Overview / Usage

With Maxon Cinema 4D you are capable of creating gaseous volumetric effects such as static/ floating clouds, nebulae, rising plasma, or even planetary atmospehres etc without ever touching anything like plugins, particles, Pyrocluster, external assets, etc.

Methodology / Approach

While particles need fiddling around, the aging Pyrocluster module tends to produce fluffy cotton wool balls and external assets are unflexible to manipulate there are two methods two to produce Voxel-like effects you normally wouldnt think of:

1. MoGraph in comnination with volumetric 3D-Noises and an approach to simulate Subsurface Scattering without actually using it.
2. Using visible volumetric lights as containers for 3D Noises.

For planetary atmospheres the approach is even more simple, as the shading ingredients are just fresnel gradients and a light sensitive lumas shader in the alpha channel of the atmospheres material.
Thinking outside the box is the solution here: it doesnt have to be physcially correct, it just has to look physically correct.

Technologies Used

Cinema 4D R19, Standard or Physical Render (both Intel Embree accelerated)
For volumetric clouds: Fast Intel Xeon or i9 machines - as you are dealing with a high transparency ray-depth.

Other links

• https://vimeo.com/253405164