Hi, I’ve been getting into VDBs again recently, and while I’ve experimented with them in the past with varying degrees of success, the whole process has been made much easier recently with the amazing plugin by Thibault Lambert called ’ OpenVDB and NanoVDB in Unreal’. I’ve been using EmberGen to create these, occasionally with the help of Houdini.
First one was a simple test landscape but the idea was to focus on the sky.
Hurricane clouds and vortices inspired by the clouds of Jupiter.
A desktop background looking like that seems so dreamy. Did you have references you looked at while creating these or were they all built in imagination?
The first cloudscape/landscape combo was just from my imagination. I like to experiment with lighting a lot so I simply combined my cloud VDB and landscape in the same file and tried different atmosphere settings until I was happy with it. I didn’t expect it to do as well as it did on Twitter when I posted it.
The second was looking at photos of Jupiter’s atmosphere, which I’m really interested in and where this whole thing started.
Approaching stormwall. Animated VDB cloudscape with a few megascans assets and the new mannequin. This one I was looking at videos online of incoming dust storms/ sand walls, plus that wide shot from Max Max Fury Road. You can’t really see the overhanging structure of the clouds from this camera so I’ll probably do another one at some point to show it better.
My latest & most advanced UE5 animated VDB cloudscape, modelled approximately on the clouds of Jupiter, albeit a tiny part. This one the detail came out better than I expected, even for quite a large area.
Same as before, using Houdini for some base modelling, sim done in EmberGen, and lit, composed and rendered in UE5 with help of Thibault Lambert’s plugin. Music by Emid.
Starting off my day with one of your videos is such a great energizer. 
Hope to see more soon!
Thanks PresumptivePanda, though my expectation is for them to be relaxing more than energising though 
I did do another one but it’s more of an experiment again, a simpler quicker one and the clouds are intentionally on the lighter side. I guess you could call these concept art as I don’t spend very long on them.
Unreal animated VDB cloudscape with colourful skies, on some planet, somewhere. VDB plugin by Thibault Lambert.
