Greg LaClé > Creating Volumetric Clouds
for 3ds Max
level: All
1) Create a plane for your ground surface. (CREATE>GEOMETRY/PLANE)
2) Create a big sphere, apply a NORMAL modifier to the sphere (MODIFIER>NORMAL) and select invert. (this is to make sure the sphere is viewable from inside) This big sphere is going to be used as the Blue sky background.
3) Position the sphere halfway, meaning centerpoint should be around the ground plane)
4) Select the Sphere and go into EDIT MESH mode (MODIFIER>EDIT MESH) and click on the VERTICES button, select the half the vertices underneath the ground plane and press delete. (We are basically chopping off the underside of the sphere, cause we don't need it.
5) Select Sphere and apply a spherical UVmap to it. (MODIFIER>UVMAP>SPHERE)
6) Create a gradient map and apply it to the sphere.
Scroll down to Brazil CSG Server, enable Ground Plane and select a dark grey color (Fig. C), go to environment and select white for the background (Fig. D) These colors wont be the final ground and background colors, we will play around with them later..