UE4: Step-by-Step to Creating Your First Volumetric Cloud Material

Full Blog Post with Additional Information: www.worldoflev...
Watch this first: UE4:
Analysis of Volumetric Clouds and How to Use Them - • UE4: Analysis of Volum...
The most important part of how the Volumetric Clouds look comes from the Material, which is then passed on to a Material Instance.
I decided to figure out how to create my own Volumetric Cloud material so I can understand what is happening, what the parameters do and most importantly to have more control over the cloud shape.
In this tutorial I show you how to create your own Volumetric Cloud material, step-by-step.
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Resources
Volumetric Clouds Epic Games Doc
docs.unrealeng...
Volumetric Clouds Epic Games Reference
docs.unrealeng...
Building Worlds In ‘Fortnite' With Unreal Engine (Clouds Section Starts at 28:06)
• Building Worlds in ‘Fo...
Making Volumetric Clouds in Unreal engine 4.26
• Making Volumetric Clou...
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[@vree_]

One of the very few actually helpful cloud tutorials, that really teach how volumetric clouds work!

[@hightechnician]

Your tutoring style is remarkably good. Everything is explained calmly and without assumed existing knowledge. Best tutorial I've seen in a long while, not just for clouds.

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

Thank you. I appreciate that.

[@РамазанНазиров-ь1ъ]

Thank you for you tutorial serias, there are tremendeously uselful! I followed the process step by step working in Unreal Engine version 5.3.2. The only difference I noticed is that Volumetric Content Is located in another folder. In current version all additional content from plugins are located in Plugin folder. To find Volumetric content you should follow this path: Content Browser --> Engine --> Plugins --> Volumetric Content.

[@Ka0us]

What I most like from your tutorials is that you explain well what a specific node do Thank you

[@BagBuff]

Great tut. Helped me understand clouds from top to bottom! Appreciated and subbed.

[@diliupg]

Easily the best tutorial on volumetric clouds! Thank you!

[@johanrojassoderman5590]

18:00 if anyone's wondering, the normalized layer altitude seems to output a value between 0-1 depending on where the point is in relation to the upper and lower bounds of the clouds. You could see that as a gradient mask from top to bottom of the cloud (at least I'm assuming the higher value is for the higher point). 1-x inverts that mask, making it go the other way. exp(-x) is e^x, mirrored along the y axis. That results in a function that starts at 1 for x=0 and moves towards 0 for x->infinity. Some cases to note is exp(0)=1, exp(-1)≈0.37 and exp(-25)≈0.000000000014. That means, following one side, you have a linear gradient from 1-0, then from 25-0, then run it through exp which alters the gradient from linear to exponential to make the blend cleaner, then invert it because the values get pretty small pretty fast. Now you have 2 functions, one going from top to bottom, the other from bottom to top of the cloud layer (rough approximations): ________ / _________ \ I hope that clears some of it up, and that my logic didn't fail 😅

[@myte.a161]

Thanks so much i was wondering what the heck it does, I cant learn things unless I understand the maths behind it. Otherwise its just useless info since I want to make my own systems. Your a life saver!

[@LighthouseHorror]

Just bought your full bundle for landscape/decals. Super excited to learn from you! I really enjoy the way you teach things!

[@thedavistheory7674]

Man you're a legend!!! I've seen your hammer tutorials and they are amazing thanks a lot for sharing your knowledge!

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

Thank you man! Will always share what I know.

[@jacobscott783]

By far the best tutorial I've seen on Volumetric Clouds. Thank you!

[@Sleeju]

This video greatly helped me understand more about nodes and clouds. I am having so much fun playing with it now THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!

[@gangedup1]

Very well done and highly informative. Great tutorial and well made.

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

Thank you. Much appreciated it.

[@TorQueMoD]

Thanks for this awesome tutorial. The default volumetric clouds look so flat, so it's awesome to learn how to change that!

[@rabbit-istudios5444]

Please upload more your tutorials are amazing.

[@dozar911]

Brother still waiting for environment and level design tutorial please bring those tutorial as soon as possible 🥺

[@arcon2800]

Excellent tutorial precise and to the point. Thank you

[@etawil51]

great tutorial !

[@Denahi1197]

You saved my life, it is the best tutorial about clouds that i found. Excellent job! You are a God to me now

[@ryanisanart]

this is going back a while but i wonder what it would take to get good results with the path tracer? amazing tutorial, thanks!

[@MohammedIdrei]

you are just a genius mr :) .. Would you please give us a tutorial for rendering any static or animated 3d mesh as a cloud .. with all these wind animation functions ? Thank you so much

[@alxleiva]

Masterclass! Thanks a lot!

[@privaatsak]

Brilliant tutorial, thank you!

[@beo1863]

thank u , now i can move my clouds !

[@marklavania3680]

Thank you! Much appreciated for sharing your knowledge with the community. A quick question: Would this setup be useful for creating ground fog?

[@zoeywoofwoof6517]

I'd like to know this as well lol

[@marklavania3680]

@@zoeywoofwoof6517 I thought lowering the altitude / height will be the solution but that does not work. I have to explore a bit more, and check if there are restrictions for that. I am sure this kind of ground fog will eat up more resources though

[@subi886]

your my lifesaver👍👍👍👍

[@leonewman1552]

fantastic tutorial

[@KUBE.archvis]

excellent tutorial. thank you!

[@ying-kohades8651]

master if it is possible create a extended tutorial about space nebula without skybox your humble servant

[@Daniel-qt5ib]

This is brilliant, thanks so much! I've been trying to get moving clouds working for a while, and there are surprisingly few resources compared to static clouds but even less that resulted in materials that actually worked. Cheers! Also, can confirm this works in UE5 :) EDIT: One question though - I'm trying to find a way to update things like the cloud speed (wind mask) in blueprint but I'm not having much luck so far. Is the idea that I would create several material instances and simply swap out which one is on the volumetric cloud object? Or is there a way of updating the instance variables dynamically? EDIT 2: So I've found out how to update the Wind Mask / Wind Clouds values dynamically. The problem seems to be the Time input though - I'm not sure what way to multiply things to make it work as you would expect :S If I change the speed to 0 (to try and stop the clouds where they are), the material will set them back to where they started since D = S * T, and if S = 0 then D = 0 (original position). FINAL EDIT: I figured out a solution. Essentially, you want to replace the Time node with a scalar parameter (I called mine Artificial Time) which is updated through blueprint and an offset which is added after the "Time" multiplication (before the RG Mask), and put your volumetric cloud on a blueprint. In the blueprint, add delta seconds to a float variable on tick and set your material's Artificial Time parameter to this variable (this step is needed for _stopping_ the clouds specifically). You can then use a branch/bool on your blueprint that can be checked for if you want to update Artificial Time or not (the latter if you want them to stop). As for the offset, this will also be set with a blueprint and applied to the material on tick through a method similar to this post here: answers.unrealengine.com/questions/65688/change-the-direction-of-a-panner-seamlessly.html?sort=oldest Specifically, Dave's answer midway down is how I did it, but his offset is a float and you'll want yours to be a vector3 so the logic will need to be adjusted for that. Don't forget to make a dynamic material instance in the construction script of the blueprint, or else updating the variables won't work. If you're trying this yourself, good luck!

[@joshholm4]

Bought 3 of your courses. Very informative! Are you still planning on coming out with more content? Looks like you haven't been active for half a year. Hope all is well.

for my limited knowlege of coding what the custom node code is doing is returning the value of doing the exponent of minus X (or - x, however you wanna say it), being X the X axis of either the Real World Space units or the cloud axis, thats where i get lost, now why do they do it, no idea, hahaha, as you say, it works so is good to me, thanks for the tutorial.

[@rikitwenty2674]

i love you its so good!

[@Xeyner13]

Could I apply this material to other objects? Like a cube or a sphere? Thank you! :)

[@monkeyrobotsinc.9875]

U r the god of unreal

[@simpill81]

So if you could give any advice on achieving a stylized look, what would it be?

[@valters01]

It's awesome! Thanks

[@melissavalencia2930]

Hi, its a nice video and I learned a lot from you. I have a question. Its possible to have the velocity pass of the volumetric clouds? thanks for your videos

[@NIKSBR]

Very Cool.. I Wanted to know if we can bring down those clouds to ground level ? like for example if the plane is flying above clouds kind of stuff ?

[@sergiogonzalez2611]

man so wonderfull work, thank you,, ohw is the perofmane with this process is more friendly?

[@Finances1983]

I absolutely love the tutorial! I was wondering, how would you get cloud shadows to show up on the landscape? I've checked in the details panel under Atmosphere and Cloud but nothing is really showing up. Any help would be awesome! Thanks!

[@WandreGG]

hi...very nice tutorial, congrats...anyone know a way to get a top down projection of these clouds to use on light funtion for cloud shadows on ground?

[@thepreecher8755]

gee wiz!!! thanks

[@meskvideo]

Спасибо, это круто!

[@andreytrukhachev7417]

Thank you very much!!!

[@torgath5088]

I can see a voxelization cubes in the clouds. Is there any way to make those smaller?

[@juniorcomsono]

hey my friend, do your old courses in WoLD website have captions? are they up to date to recent UE version stuff?

[@rudy552]

Where did you get the texture pack? 34:39

[@joeyn.8379]

Thanks so lot.

[@JwGesshoo]

I'm trying to implement a movable individual cloud that will work independently of the other volumetric cloud actors clouds in the level. The purpose of which is a storm system spawning. Do you know of a way to replicate this look and movement with more spacial control without negating the global volumetric clouds I already have?

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

Take a look at Blueprint Placed Clouds. May give you what you want. You can find an example of it in Plugin content in Engine folder. Scroll down to the bottom of this page for a bit more info: docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/BuildingWorlds/LightingAndShadows/VolumetricClouds/

[@JwGesshoo]

@@WorldofLevelDesign Are you referring to the cloud mask generator and the cloud mask object? I have played around with them a good bit but when I drag them into my scene it overrided my global volumetric clouds that are present in the sky. I was trying to find a way to both keep my volumetric clouds that fill the sky themselves and still have seperate movable storm actors.

[@D3FA1T1]

The exp(-x) code does not work in ue5 ,SM5 gives the error X3013 undeclered identifier 'x' 'exp': no matching 1 parameter intrinsic function

[@frey6832]

amazing

[@PILMooM]

Very nice tutorial!!! ^^b

[@3danimationfilmandtelevisi878]

thanks!

[@Blendermasterhacks]

Is there any way I can create cloud layers?

[@VVLGANESHK]

What about for vulkan?

[@askingyou4life]

are you nathan?