Going Further - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 250

1. Create cubes to determine
where cloud should be.

2. Run cloud generator add-on
with cubes selected.

Figure 15-4: Creating the rock for the Bat Creature to stand on

layer along with the lamp. I then shifted the camera
down slightly and angled it up to give a different
perspective on the Bat Creature, and I adjusted the
positions of his feet to make him stand on the rock
correctly.

3. Add lighting and
tweak materials.

Adding Clouds
To complement the mood of the image, I added
some clouds around the rock. Blender has some
fantastic tools for rendering volumetric materials
like clouds. A full discussion would require its own
chapter, but thankfully for our purposes, it's simple
enough to say that a terrific add-on called Cloud
Generator will do most of the work. Enable the add-
on from the User Preferences editor.
To use the Cloud Generator script, I first
sketched the rough volume of my cloud using
cubes. Then, I used the Generate Cloud button,
which can be found in the Tool Shelf, to automati-
cally generate cloud objects with the rough shape
of the cube objects selected and to set up appropri-
ate materials (see Figure 15-5).
I left the generated material almost as it was
made by the add-on, except that I turned on External

Figure 15-5: Creating clouds with the Cloud Generator script

Shadows in the Lighting panel of the Materials tab
and set the scale of the clouds texture belonging to
the material a bit lower to give the cloud some more
detail. I rendered the cloud on its own render layer
and composited it into my image after adding the
background in my comp setup (before the bloom
and color grading were applied). The results are
shown in Figure 15-6.