Cloud Noise Generator

[Todd_Vance]

The Blender texture properties panel lets you generate a “cloud” texture, but it’s missing in material nodes. It has white noise and noise texture, but those aren’t quite the same. GIMP also has a similar cloud generator.

This is my attempt at duplicating the effect. Not having studied the source code, there are no guarantees that this is “exactly” right, but it looks close. I also allowed the semi-random colorization of the cloud like the texture panel of Blender and GIMP also do. The main thing is changing contrast to make the histogram wider and centered (using the SCOPES tab on the rendered image to see the histogram).

Of course, online you’ll find statements like “cloud noise generators don’t make realistic clouds”, but they seem useful for other things. And they can be “a part of a complete cloud material, along with toast, juice, milk, and a bowl of cloud noise” for those who remember Saturday morning commercials during the cartoons.

And here are the settings I used on the node:

[RayMobula]

Cool.

In video editing software these are called Fractal Noise (Hitfilm) or Fast Noise (Davinci Resolve Fusion). They can be used to make all kinds of things, from animating surfaces, fog, clouds, defects, hight maps, etc. Very handy.

[NP5]

Interesting. Geo nodes stuff?

What I find odd is how there are so few textures to use in procedural texturing. Why are there not more?

The need for huge complex node groups seems just a failure to provide more ready made textures/patterns. Most people are not programmers and do not want to be. Tools should be ready made to use.

[Todd_Vance]

Not geometry nodes, material nodes (outputs to a shader rather than vertex coordinates, etc.). One day I’ll learn Geometry Nodes, but they seem even more limited (versus what you can do with the usual modelling methods).

[FedPete]

When I look at the end result, I get the feeling it has some depth towards the middle point. Zooming in/out?

• Blendes shader noise and WHITE noise are two different things! They look the same but internally it has different use cases, see manual.

[Todd_Vance]

I noticed that. Don’t know if it’s just random or an artifact of the random number generator in the Noise Texture. (I learned about non-randomness in random number generators as a kid with my PCJr when I tried to graph the BASIC RNG. Lots of repeating patterns.)

[Todd_Vance]

Ok, I noticed changing the lacunarity (according to documentation, affects the different scaling between the multiple dimension levels being xor’d together–doc says its an additive term but I’m almost sure it has to be multiplicative, that being the usual way of distributing scaling values) affects that “scale effect”, unsurprisingly. It can be made to disappear or reappear by changing the value. The scaling does seem to be centered at the center (that may be because of using Object coordinates which center at the pivot point of the mesh).