Ok, this is YATC: Yet Another Thread on the Clouds ! I know there are severals of this subject but ... I can't find really precise explanations (waiting for Yann L article !). If what I'am looking for is in a book please let me know.

Quote: fboivin: JF Dube has a good article in Game Programming Gems 5 about cloud rendering using the latest hardware (ps3.0)

How to implement realtime (60 Hz) clouds changing ? Using: - a sky dome - a procedural texture (perlin noise) - some nice lighting/scattering/shading - shaders and modern hardware See Yann L's example: Others implementations (i.e. impostors ...) are out of subject. References are: - M. Ken Perlin himself ! Improved Noise reference implementation in JAVA (C++ translation is obvious). - Hugo Elias Perlin noise implementation and Clouds and the the article in gamedev form Francis "AK 47" Huang - THE thread on Clouds (Yann L). - Others threads (okonomiyaki: Cloud 2.5d raytracing ... need more eyes, HellRaiZer Cloud Shading ...) So, my questions are: - could someone explain the whole process in detail (especially scattering) ? - and also could you give some explanation on what is done in CPU and what in GPU ? What I understand so far: 0. The process: 0.1 Compute Perlin Noise in N octaves 0.2 Compute the scattering of sun using a 2.5d raytracing (Bresenham line drawing for example) on small resolution of noise and less octaves. 0.3 in the fragment shader compute the final sum of octaves and exponentiation (using a lookup texture ?)and compute the blending with sky colour and sun glow. 1. Perlin Noise: 1.0 Noise generation. The aim is to generate N octaves of noise. They are basically 2D arrays. The basic implementation uses Ken Perlin's noise generator which does the noise generation + interpolation + smoothing. Several others implementations use tricks to minimize the number of calculations. 1.1 Do I need to have seamless noise ? 1.2 If yes, how to have efficent seamless noise generation ? 1.3 Does anyone knows if hardware vendors will implement the GLSL noise() functions ? Trick 1 (cf. Yann L thread): Precompute sum of octaves in a RGB texture: R0 = (1*O1 + 1/2*O2 + 1/4*O3) G0 = (1*O4 + 1/2*O5 + 1/4*O6) B0 = (1*O7 + 1/2*O8) Then the final sum is: final = R0+1/8*G0+1/64*B0 Trick 2: Remember that the low frequency octaves give the general shape and high frequency octaves give the small variations. One simple trick is to compute only low frequency octaves when needed, using allways the same high frequency octaves. Trick 3: cf coelurus The lookup texture to do the exponentiation could be: lookup_texture[u, v] = 255 * (1 - exp(a, u + v)) 2. Sky dome 2.1 Polygons Can I use a dome generated by program ? Use for example : http://www.spheregames.com/files/SkyDomesPDF.zip 2.2 Tesselation I understand that dome needs to be more subdivided in the horizon than in the zenith, how to do that by program ? 3. Scattering 3.1 I understand that I have to consider the noise as a value of thickness of the cloud. (cf. Yann L thread). 3.2 How to have a voxel from the noise map ? Do I need a render to texture phase ? Trick 1: The sun is a point light. See Yann L's thread: Trick 2: Mark Harris does the scattering using a 2 phases rendering see his paper, Algorithm 1 P. 118. Place the observer at the sun position, render the clouds and get the opacity (from colour buffer or z-buffer ?), then render the scene using that opacity for scattering. Could we do that with our 2D texture ? 4. Colour of sky The reference document seems to be Dobashi: http://nis-lab.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~nis/cdrom/BasisSky.ps, how to implement ? J. [Edited by - jmaupay on September 8, 2005 4:09:53 AM]

Quote:Original post by timw
may I ask what is seamless noise? perlins noise interpolation seems to me reasonably seamless, you will notice repeating patterns if you vew a texture over a large enough domain, but nothing I'd consider seams?
Tim

Seamless for me means it can repeat without showing the tile. And when I generate noise it is not "repeatable" at all. The first octave gives the general pattern. Something has to be done to the octaves to be repeatable. So my question is: how to have repeatable noise ? For example: Matt Zucker
The Perlin noise math FAQ
explains how to do that but I feel that it is not an efficient way of doing it ?

If you take the 3DLabs 3Dnoise texture generation here GLSL demos from "Orange book", it's tilable but they are doing an other way (I don't understand). So if you can explain the "how to" ...

Quote:Original post by coelurus
It would be nice if you managed this thread and put answers to your questions in your first post. A sort of reference for cloud... stuff.

I'll try to do that

Quote:
0.1-0.3) Using the original Perlin noise-approach, you can add up octaves immediately per texel. Loop through the octaves you want, scale and offset coords for the noise function, scale result and sum up. Scaling buffers with noise isn't very good and you can get much nicer and smoother results using real Perlin noise. You shouldn't really use 2048x2048 textures either, you can tile high freq noise textures and use 64x64 textures for 3 octaves per texture.

OK. No problem with that. By the way, the "original perlin noise" is from M. Ken Perlin himself ?! Improved Noise reference implementation in JAVA
(C++ translation is obvious).

Why don't we use that one ? Is there any copyright problem ? Or any not-random results due to the pre-computed permutation table ? Any limitation in dimension (256) ? Or any not good interpolation ?

Then generate octaves and sum them:
(peudo code from Hugo Elias:)

function PerlinNoise_2D(float x, float y)      total = 0      p = persistence      n = Number_Of_Octaves - 1      loop i from 0 to n          frequency = 2^i          amplitude = p^i          total = total + InterpolatedNoisei(x * frequency, y * frequency) * amplitude      end of i loop      return total  end function

But I thought that Yann L's approach is not this one. He is doing the sum in the GPU. I feel that he could provide smaller textures then let the GPU doing the magnification interpolations ?

Quote:
2.1) A skydome is just a collection of tris spanning a capped sphere, get it in any way you want.
2.2) Doesn't matter if it's efficient or not, the skydome should not be regenerated or reloaded every frame anyway.

Ok my point 2) is stupid. I'll remove it, perhaps providing some links to how to generate a sky dome for example here:
Sky dome tutorial from Spheregames

Any other good url for that?

Quote:
3.2) As you mentioned in 3.1, the cloud array is a collection of noise values that specify cloud thickness. A cloud voxel exists at position (x, y, z) in the cloud array if "0 <= y < cloud[x + z * width]" (y being up). You can trick this out a bit and try:
c = cloud[x + z * width]
-c/4 <= y < c
to get some "substance" under the clouds during scattering, it really makes a difference.

Sorry I don't understand. What is cloud[] ? Is it my noise texture ? For the moment I have a texture with several octaves (the sum and exponentiation is done in the frament shader). That texture is mapped to the dome (the dome is quite large, that's why I wanted the texture to be 2048x2048 and not to repeat it) using texture spherical coordinates(glBindTexture/glTexCoord). Where do I have a voxel ? Probably in the fragment program, but I feel that you are not talking about that ?

Quote:Original post by coelurus
Dark clouds [Apoch: link redacted]

Very nice shot !

Quote:
I'll rearrange my answers here a bit:

The Perlin-noise link you found is _the_ one, afaik you should be able to simply copy and paste that code (and make it 2D for your clouds).

Well, I use Z as the time and I would like clouds to change over the time. So just taking x,y values at a fixed z (time) is straightforward. New textures will be computed over several frames then replaced when completed (= time slicing). z will change only when a new cloud texture is completed and will change very slowly. So it's necessary to keep the 3D noise function.

Quote:
Make sure you get a proper RNG (Random Number Generator), rand() is usually not good enough.

Where do I need to use a RNG ? Ken Perlin uses a permutation table, I don't see any rand. If I generate a white noise, then do the smooth and interpolation myself, then a RNG is needed to generate the white noise. But with the Ken Perlin function, I don't see where to use rand() ?

Quote:
What kind of raycasting are you gonna do, preprocess on the CPU or by using the newest fragment program model in realtime? I have no experience at all from "ps2.0" and up so I can't comment at all on realtime solutions. The CPU preprocess is just a straightforward scan through the lowest freq octaves of your clouds. Loop through each entry in your generated cloud texture (you do generate it in some memory I hope?) and cast rays from cloud particles to light source and camera views. There are no distinct voxels in the clouds, only pillars of voxels so you have to check for lightrays that cut cloud pillars.

It's pretty tricky to explain the entire process in a post...

I dont know if I'll use preprocessed or GPU raycasting. For the mement I have to understand how to do it on CPU (preprocess). I'll see after if shaders could help in some way. (yes I have a texture in memory).

What you mean is (your texture is 128x128):
for (int i=0;i<128;i++)
for (int j=0;j<128;j++)
RayCast(LowFreqNoise[j],SunPosition,CameraPosition);

I have a problem of transformation. The texture will be mapped in a dome. So how to transform the i,j coordinates to the coordinates x,y,z in the dome ? I mean the sun and camera are in world coordinate, how to transform i,j to that coordinate system ? (I assume that the texture is not repeated and is entierly mapped on the dome i.e. u,v coordinates will vary from 0,0 to 1,1).

[Edited by - ApochPiQ on November 28, 2008 11:47:02 PM]