 In this video, I'm going to teach you how to create stylized, puffy looking clouds using Cinema 4D and Redshift that'll make Bob Ross proud. Making clouds is actually super easy. You don't even need particles at all. All you need is Cinema 4D R20 and above and Redshift. And this technique that I'm going to be showing you is super flexible. You can apply it to any object and you'll have the ability to easily adjust the style to make any kind of cloud that you want. Now be sure to download the project file so you can follow along. You'll find that link in the description below. This cloudy tutorial was brought to you by the Little Rays of Sunshine over at School of Motion where you never learn alone. When you sign up for a course you'll be learning from and with artists from all around the world. Your courses are based on real-world bridge so you can see and learn what it's like to create client work and by the end of the course have a few new pieces to add to your portfolio. Each School of Motion student is assigned a teaching assistant that ensures you get all the technical or creative support that you need. Way more helpful than fire emoji comments. Now if that all sounds good to you check the link below and use the offer code Idesign100 to save $100 off of any of my 3D courses. Alright? On to the tutorial. The first step is just creating your basic cloud geometry. This could be literally any shape but I'm going to try to make this look like an actual cartoony cloud so I just got some spheres in my case that are orientated in a kind of a cloud-ish formation here and what I'm going to do is with cartoon clouds they usually have like the bottoms chopped off that sounded very violent but we're just going to flatten out the bottom here of these clouds and we're going to do that by using just a melt deformer and we're going to make this a child of the cloud. No, in the same level of hierarchy here so it's going to affect all of our spheres and we're just going to bring down the strength to 0% and now I can just select that melt deformer bring this down and kind of just again just chop off these spheres maybe I can go and select this sphere maybe get this a little bit bigger but something like that and you can see that my objects are a little chunky so I'm just going to go into my spheres and we'll just bring up the segments to about 200 or so and we'll evenly subdivide this using the icosahedron type and if I hit N and then B you can see how nicely subdivided this is versus just your standard so icosahedron in fairly high segments because what we're going to do next is add even more fidelity and more detail more lumpiness using not just more geometry but a displacer so I'm going to hit N and then A to go to garage shading without lines and let's add a displacer I'm just going to place this in the same level of hierarchy as the clouds let's go into the shading tab and let's add some noise so you can see we got all this lumpy noise here and again if we did not have high segments this would look all cruddy and janky let's unjankify that and bring that up and let's go to this splacer and this just looks kind of lumpy the one noise type that I thought looked really good with this kind of like a cartoony stylized cloud was this veronoi one and if I increase the size here you can see this looks not like a nice cloud almost looks like a bunch of low poly rocks or something but if we go into this splacer and then go to the object tab and invert the height you can see this looks just very lumpy and you can see those black and white values of this noise doing their thing and one thing we can do is clamp the high clip here and now we just got some kind of almost looks like warts or something like that which is lovely but if we increase the scale here basically what we're doing is just creating a little bit more of the lumpy detail here without adding more spheres so I can go and just the seed to whatever I want and we're just looking at like we're getting these extra little lumps on the side there and I think this is looking pretty good and again the more you bring this clip down the more or less you have these lumps all over the place so I would say let's say this looking good right there good seed right there what we can do now is use this geometry to create our cloudy fog and what we're going to use is a fog volume to create that little cloudy look and how we can do that is by going to our volume builder menu grabbing a volume builder and just placing everything underneath that volume builder and you can see we have all those 3D pixels those voxels and the lower the centimeters here the more fidelity we get smaller pixels more resolution the bigger the pixel the less detail it is the more pixelated everything looks but we're not actually going to use this signed distance field we're going to generate fog volume okay and once we change that to fog you can see that instead of those little 3D pixels we now have all these little dots and they're kind of spread apart so as of right now we don't have a very dense fog volume so to do that I'm just going to bring down that voxel size to 2 one thing you should note is the lower this number the more memory it's going to take up you can always keep track of the memory down here but I found that if you work with a size of like 2 or something and make all your adjustments you can lower this down to say 1 or whatever before you finally render but as far as working it's pretty good to keep it with 2 and everything stays pretty light in your viewport and in your render but if we go in actually render this fire off the redshift render view you're going to see that absolutely nothing is going on here and that's because even though we're generating a fog volume using this volume builder we have no way of this being compatible to being rendered by redshift until we do two things number one is going to our material manager here and creating a redshift material and a volume material okay what we're going to do is we're going to apply that to our volume builder here and there's one other step we need to take and that is by going into our redshift volume material and just choosing the channel that we want to be rendered as a fog volume and if we go to the drop down menu you'll see there is this volume builders area and you should see the name of your volume builder in here so in my case my volume builder is named volume builder default name so it shows up here I'm just going to select it and still nothing happens okay and that's because we don't have any lights in our scene so let me just close out of this redshift volume material real quick and let's go to redshift objects and let's just grab a redshift sky here and wait for it boom we got this chunky pixelated mess and here's where we can adjust things like the turbidity which kind of scatters the light we can bring up the intensity here let's blur the horizon and just kind of move it down so we just get this nice like kind of glowy sunlight nice nice vibes there let's actually go in maybe we'll create an infinite lights that kind of act as a sunlight and we'll hit the R key for rotation and let's really crank up the intensity here to like say 6 and here we can kind of change the color to maybe like a orangish type of look okay so we're not going to really concern ourselves too much with the color but just that we can like adjust the angle and see all the details so if we really angle this you can see all this little pixelated mess going on here and that is because if you look at our fog volume all we see is like white okay if we go to our volume builder and click on our clouds here you can see there's this inside voxel falloff and this maximum voxel falloff well let's just go ahead and let's just put in a value of 10 and you can see that all of these voxels all these dots are no longer white we have this gradation from black to white and you can see that in our render view everything just kind of smoothed out so what's going on well in our voxel you can either have a value of zero or one and one is fully white and zero is black and you can think of that as like your transparency or your opacity so whatever is one or white just like a full opacity and whatever is black will have 0% opacity and if we increase this voxel falloff to 20 you'll see how this smooths out even more because we're kind of eating away at the volume making it a little bit more transparent on the outside and slowly bringing up the opacity on the inside creating this nice transition okay and when we don't have that all these voxel pixels are just totally on 100% opacity and that's why it looks all chunky now what I like to do is just use this maximum voxel falloff and turn that on and what this will do is create a nice gradient from black or zero to white or one and you'll have this nice smoothed gradation from 0% opacity to 100% and you can see how even our edges are kind of see through now now one way we can kind of control how thick our volume is or how much light it can absorb is by going back into our redshift volume material here let me just add an object in here like a nice little cylinder and let's just rotate this like so amazing render here okay and you'll see that this volume is fairly thick we can't really see through it and that's where these two options here they're very important as far as what your volume material looks like and the first up is this scatter coefficient which basically means how much light is penetrating your volume to the inside of your volume so if I crank up this value you can see how bright this gets and that's because more light is being scattered within the volume and it's just illuminating everything now this absorption coefficient means that that light is going to be more absorbed and you're going to see this looks darker and darker and looks more like smoke because what this means is that more light is being absorbed so that's why it's looking a little bit darker so what you can do if you want to have like a very see-through volume is have this absorption coefficient fairly low and that's too bright we have too much scatter so I'll bring this down and you can start to see really touchy here but you can start to see how let's do like 0.01 and 0.01 you can see how that's very transparent but you can see how you can push these values to make I just put in the same number again 0.1 how you can make this kind of transparenty cloud type of look and if you want thicker clouds you can adjust both of these values to make thicker clouds with less see-through properties there so play around with those values you can also remap this as well using these ramps to get whatever type of look that you want so if I like do something like this you can see how see through our edges are so something like that so a lot of control here can even adjust the color so what is that color getting scattered so something like blue and then you can go into the absorption change what color is getting absorbed and you can see that it's a little luminate like that color is spilling over which is pretty cool so a lot of cool looks that you can have going on there it's going to set that back to default on both of these so I'd say that's looking good we'll close out of the redshift volume material and you know you could be at the point where it's like actually this looks pretty good that looks pretty stylized but I'm still seeing a lot of those chunky values in here so what we can do to kind of smooth everything out so we're not seeing those pronounced little bumps is going into our volume builder and using something called a fog smooth and if you want to think of your voxels as 3D pixels you can think of your fog smooth as like a Gaussian blur for those pixels and as I apply that you can see how that kind of smooth out these details and we're getting a little bit of that weird pixelation back but that's okay for right now because right now it just looks a little bit too fluffy we kind of lost some of that detail some of that fidelity so what we can do is I just explain how we have these like black and white values values of 0 to 1 black to white and that kind of controls the transparency of your different voxels what we can do is actually use noise to adjust those black and white values and create more fluffy looking clouds okay so how we can introduce some noise to our fog volume is two ways we can either use a random field or a shader field and what I can do is just drag and drop this shader field as a child of the volume builder and if I click on my volume builder you can see there's our shader field and you can use all these different types of blending mode so just like fractal noise in After Effects or Photoshop you can multiply these grayscale values in a shader field if we actually go to our shader field and load up some noise right now there's nothing in this shader field so let's go and grab some noise and let's make this really pronounced so let's just crank up the contrast and you're going to see that nothing's happening because we gotta go to our volume builder and change this mode from normal to multiply and you can see that everything just kind of disappeared they didn't disappear they just kind of transformed into a weird cube and that's because by default the creation space of this noise or whatever is being generated by the shader field is just a tiny box so if we change this to object below it's going to generate that noise from the shader field using the volume of the objects below so now you can see in the shader field these black and white values eating away at some of our volume here so whatever is black if you multiply it on white it's going to make it darker right so whatever is white in our noise is going to just remain and maintain that volume opacity and whatever is black is going to be away at that volume there so what we can do is we use that really nice Roanoi 1 noise to create this splacer let's try that same noise in here in our shader field let's just increase the scale and you can see that these look like almost looks like coral if this is small enough which is kind of interesting but what we want to do is actually invert this so invert the black and white value so all I need to do is just I'm just going to click and drag on this color chip make that color just put 100 in the value area there and now whatever white is going to be maintained and whatever is black again is going to be multiplied and eat away at our volume and you can see that if we make this small enough this kind of looks like a cool effect in itself these nice little poofs so what we can do at this point is maybe adjust the contrast here and the high clip and you can see how we have these nice little puffs that looks almost like a cotton ball and now we can just adjust the global scale here 50 and again this looks like a cool look by itself but what we can do to try to smooth all this out is go to our volume builder and when we applied that shader field it applied it on top of the fog smooth so these fog smooth layers are really any of these layers here you can think of as adjustment layers and effect the layers below them so if I want this fog smooth to effect and smooth out the black and white values from this shader field I just need to place it below that fog smooth and you should start to see that kind of get smoothed out and now we have these little like fluffy clumps making up this cloud now so now I can go in here change the seed and see what all these different seeds look like and just get the type of look that you want or you know it's a big noise or bring this to 100 little small noise whatever you want to do everything is completely live or displacer everything and that's kind of the lovely part about all this if I bring this high clip down even more you can see what goes on there so I'm liking something right around here okay and you can see that we're kind of getting a little bit of see through right there and we can adjust that by either going into this volume and making this a little thicker or we can go in and use yet another fog modifier which is this fog multiply and what this is going to do is basically take those black and white values and multiply them by a number so if I do two you can see that's going to actually just thicken everything up and apply even more opacity and more volume to this volume the volume to the volume sure we can even go into the voxel distance and this is basically like your Gaussian blur strength and bring that up even more to smooth all that out and this is looking really nice now another thing we can do is again that you could stop right here or you can add even more high fidelity detail and you can do that by we got this big detail this big noise here we can duplicate this shader field and let's go to our volume builder here can see that by default the creation space is set to box again so we'll need to make sure the objects below is chosen and we choose multiply for this as well and we can do a thing like making this global scale very small and you can see that that's breaking everything up even more or we can go in here and change the noise type to something like wavy turbulence and let's right click on this arrow here to reset this high clip to its default value you can see how this noise is just breaking this up even more and creating this really nice effect and if you decide that actually you know what I don't want to see through this cloud as much we can go back into this redshift volume here and just beef that up make it thicker and then just add more light scatter through there so you can always come back in here and adjust stuff like that or again we can do a little bit of both maybe even going into this fog multiply and doing 2.5 and thickening that up even more now you notice that the second shader field which if I double click let's rename this details can see that this is above the fog multiply and the smooth so fog multiply is not acting upon unless we make this lower in the stack and this fog smooth not acting upon unless we have this layer below the smooth but you can see that that just totally smooths everything out so it's kind of nice to have the finer details up even higher in the stack so it's not being smoothed out by that fog smooth at all so I think this multiply is kind of making things a little bit pixelated so I'm just going to bring that down a little bit maybe this shader field with the details we can make this even more subtle by just lowering the contrast to maybe negative 30 just see that this picks up but just a little bit of that nice fine detail there so this is actually rendering really fast so if I just grab my light here we can kind of rotate this around to just see how this actually looks depending on the light angle and I would say you know this is looking really nice now of course there's tons of things we can experiment with with different noises adjusting the different scales of these noises to whatever we want one thing I want to do is just like we added high fidelity detail to this fog volume using this second shader field I want to do something similar by creating this little wispy floofs or something like that using a second displacer so let me show you what I mean by the floofs let me just hit Q and what that's going to do is deactivate this generator or our volume builder and I'm just going to command click and drag to duplicate this displacer I'm just going to name this displacer floofs and that sounds like a fake name of something I'm displacer I'm going to go into this noise now and let's change this noise type to wavy turbulence and we'll just decrease the scale here and you can see how this is kind of crumpling everything up let me turn off this infinite light because it's kind of blowing everything out but you can see this nice little crumpled detail if I increase the contrast you can see what's going on there now what I want to do is make it so when I go into my object tab here that I'm just pushing outwards and not inwards so what I'm going to do is change this type from intensity centered which is displacing inwards and outwards and just choose intensity which means that we're just displacing outwards and now at this point what I can do is go back into my noise and adjust the low clip and the high clip to have it so only a tiny bits of noise are displacing on different parts of this object so this is looking kind of not so great at this point if I adjust the scale a little bit and maybe the seed and let's turn back on our volume builder by hitting Q again and we'll see what this looks like you can see wherever we have that second displacement the displacer fluffs we have this pushing away from our main volume here and it's got that lighter opacity because it's that blacker color in our viewport here so that means that it's got a value closer to 0% opacity and you can just have a lot of fun with this to create however many fluffs you want little wispy details like this that's a lot let's hit Q again and you can see exactly how much we're displacing there doesn't look all that great let's maybe go into our displacer and maybe that's too much displacing a little bit too much and we can again always change the type of displacement maybe remove the octave so it's a little bit simpler of a noise or we can add more octave so it has even more detail but I think maybe something like this looks pretty nice let's bring this up even more we have this wispy fluf right there turn back on our volume builder you can see that just adding that little bit of detail let's turn that off turn that back on again you can see how that just adds a little bit of that extra personality I don't know do clouds have personalities but just the style of it where you have all these wispy fluffs all over the place so again like this is such a flexible workflow you can literally place any object in this volume builder and have all these effects be applied to it so let me just go and let's grab this scene here which basically all I did was same kind of workflow I have this heart and this star like lucky charms but the same kind of workflow you can see that we have a fairly dense mesh and apply the same kind of effects and we have these different types of shapes here that are underneath this single volume builder and we get these really nice stylized clouds just some simple spheres a heart you can see just how flexible this is so the best part about this workflow is you can actually save these fog volumes out as vdb file so you can share them sell them I'll be sharing a bunch of them that you can download as well and the great thing is you can load these vdb files up and they're going to render very quickly in c4d and that's even including if you have an animated vdb so before I show you how to actually export out of vdb let me show you a couple ways you can actually animate this cloud to make it kind of undulate and you can do that either by animating the noise in the actual shaders by just changing this animation speed to anything but zero or you can go into the splacer and this is actually easier to show here in the viewport and go into let's actually go into this noise and this animation speed let's choose one and if I hit play you can see how we have this actually turn off the redshift render view there and you can see how the noise is kind of undulating and animating and you can bring this down to say you know point two and if you want this noise to loop you can basically put in however many seconds your animation is so for my case this is 90 frames or 30 seconds I'll put in a loop period of three and by doing that that means it's going to loop every three seconds so once this gets to frame 90 it's going to loop back to frame zero and look really good now another way you can actually have the noise move through your object so if I put a movement of one here and a speed of one percent and hit play you can see how this is moving from right to left and if I put a negative one in here you can see it's moving left to right and that's one other way of animating the noise and animating the cloud so it's a animated fog volume here so I'm not going to animate this but you could save out this VDB animation so what I'm going to do is just turn back on this volume builder and to save this out to be able to say like clone or send to a coworker or to even you know make your own asset pack of clouds you just want to select your volume builder go to file export VDB and this is where you can choose whether you want to include animation and the one thing I will say about all this is let me cancel out of here is you want to pay attention to your voxel size okay let me turn this back on again let's get this render of you going the lower this voxel size the bigger this VDB file is going to be and the more detail you're going to have on your voxel anyways so the bigger the size the smaller the VDB file so if you're animating a VDB with this low of a voxel size be prepared to have a fairly beefy file but for a still you know you can get as low as you want with that disclaimer out of the way let's go to export volume.vdb select it only so it's only going to export my selected object here which is fine hit okay go to cloud tutorial start to and then to load up a saved VDB what we're going to do is go to redshift objects redshift volume let's actually hold control or command and click to just turn off all these objects here so now we just have the redshift volume and then to load up that VDB we're just going to go to our file path here let's load up that VDB file you're going to see this little bounding box area and you're not going to see anything and that's because we need to just drag and drop that redshift volume material onto it and while a lot we have our VDB here looking really nice and then what we can do is very easily clone it to make a whole bunch more clouds get this clone scale everything up a little bit let's maybe make a whole bunch of clouds here and now we got our lovely compose our shot here we have a lovely cylinder in the clouds which is just lovely and this is just so dang fast at least on my setup with two 3090s but redshift volumes render unbelievably fast it's pretty incredible that you can do something like this you would not want to try something like this with standard renderer or physical render because your computer will just explode and catch into flames so now we got our nice NFT that we can mint and make a million dollars alright so there's your little crash course in creating fluffy fluffy little clouds if you want to check out more cloud tutorials that I've made you can check them out over here or over here or maybe both sides I'm not quite sure if you like this tutorial please be sure to like it and subscribe to my channel if you like what you're seeing here hope to see you again soon in the next tutorial bye everybody