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[Impmaster]

Hey all, I have no experience whatsoever with graphics or art. I want to make a game set in the clouds and I wanted to copy this aesthetic:

However, I'm not sure how they made the clouds. I tried making spheres then just changing the dimensions in unity, but that looked too artificial. Are these clouds actually meshes or did they just add a texture?


Looks like a mesh but i'm not sure. Where do I start? Just learn how to use blender and slightly tug at the edges of a basic sphere?

[initials]

Maybe look into metaballs?

[oahda]

Looks like it might be 3D metaballs with a very low blend factor (<- not an official term, but you'll understand what I mean if you start learning about it), yeah.

If you don't need them to be dynamic, however, you could premodel them by combining spheres using boolean operations in your 3D software.

[BorisTheBrave]

Your closeup does make them look like pretty much just overlapping spheres with some blending over the boundaries. You're 90% there with overlapped spheres, but metaballs would be an easy way of improving.

What makes them look cloudlike is the texture and lighting. (also the context - they are so stylized I'm not sure you'd recognize them as clouds without the mist and sky as context).

If I had to guess, their shader will have a slightly rough normal map to hint at detailed surface, some baked ambient occlusion so they look like they block sunlight, and some luminance to simulate internal scattering inside the cloud. There's also some color tricks going on in your screenshot, as the shadowed parts of the clouds are blue rather than dark, but I don't really have the artistic chops to explain what is going on.

[Μarkham]

It's most likely a mesh.  Nintendo would have optimized their game, and for a background object, I doubt they would waste computational power on metaballs and never-seen geometry that you would have with overlapping spheres.  They have a low polygon count, but are using either bump or normal maps for the texture.