Yet another clouds update

Published September 03, 2004
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I think i will be done with the "step 1" of my clouds this week end. I will soon be ready to work on "step 2", integration at the full planet level.

At the moment the clouds are still unanimated and cover an area of 153x153 kilometers (i'm tiling a 16x16 grid of clouds, each voxel space is around 10 km large).

To reduce fillrate, i am now rendering the closer clouds into a small resolution texture (256x256 in the screenshot below) and alpha blend it on top of the screen. I'm not quite sure yet how it will interact with the ZBuffer, but the framerate increase is pretty good, especially when navigating inside the clouds. With that "trick", the framerate is constantly over the 100 fps, and generally around 150 fps, at ground level.

Here is a screenshot taken a bit above the cloud layer:

0 likes 2 comments

Comments

evolutional
I wonder, will you be implementing atmospheric effects? Storms, winds, etc which will affect how the clouds will be rendered and animated?
September 03, 2004 01:27 PM
Ysaneya
Quote:
I wonder, will you be implementing atmospheric effects? Storms, winds, etc which will affect how the clouds will be rendered and animated?


I will _at least_ have atmospheric lighting (through a skydome), moving clouds/wind and rain. Other effects that i'm thinking of including but are less obvious are: snow, lightning, cloud shadows on the ground and god rays.

The biggest issue here is "storms". Clouds between two different voxel spaces (when basically the whole cell is filled of clouds, ie. to simulate a storm) don't interact very well yet; especially the lighting: clouds on one space can't affect clouds on another space, so when you tile the spaces in the world, all the clouds near the edge of a space have a white seam. I'm not quite sure yet how to fix it.

Y.
September 04, 2004 07:19 AM
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