Blender: How to make realistic clouds

In this blog post, I am going to walk you through the steps I took to turn my cartoon-style cloud into a more realistic cloud in Blender. The result will be as seen above: the rainbow ends into a fluffy cloud on each side.

Notes:

• This is a Blender EEVEE guide on making a cartoon style cloud realistic looking.
• We’re working on the cloud on the right side of the rainbow in these images.

For my current project, I created a cloud using meta balls, but I wanted to make it… cloudier. More realistic, less like a cartoon style cloud.

To do this, I did the following:

First, I added an Empty Volume (Shift A -> Volume -> Empty) behind my existing cloud.

With the Empty Volume selected, go to Add Modifier -> Volume to Mesh. In the Object tab, enter your object (your cloud). When you’ve done that, you can hide the cloud object from your (rendered) view.

Then you can play with the Density (I set mine to 12), Exterior Band Width (I set mine to 0.150) and increase the Voxel Amount (I set it to 128).

Then add a Volume Displace Modifier and set the Texture to Clouds. Increase the Depth and Nabla. I set mine to 7 and 0.10 respectively. For the Volume Displace strength, I picked 3.

Finally, go to the Material tab of your cloud and change the settings to your liking. You can see my settings in the screenshot above. :-)

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