Hey, folks. Some time ago I made this for a vr project, thought I’d share it here.
The goal was to create nice-looking lightweight clouds to use in timelapse vr scenes. At first I tried a volumetric approach(ray marching), however, I couldn’t get anywhere near stable 90fps using htc vive and gtx1070(I checked a few available solutions as well, all resulted in noticeable performance drops). So I decided to utilize a simplier approach - 2d perlin noise with proper lighting, taking into account Beer’s law, and Heyney-Greenstein model.
Here you can see what I ended up with (Timelapse):
Capabilities demo:
Presets editor makes it convenient to save different cloud types and use them when necessary.
Also includes a modified version of built-in skybox shader with stars.
Any suggestions?
Thoughts:
Multiple cloud layers version. Will make shader heavier but might be worth it.
To include more built-in cloud types (any preferences?)
Looks pretty cool! I particularly like that the clouds interact with the sun. I’d like to play with the demo, see what kind of framerates you are getting with those shadows on. Are they actually shadows? Can you make a nice clean edged puffy cloud?
Thanks, yes, they are, they correspond to clouds if that’s what you mean.
With shadows it’s stable 90fps using gtx1070 and vive (without vsync it’s 200+ but i don’t think that’s very trustworthy).
Unfortunately realistic looking clouds are possible only with volumetric rendering.
Fake lighting can only get you this far.
Is that a flat plane rendered on high y position or rendered on the skybox? Is it possible to have carmera above the clouds and look down on the ground with cloud passing by? It doesnt need to be camera to be able to intersect with the cloud… just look down on it. Also the… shadows… are they rendered off from corresponding directional light as shadow casting or light cookie?
it’s a dome. But if you need you can replace it with a plane, there is no difference, so , yes, it is possible.
Shadows are created using projector with the same generated texture.
Will upload it to the assetstore this sunday(need to clean and comment the code and create a simple guide). Mobile version will be added later.
Not sure how long does it take for the asset to be approved right now by unity team, Usually around a week or two.
