- [Voiceover] The stock clouds provided with VUE look great,
and if you're only rendering a still,
they may be fine,
but the render times might be too long for animation.
In this course we are optimizing for animation.
So far, we've turned the shadows off for the clouds.
Now we're gonna go into the cloud's function graph
and change up the way that the fractal algorithm
generates the clouds to speed up our render times.
Go back into the atmosphere editor,
and we've got our "clouds" tab
and our "uniform simple repeater" layer.
We're going to now make that live up to its name.
First of all, set the scale here a bit larger to 0.5.
And then we'll right click on that
and go to "edit layer."
That opens up the advanced cloud material editor.
And in the "color and density" tab,
we see the pattern of density generation.
I'm gonna position this over the top of the other window
so that we're not generating too many previews.
First of all, we've got a default filter in here.
I'm going to reset that.
Right click and choose "reset filter."
We've got a function scale.
It's being stretched.
Let's just set all of X, Y, and Z to 0.5.
Our material preview here is at 10 meters.
We'll set that to 100 meters.
I'm getting a better idea
of what the pattern of clouds might be.
Over here in the "cloud layer detail" section,
let's make some changes.
We have a scaling value of 20.
I think that's fine,
but we'll make it rougher with a roughness of 85.
Variations we can reduce a bit down to 60.
And uniformity to 50%.
Down here in "cloud modulation,"
increase the altitude offset to 100,
and the sharpness modulation down to 0.
And finally, turn off "auto-scale clouds" here.
Now we set the general cloud layer and modulation settings,
we're ready to go into the function editor itself.
Right click on the "density production sample"
and choose "edit function."
If you want to, you can organize the graph.
Right click on "graph options" and choose
"enable auto-graph layout."
And you can also turn that off with that same command.
Right click, disable.
We've got a pretty simple graph here,
but we can make it even more simple.
We want to connect something else to the density,
so right click anywhere in the function editor
and we can create a node.
And we want to go to "fractal,"
"basic repeater."
And now we've got our basic repeater node created,
and it's automatically connected to "position."
Now let's connect it to the "density."
If you click on the plus sign,
the parameters open up and you can see we have "altitude."
Click and drag from the "density" to "altitude"
on the basic repeater node.
And that disconnects from these other nodes.
We won't need these.
We can just drag a rectangle around those
and press the "delete" key to delete them.
In the basic repeater node, we'll make some changes.
The noise type is set to "Perlin noises gradient,"
and that's fine.
Wavelength of one and origin of zero is also fine.
Scroll down a bit if you have to.
And, in the "harmonic behavior" settings,
let's increase the number of repeats to four.
And then the scale and amplitude.
Scale is the size of each iteration of noise,
or each repeat of the pattern.
Set the scale to 0.33.
And the amplitude is the relative strength
of each successive iteration.
We'll increase the amplitude to make it rougher.
Increase it up to 0.66.
And the combination mode set to "add."
Click "okay" to close the function editor.
And now you can see we've got
a pretty nice pattern up there.
And we've simplified the production of the cloud density
so it should render more quickly.
Let's do a test render with our new cloud layer.
And I believe that looks pretty good.
We can close the advanced material editor.
We can close the atmosphere editor,
and compare our results back in the render stack.
Here's the edited version after we've replaced the graph
with a single basic repeater node.
And here it is with the original graph.
That's a simple introduction to the function editor.
We will be visiting it again
when we get to the chapter on materials.