For this tutorial I will have the worded directions along with the exact keystrokes it take to get the step done. If you are fluent enough with Blender you may not have to look at the keystrokes line. Each step within the keystrokes line will be highlighted like this: Example. Arrows will indicate that you should be following a menu path.

If you want to skip the setup part of this tutorial you can go straight to Settings and Texturing.

SECTION 1 -- SETUP

Step 1 - Let us begin by opening a new scene.

-- Ctrl X -OR- File --> New --> Erase All

If you have kept the default scene that Blender automatically sets up than you will want to delete the default cube. I normally have the screen set up at front view at the beginning.

-- X --> Vertices ; 1

My Screen looks like this:

Step 2 – Add a plane. This is what the cloud will be emitted out of after the particle setting is added to the object. Skew the plane along the X-Axis by a factor of 10 and then move your view a bit to see your plane in 3D. A good way is to look through the camera. This way you will know exactly what the scene will look like when you decide to render.

-- Add --> Mesh --> Plane ; S ; X ; 10 ; 0(Camera View)

Step 3 -- In order to see the clouds better when you render lets move the plane back by about 5 on the Y-Axis and also by -5 on the X-Axis. In order to see the particles you must be in object mode. After you do that, go to the Physics buttons and hit new in the physics tab.

-- G ; Y ; 5 ; Enter

-- G ; X ; -5 ; Enter

-- Tab ; F7 ; Click the Particle Buttons ; Click Add New



Great! Now we have the particles hooked up to your plane. Right now there are no particles to be seen. To see the particles you will have to make a few changes to the particle settings. Go to the next page for the next section of this tutorial.

Step 4 – So far we have gotten the set up done for our clouds. After hitting ‘Add New’ a whole slew of buttons and settings appeared onto the screen. Some changes that I am going to make include making ‘Amount’ 2000, ‘End’ 250, ‘Life’ 100, ‘Normal’ 5, and ‘Random’ 1.

-- Click Amount ; Type in 2000

-- Click End ; Type in 250

-- Click Life ; Type in 100

-- Click Normal ; Type in 5

-- Click Random ; Type in 1


To see the particles come out of the plane you can either hit Alt-A to start the rough animation or you can split on of the views and turn it into the timeline as you can see at the bottom of the viewing window and above the buttons.

Step 5 – In order to make these particles look like clouds, we have to make a texture for it. So, let’s go to the Materials tab. Click on 'Add New'. All of the material buttons should appear. Click on Halo. Go into the Shaders tab and change the Halo size to 1, Hard to 35, and Add to .080. You also want to select HaloTex and Shaded. Over in the MapTo tab, turn on Alph. Lastly you should change the RGB color to white.

Instead of doing a keystrokes line here, I have these screen shots for you to look at and match on your blender file. These are all the settings you need to change.



Step 6 -- Now go to the texture buttons. Click 'Add New'. Under texturing type select clouds in the slide out menu.

-- F7 ; Click Add New

-- Select Clouds under texture type

Now we have to get the texture settings done. I’ll go right down the list:

- In the Colors tab, (this is in the same box that the “Add new” button was in), change the Bright to 2.000 and the Contr to 4.000

- In the Clouds box, select Hard Noise, set the NoiseSize to 2.000 and the NoiseDepth to 6.

You can see these settings in the picture below.



Step 7 - This is the moment you have been waiting for. Go ahead and hit F12 and see what you have just created.

If you did yours exactly like mine, it should look similar to this.



The rest is up to you. Go back and change settings to see what they do and make changes where you think you need changes.

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