Semi-procedural clouds

[lolwel21]

I’ve been working on starting a new asset pack: Cloudscapes! They use a combination of meshes and procedural textures.
As an optimization to the cloud rendering workflow, the nuclei of the clouds are all homogenous. This saves on a bit of memory, but more importantly speeds up render times. (It’s still slow, though. There are heterogenous volumes in the render, after all.)

The node-group setup I’m using includes a number of randomizations controllable on a global scale, and it works perfectly with instanced versions of the cloud segments. Some of these global (world-space) variables include wind speed and direction and the positioning of the small-scale noise making up the surface of the cloud.

What do you think?

[Regono]

Is it capable of doing different types of clouds? If so I would pay for that.

[lolwel21]

Currently working on that!
Right now, I’m working on parts for cumulus, nimbus, and stratocumulus clouds.
After that, I think I’ll try lenticular and stratus clouds. Cirrocumulous and high stratus clouds may warrant use a different method entirely because they’re so high up, an valley fog seems location geometry dependent to the point where making cloud segments may not be very beneficial.

By the way, I’m using this weekend’s competition as an R&D through use experience type thing.
I’ll post the finished product on this thread, too when I’m done.

[lolwel21]

Still a few bugs in there, but progress is being made.
(This takes SO LONG to render!!! I might need to dip into false volumetrics)