I'm attempting to make a cloudscape time lapse and need to find a way to efficiently create the cloud volumes.



My solution so far has been to build the clouds themselves from spherical ‘puffs’ and to instance those puffs onto points at render time. My issue with this method at the moment is I can't find any way to have control over per-instance variations (beyond transforms, mostly looking for varying density).



I have attached a file that shows a basic setup. Cache the frame to your local drive and make sure the instancefile attribute path is set to the cached file location correctly.



One solution to my problem could be to cache multiple cloud puffs at different density values, and use different instancefile paths. But this will get heavy quickly as I need hundreds of frames to make up the time lapse animation. I'm hoping to find a method similar to how you would do regular copy stamping, using pt attributes to drive variations in the instanced geo. But obviously copy stamping is too heavy for my purposes.



Any ideas/thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

I havnt looked at your file but i think you might be able to do this in your volume shader with stylesheets. Theoretically you should be able make an override in your stylesheet that picks up a point instance attribute for density and uses it in the shader.

-b

Thanks bonsak, I've actually found using the instance obj and material overrides to be a simpler solution than using stylesheets. See this post for anyone interested: https://forums.odforce.net/topic/40138-point-instance-procedural-with-per-instance-variations/?tab=comments#comment-193639 [forums.odforce.net]

Sounds good!