VDB Clouds in C4D vs. Unreal

C4D vs. Unreal clouds.

Some time ago, I needed "art-directable" clouds for a project—ones that weren't just randomly generated, but behaved and looked a certain way, and of course, were as realistic as possible. Creating them wasn't difficult using the Cinema 4D/Redshift combo with a pyro emitter. However, rendering them locally on my workstation was incredibly slow. For example, my computer shut down because the motherboard overheated past a certain point.

Next, I used a render farm, which went fairly well since the calculation was spread across multiple machines. Still, I felt that the rendering process took too long. Then, I tried importing the .vdb simulation created in Cinema into Unreal. The end result was at least as good, and in addition, I was able to output everything as video without the need for actual rendering, in real-time.

Nowadays, there are many tricks to achieve what was once impossible, and often with free software like Unreal. This isn't anything new, but a good reminder to myself that things can be done in more efficient and energy-saving ways.