3D Painterly Clouds Workflow

Stylistic goals

For Project Gold we needed clouds, that would match the oil painterly style of everything else.

We wanted the clouds to be in 3D space and not just flat 2D matte paintings, so they catch light and have visible dimensionality, parallaxing, all the good stuff.

So I got to use the precursor of the Brushstroke Tools Add-on and the scanned strokes that we used for everything else in the production!

There was quite a bit of testing to get the look of the clouds right.

The first attempts easily looked too cartoony with the strokes sticking to the base mesh surface.

So the brushstrokes had to be way more jumbled, loose and gestural to feel like they were created by an expressive oil painter's hand.

On top of that each sequence would get its own treatment to account for the changing weather conditions. The happy, fluffy clouds pile up into storm clouds and the beach shot at the end features some subtle bruhstrokes that almost disappear into the sky gradient.

How to paint clouds Project Gold style

Here is the file with the finished result, if you want to explore it already, but I will go over how I created everything in the rest of this article.

So let's look at the process of painting a single cloud and also how to turn it into a quick composition!

I'll use Eevee for the demo and the updated Brushstroke Tools Add-on as it's now way more convenient than the version we used during the production, but the workflow hasn't changed much.

You will want to have the Add-on and a sky dome with some brushstrokes, so it doesn't feel too clean as a backdrop.

Create a base cloud at the "correct" distance to camera. Depending on how realistic you want to be with this, you can put the clouds 2-6 km high, but I will cheat for the demo.

Now sculpt the cloud vaguely into shape. The most important part is to give it some depth so the bottom plane feels like it receeds in space and you get a sense of volume.
Other than that, there is no need to put too much effort into the sculpt for this style of clouds. You will soon see why. For the Gold Showcase I often left the base meshes as chonky UFOs in the sky and it was fine.

Making the brushstrokes

Before you create the brushstrokes, don't forget to update the UV map of the base mesh with Smart UV Project.

Then create a Draw layer with the Brushstroke Tools Add-on. I prefer Draw over Fill for this, because it allows me to place more brushstrokes in specific areas quickly, paint away from the base mesh freely without setting up masks and because I like to paint things by hand :)

In the video I also make a copy of the basic Brush Material, so i can modify it later. Then finally I draw some brushstrokes! Try to emphasize the gesture of the volumes of the cloud while covering the surface.

Brushstrokes are now drawn in reference to a surface object as long as you keep it selected in the outliner, it used to be a bit more annoying.

You can also select the brushstrokes object itself as your surface object to draw quite freely in mid air!

Making the cloud poofy

By now you can make the base cloud object invisible to the camera and exclude it from being rendered, but keep it around.

Next I make a bunch of adjustments to the brushstrokes in the Shape tab. Most notably I add a ton of Noise, set the Normal Offset to negative (!) nine meters, fiddle with the Overdraw, and create some Duplicates that I spread around and rotate with Random Tilt.

All of this is done to make the strokes more scrambled and follow the surface of the base mesh less.

I also ended up enabling the Dappled setting, which chops up the brushstrokes into the shortest available dashes from the Brushstroke Atlas.

"Sculpting" the cloud

Everything up to this point was setup for this bit! In Edit mode you get to mess with the curves as you please to get the shape and gesture you want.
I like to do this with the overlays off, just Lasso Select and move the selected strokes around. You can also go into Sculpt mode and Comb the brushstrokes, but that feels a bit less effective to me. Add more strokes wherever the cloud gets a bit thin.

I didn't in this case, but you can also sculpt and scale the base cloud object in this step and see what results you can get.

In the video I had to delete stray brushstrokes, that I accidentally drew on the sky dome, whoops! Often enough you can fix shorter outlier strokes, you don't like with a different Seed. Conveniently Seed also generates similar clouds you could copy paste around the scene...

Copy and Pasting a Compositon

Here I start copy pasting the brushstroke layers and making adjustments in the Shape and Material tab to each layer to create a quick composition.

Don't forget to create copies of the brushstroke material before making changes in the Material tab otherwise you might accidentally mess up your initial clouds.

As you see I also use multiple brushstroke layers to assemble a single bigger cloud. The main cloud here is composed of about ten layers.

If you run into a lot of black lines showing up in your clouds in Eevee try this fix:

Final result

I somehow forgot to ever use the lights I set up, so I ended up adding an HDRI image (forest.exr) to the world material as an environment texture node.

And that's the result of the demo (same .blend file as linked above)!
Good luck making your own clouds with the Brushstroke Tools Add-on and exploring different shading styles!