Thread by @ShaderBits

Some cloud experiments continued from #UE5 #PS5 demo; here showing Flowmaps-3D function from 4.26. The Clouds are made from Curve Assets + hand painted density & flowmaps. Paint thunderstorms! Now as twitter video. Examples will be included in 4.26

#UE4 #realtimevfx #cloudscape

Some details: Cloud rendering w/new VolumetricCloud component by @SebHillaire for 4.26.

Clouds painting is a 2d map with RGBA colors. The curves also form an RGBA texture, so depending on which color you paint, that decides which curve profile to use.

Curve DF:

Because the curve profiles get converted into SignedDistanceFields (could get similar result by blurring too), when painting density, the density determines how far along the curve you are for each point. So just adjusting density of the mask gives (cloud compositor here):

The internal lightning is another Voronoi volume texture. Its not shadowed or anything, but it's masked using the cloud detail volume texture. You can see when I turn the detail off on the cloud itself, the lightning still has the pattern which gives a scattering illusion:

Also: applying the lightning is super easy with the new VolumetricCloud using a Volume material. Just multiply your custom internal lighting value by your main density and plug the value into emissive.