Clouds on the Horizon

Saturday, July 21, 2007 Saturday, July 21, 2007

I had an interesting visitor the other day, Iswish Planner. He's an interesting fellow who is involved in the RL music scene, including having worked with Michael Jackson in the past. His request was whether I made clouds. And I don't. Or at least didn't until then.

With Iswish's help, I built a complete set of cloud devices: Small, Medium, Large and Crazy.

“Crazy” you ask? It's basically the Large Cloud but instead of having a mixture of naturally-appearing light grey and white colors, like you'd find in a normal cloud, it has random wild flourescent and pastel colors!

I was surprised to find that the best seller of the Cloud family is CrazyCloud by a large margin. Why? I don't know! What are people doing with it? I have no idea! Somebody let me know what's going on!

I made another cloud variety, specifically for Vampires (pictured). It has blood red and black colored fog, and is very eerie to stand underneath. I think it's quite effective, yet very few are sold. Who would have guessed?

This all tells me that at the end of the day, the customers know best. Keep listening to them.

2 comments:

Dario de Judicibus said...

Armi, which parameters you used in Particle System call to create your clouds?

29Blogs said...

I simply used a flat angle-cone pattern and randomized the colors appropriately with a timer. Oh, I also used Jopsy's "big soft dot" texture, which seems to work better in clouds than the default particle texture.

The trickiest thing was balancing the size of the cloud against the speed and age of the particles. If wrong, you have either a frayed cloud or a tiny cloud. It was also fun setting the colors so that they actually looked like a cloud. That took the most time, if I recall.

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