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Turns out that a big part of cloud rendering is also the authoring, cause procedural noises can only get you so far ☁️ Trying some stuff out with simple shape volumes that add/remove density, but what other method of cloudscape authoring would you like to see? 👀 #gamedev #unity3d #madewithunity

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I have wanted, for the longest time, to create a space dogfighting/exploration sim set in a nebula using proper volumetric clouds. This is the closest I've seen to practically generated and authorable tech that could pull it off! Amazing

Slightly unrelated but still fun to show; check out dat performance 👀 That's a cloud volume that spans 3000x2000x3000 world units filled with thick fluffy clouds raymarched at minimum 8 units per step and rendered in a quarter res buffer Whole scene averages at 1.5ms (on a 4080 super, but still)

It helps that it's in quarter res (with depth aware upscaling to take care of edge artifacts). Other than that, I run the whole thing in a compute shader before compositing and I increase the step size in the distance which also seems to help. I think it could be even better with some tricks tbh

Maybe the option to use different types of noises? I have more experience with non-realtime clouds, but you can typically play with different flavors (although I assume mixing noises might get more expensive). Also, using VDBs could be interesting?

I'm mostly playing around with modifying the noise as much as possible (remapping, inverting by normalized height etc) VDBs are certainly a good idea, I'd also play around with baking arbitrary mesh sdfs too 👀 lots of customization ideas, but I wanna keep it as wysiwyg as possible