I’m basically working on a environment on ue5 that take places up in the cloud, and would like to have the side of the environment hidden by some mist/cloudy cloud. So far i’ve looked a bit everywhere for Niagara and my results are more similar to a fire smoke rather than mist, and the quality is pretty meh ( some sub uv animation, with the texture being alpha of clouds) I fail to make them spawn correctly and have the correct color.
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The only place where I’ve seen great results was by Asher Zhu and his dry ice effect (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2RQm_Bu81I&ab_channel=UnrealEngine) but I don’t have the skill yet to understand and build something similar. As far as i’m aware it’s also not possible to have volumetric cloud not in the sky. Should I look at another software or any tips to achieve similar results ? It’s for renders and not game so I don’t mind if it’s heavy. thanks
I would do this either via Volumetric Fog (inside the exponential HeightFog), or via Volumetric Clouds. Both methods are similar in the way that you create a volumetric noise material which defines the ‘granularity’/‘shape’ of your mist. These methods should also be cheaper than using sprites only and they light nicely (meaning you get shadows on them).
You can then always render your sprites on top of it. If you have Houdini (you can use free version I guess), there’s a good tutorial by Andreas here: Cloudscape! // Houdini for Games on Vimeo
You can put volumetric clouds anywhere! The Volumetric Cloud actor has parameters for altitude and thickness of the cloud layers. You just set them relative to the ground. The tricky part is defining the bounds – by default, it’s infinite. In your material, you need to mask out sections of world space and translate them to texture space.
If you want to use volumetric fog, you need to add a raymarcher to you material.
Here’s a thing I worked on which uses volumetric clouds positioned in arbitrary places (and turned into heads):
Thanks for the reply, I’ve already checked out asher tutorial and video multiple time, and it’s still way to broad and difficult for me to understand what’s going on. I’m not a vfx artist, but since i’m working on personal portfolio piece I have to figure out myself ill give it another shot in a day or two
Also thanks for the reply, I’ve messed around with the volumetric cloud settings and indeed I can lower them, but up to a point before they get squished
here is with normal settings, you can see my mesh on the corner
as for the material I’m using the default volumetric cloud material that comes with Unreal. I’m using the blueprint bp_paintcloud and am painting them when I hit play
The only solution I see with my skills is to try to do my best with niagara and the volumetric cloud and then fake it in photoshop
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ill give it another shot in a day or two
