What's a simple way to have realistic, moving clouds?

Archived Forums Questions & Answers
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Anybody have any ideas? I’ve searched through countless threads, but I haven’t found anything that truly works (and looks realistic). Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

  • I tried creating a cube, reversing the normals, adding a texture to the cube and then rotating the cube with environment inside of it.
  • I tried using a 2D texture above my environment and animating it.
  • I tried animating a 2D plane.
  • I tried using particles, but it was CPU expensive.
  • I tried reversing the normals on a sphere and then rotating the sphere.
  • I tried to rotate the main camera’s Skybox.

I'll be looking into that subject soon myself Meppiel, I'll up vote this post as for me it's an interesting question.

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4 Answers

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If all you want to do is rotate the skybox (as your own answer seems to indicate), then it would be much simpler to create two cameras in your scene, say mainCamera and skyboxCamera, set the depth of the mainCamera to 1 and the skyboxCamera to 0, set the Clear Flags on the mainCamera to “Don’t clear” and on the skyboxCamera to “Skybox”, and finally set the culling mask on the skyboxCamera to “Nothing”.

Then you can rotate the skyboxCamera using a script, and it will draw only the skybox behind everything else seen by the mainCamera. Much simpler and potentially less problematic than rotating all the objects in your scene.

Got to go with Shaderop on this one Meppiel. Moving everything like that is maybe working for you right now, but the money is on it biting you in the ass at a later late. I've not played around with camera depths, so this looks interesting! Thumbs up!

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@UFO Hunter: Yeah, I figured that having everything in the scene rotating slowly would cause some serious problems later in development. Good call. @Shaderop: Awesome idea! Thanks for the advice!!!

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After banging my head in the wall for hours I managed to come up with a pretty good solution. Instead of having my environment (houses, trees, and so on) still and the clouds moving, I decided to move everything in my scene (thus giving the illusion that the skybox was moving. I created an empty GameObject, put everything in the hierarchy inside this parent, and put a very slow Vector3.up rotation on the empty GameObject. Try it out, as long as the skybox isn’t extremely detailed it looks nice.

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There is an asset on the asset store named Cheap Sky for free

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Go here link text and use the shader from the sample level for the sky, I use it and it’s great.

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