still working, produced some nice
images (but very slow), will post a decent one in the next few days.
  I would also like to point out that if you are looking at the cloud from a
large distance/unique angle/wide camera angle, you should adjust the max and
min distances appropriately.  You can also achieve faster render times if
you don't have a needlesly large cloud object (beware of shadows that should
be present from portions of the clouds that are off screen, if you make the
cloud box too small your scene might not look right).



                     Reactor

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