Density becomes sky.

1. Install VanguardCloud

Overview

VanguardCloud is a 3ds Max plugin for Windows 64-bit. It installs for Max 2024, 2025, 2026 and 2027 — whichever of them the installer finds on the machine.

Steps

1. Close 3ds Max. A plugin cannot be replaced while Max holds it open, and an installer that appears to succeed against a running Max has changed nothing.
2. Run the installer you downloaded from this page. It detects every installed Max version and writes the plugin into each one.
3. Start Max and open the Create panel → Geometry → VanguardFX in the dropdown. VanguardCloud is there beside VanguardCity.

If the button is not there

The category dropdown at the top of the Create panel defaults to Standard Primitives. VanguardCloud is under VanguardFX, not under Standard Primitives — this catches almost everybody once.

2. Activate your licence

The 7-day trial

Every install starts with a free 7-day trial. Nothing to enter and nothing to ask for: create a cloud and it renders.

Activating a purchased licence

1. Create a VanguardCloud object and open the Licence rollout in the Modify panel.
2. Copy the Hardware ID. It is read-only on purpose — it identifies this machine and a typed-over one will not match.
3. Sign in on this site, go to My Account, and paste the Hardware ID against your licence.
4. Press Download licence. Paste the file's contents into the key box in Max, or use Load from file….

Moving to another PC

A licence is bound to one machine's Hardware ID. Ask for a transfer from My Account — it is a normal request, not a special case, and you do not lose the remaining days.

3. Your first cloud

Create it

Create panel → Geometry → VanguardFX → VanguardCloud. Drag in the viewport to set the box, then drag again for its height. That box is the domain: the volume the renderer marches through, and the cloud exists nowhere outside it.

What you are looking at

The viewport draws the box and a fast preview of where the density is. It is deliberately cheap — the real cloud is evaluated by the renderer, at render resolution, and the viewport is there so you can place and scale it, not to show you the final image.

Press Build Cloud Material

One button, in the Modify panel. It builds the volumetric material for whichever renderer you have picked and assigns it. Until you press it the box is an empty volume — that is the single most common "it is not working".

4. Shaping the sky

Coverage and density

Coverage is how much of the sky has cloud in it at all; Density is how thick that cloud is where it exists. They are separate on purpose — a thin overcast and a few fat cumulus are the same density at very different coverage.

Cloud type

Cumulus gives scattered puffs with flat bottoms and cauliflower tops; stratus gives layered sheets; cirrus gives thin high streaks. The type changes the shape the noise is pushed into, not the amount of it.

Detail

Detail adds the small-scale erosion at the edges that makes a cloud read as a cloud rather than as a blob of fog. It costs render time roughly in proportion to how much of it you ask for.

Animation

Wind moves the whole field; Evolve changes its shape in place, so the cloud boils as it drifts. Evolve is expressed as a ratio of the wind speed, so a cloud that drifts faster boils faster and you do not have to keep both numbers in step by hand. Both are animatable.

5. Rendering

Pick your renderer first

The Render Engine buttons — Physical, Corona, V-Ray, Arnold — decide which volumetric material gets built. Pick the one you are actually rendering with, then press Build Cloud Material. Building a Corona material and then rendering with Arnold gives you a black frame, and nothing warns you.

Light it

A cloud is lit, not emissive. It needs a light — a sun, an HDRI dome, or both. With no light in the scene a correctly built cloud renders black, which looks exactly like a broken one.

Steps and quality

The renderer marches through the volume in steps. Fewer, larger steps is faster and bands; more, smaller steps is slower and smooth. Start coarse while you are framing the shot and raise it for the final.

6. Tips & fixes

The cloud renders black

Three causes, in the order they actually happen: there is no light in the scene; the material was built for a different renderer than the one you are using; or Build Cloud Material was never pressed.

The cloud renders as a solid box

Density is far too high, or Coverage is at maximum. A volume that never lets light through is a box.

It is slow

Volumetrics cost what they cost, but three things dominate: the step size, the Detail amount, and how much of the frame the domain covers. Shrink the box to the part of the sky you actually see before you touch anything else.

Nothing appears in the viewport

Check that the domain box is not scaled to nothing, and that you are in a shaded viewport rather than wireframe.