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Requires Carrara 6 and 7. This is not a finished product but rather a demonstration of how such a cloud can be created in Carrara. You can use this … more »

Requires Carrara 6 and 7. This is not a finished product but rather a demonstration of how such a cloud can be created in Carrara. You can use this as a basis to build a cloud system to suit your scene. The cloud model has a misshapen central polymesh that defines the general shape with some smaller ellipsoidal polymeshes imbedded in it to give it that lumpy look. Don't worry if it looks a little scrawny in the model room because everything will puff up a little due to the displacement shader. Also, I varied the size of the polygons to control how much puffy detail results from the displacement shader. For more detail, I subdivided/tesselated areas and I also use subdivision smoothing for this purpose. For best results, if you want multiple cumulus clouds bunched together in your scene, they should all be built in a single vertex object because that will eliminate problems with SSS when two objects intersect. The shader has four components. The subsurface scattering channel is set to "local" because it is currently impossible to get the proper level of SSS that the large scales clouds require and because it allows you to change the scale of the clouds in a scene without affecting the SSS. The displacement channel, as mentioned, puffs up the cloud and gives it the lumpy details. The glow channel is used to simulate ambient sky light. If you use actual lights to do this, you will probably want to eliminate this channel. Finally, the color channel is very dark and is used only to tint the cloud a little. Both the color channel and glow channel have cooler colors at higher altitudes and warmer colors at the base to simulate actual cloud colors. « Less