Hi everyone,

I'm currently making a cg Earth in Houdini, and I'm asking myself if I need to make the clouds in volume… Currently they are just a texture with displacement, which works pretty well. But I want to have ligthning in these clouds, like on this picture : http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/files/2013/07/tstormfromspace22.jpg [blog.chron.com]

So how can I transform this texture into a volume and keep all the details that we can see in it ? :
http://www.noirextreme.com/digital/Earth-Clouds2700.jpg [noirextreme.com]

Can it be done only during rendering or do I have to convert it into (onto ?) a volume and then rendering it. My goal is also to see light scatters in clouds, like in the image.

Thanks !

Tom

This king of effect :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs489_ei6Nc [youtube.com]

Have you tried a Trace node? Point it to the image. Then follow that up with a Points From Volume.

I tried it, yes. The problem is that I don't have gradient information, so my volume is not interesting

Thanks