VFX artist Thomas Marco has released a free stylised cloud shader for Blender, aimed squarely at artists working with procedural shading and volumetrics. The shader is 100% procedural and node-based, requiring no additional plugins or third-party libraries – just Blender and the will to render some puffy sky furniture.
Packaged in a downloadable .blend file, the shader includes a volumetric cloud setup with user-friendly control parameters. These custom properties are exposed in the Modifier tab, offering sliders for direct manipulation without diving into node spaghetti. Marco provides control over overall cloud shape, contrast, and edge softness – useful whether you’re shading a morning mist or sculpting a stylised thunderhead.
The shader is built for Cycles, Blender’s path-tracing renderer, and was created using Blender 3.6. While the file is compatible with newer versions, results may vary, as always. If things break, blame the Blender gods – or at least check if your version has changed shading behaviour.
Marco explicitly mentions the shader is made to be stylised, so while it leans into soft, painterly looks rather than physically accurate cumulonimbi, it’s perfectly suited for non-photoreal animation, game cutscenes, or surreal VFX inserts. It’s a procedural tool for aesthetic cloudscapes – not meteorology.
The shader is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY), meaning you can use it in both personal and commercial projects, with credit. He also includes a short demo animation and a preview render. The file is around 70MB, so no, it won’t choke your bandwidth.
As always: before integrating free tools into your production pipeline, test thoroughly. Especially when working with stylised procedural setups, version compatibility and render performance can vary. This shader is a strong candidate for lookdev and previz, but your render farm might have opinions.
Price
Free under CC-BY license. Download it from Thomas Marco’s Gumroad.
