Vahur Krouverk <vah### [at] aetecee> wrote in message
news:3AAFBF12.BF398D9D@aetec.ee...
> Hi!
>
> I've experimented a little bit with procedural clouds (written with
> shader) and here is most promising result. Basically it is one plane
> with shader. Shader is quite messy right now, but basically it performs
> marching from intersection point toward light source and uses "advanced
> calculation" to calculate cloud's color. So the shadowing of clouds is
> totally fake, but with little  more tinkering it could be possible to
> make this fake quite believable. But right now every attempt leads to
> worse output, so I have to take time off.
> Good part of such approach is that it renders quite fast: 512x384 aa0.3
> on 2m28sec (350 MHz P2)

Not bad!

I recently implemented a real-time clouds simulation at work (I work in the
games industry), so confidentiality probably prevents me from saying too
much :-(. But I recommend you have a look here:
http://www.eml.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~doba/pub_doba.html

What I did was based entirely on the second paper there, called "A Simple,
Efficient Method for Realistic Animation of Clouds". It's just about
possible in real time (though we'll probably drop it because it's a bit
expensive) but if you're pre-rendering you could get ridiculously realistic
clouds :)

I hope this is of some help.

--
Tek
"There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic... to human
behaviour." - Bjork
http://www.evilsuperbrain.com

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