my diamond-shape logo; quite minimalisitic. Liam Collod
Up in the sky there was the cloud farm. Collecting clouds and packing them up in wooden boxes before sending them down there. It was not an easy task, you had to bear the constant wind and a strong sun reflected by a deep blue sky. Quite a surreal job.

breakdown

progress as seen through my IPR window
A screenshot of the Gaffer interface with the scene loaded.
Screenshot of the scene in Gaffer; with a probably very non-optimized node-graph layout.

The Cloud-Farm

calendar-month

My last personal 3d project was 5 years ago. Not anymore ! It all started from a technical blog post and the need to understand more some concept with practice. Then find way to illustrate those concepts to others. But where do you even start ? And even how ? All the software I learnt to use for my job are behind paywalls. Blender ? It doesn't support the specific feature I need to showcase. I found my answer in Gaffer which I had on my todo list since forever. Paired with RenderMan and there goes my software workflow for 0€. Still what do I want to show ? How do I even craft the assets ? I went with the most time-saving solution: relying on Megascans. And the dumbest way possible, no concept, no planning, just assembling pre-made asset together until I get something interesting. My only constraints were that I had to have some volumetrics and a motion-blurred object. And slowly, a concept appeared: up-in the sky they are harvesting clouds... a cloud farm !

Credits:

Download:

If you want to play with it, or use it for testing purposes you can download the source render:

render.exr (8.7MB)

It's a half-float deep exr with the usual RGBA channels and the 2 extra Z channels for deep.

The above .exr file is licensed under the following terms:

You are free to use the file provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, as long as:

  • you are an individual human being
  • you are not any of a misogynist, racist, fascist, terf, queerphobe, bigot, antisemitic, islamophobe, genocide-denialer, history-negasionist piece of shit.
  • you do not support any individual or entities matching the previous criterias.
  • the .exr file is not used for the purpose of training or improving machine learning algorithms.
  • you include this page url as a credit next to any work making use of the .exr file.

Software

Gaffer RenderMan Megascans Nuke