Thorsten wrote in Wed Aug 22, 2018 5:46 pm:Some impressions from flight-testing:
Thorsten wrote in Wed Aug 22, 2018 5:46 pm:Do you think we should be looking at procedurally generating the cloud sprites rather than relying on textures?
I suspect that may be hard to do - at least I don't know how a noise function to generate all the subtlety that's in the textures should look like.
In web examples, people often use Perlin noise - but while that looks like cloud, it doesn't really look like any particular cloud type.
So if you have some idea how a suitable noise would look like I'm all ears and think it's worth trying - but for all I like painting things with math - clouds are damn complicated.
(Actually, once we do more cloud stuff in the fragment shader, the thought crossed my mind to completely re-vamp the clouds to hand different metadata to the shaders. But I've shied away from that - clouds are too important an element of flight to break them for low performance systems...)
Please excuse if a silly idea, could you use basic voxel cloud shapes (created for all cloud types) to drive/control the procedural maths?
Please excuse if this is a silly idea, could you use pre-created basic voxel cloud shapes (created for all cloud types) to help control the bounds of the procedural maths?
appears in real life there may be a more gentle roll-off from bright edge into main cloud body?
loosely confining a fractal within a rough cloud shape bounding box, even pre-generated allowing a larger selection of cloud formations?
Thorsten wrote in Wed Sep 05, 2018 6:24 pm:We currently do clouds by putting a pre-generated (in this case by simple photography...) stack of textures into a rough cloud shape bounding box... (aka, I'm not getting the difference you have in mind).
'fractal' is a nice word - but what is the actual function you evaluate to get the structure of a Cumulus cloud, how does it differ from the function to get the more structured Stratus types? I have no idea.
It seems than rendering voxel clouds has already been attempted, and since it takes one second per frame to compute them it's too expensive.
Source: https://gearnuke.com/horizon-zero-dawn- ... oudscapes/
Looks very feasible and interesting, wish I had the time now to dig deeper.
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