How to Create Randomly Generated Realistic 2D Clouds in Blender

Next I just added a simple plane and scaled it on the y axes, not that it really matters which axes you scale it on so long as you end up with a sort of rectangle. Then press ctrl+a to apply the scale, this is important for the materials. go to the material panel and hit the plus button to add a new material. now you can either split your window to add a shader work space or else you can just click the tab at the top that says shading, to access the shader editor. make sure the object that you are changing the material on is selected, and than you can delete the principal BSDF, and add a noise texture. I set the scale to 2.01 and the detail to 15. you can add a little distortion if you want some more wispy clouds. ctrl+shift click the noise texture to preview it. Now drop a color ramp in between the material output node and the noise texture, and crunch the white and black values. This is a good mask to determine which parts will be transparent. Cool, so now you can add a mix shader and plug the color value of the color ramp into factor of the mix shader, then plug the mix shader out put in to the material output node. Then add a transparent shader node and plug it into the first shader out put of the mix shader one, and add an emission node and plug that one in to the bottom socket of the mix shader. Now go to rendered view, if you aren’t using cycles you need to switch over to cycles render engine. Next we need to map the texture correctly, so select the noise texture and press ctrl+t to add a mapping node connected to a texture coordinate node. instead of using the generated value of the coordinate node, plug the object value into the vector of the mapping node. Currently the clouds end abruptly at the edges of the plane, so to fix that, add a gradient texture and switch it to spherical. ctrl+shift click the gradient texture node to preview it. Right now it is just a circle, but we need it to be an oval to reach the other ends of the planes. So select the mapping node we added earlier and press ctrl+shift+d to duplicate it and still keep it plugged up to the coordinate node. I then changed the y value in the mapping node under the scaling section too 0.64, now the circle is reaching to the other ends. This will be a mask for making the cloud fade out at the edges. Select the mix shader we added earlier and press shift+d to duplicate it and drop it in between the material output and the other mix shader. Take the color value of the gradient texture and plug that in to the factor of the new mix shader we just added. now plug the first mix shader we added into the bottom socket of the second mix shader, and then take the transparent node’s output and plug that in to the top shader input of the second mix shader node and still keep it plugged into the other mix shader as well. now to add the las touch that makes it more realistic add an object info node behind the noise texture and select the box on the noise texture that says 3d and change it to 4d. then finally to finish the node setup take the random value of the object info node and plug it into the value of the noise texture that says W. this last node will make it so that every time that the cloud is duplicated, it will be a random shape instead of the same cloud being duplicated all the time. If you haven’t connect the output into the material output to view your complete material. You can change the color of the cloud by changing the color of the emission node, and the density by making the color darker. and to use this in your scenes you can use a particle system to duplicate your clouds over your scene.