Procedural clouds

[richardpl]

Multiple layers of clouds including volumetric clouds when flying in atmosphere.

[vlastan]

yes, maybe even a texture alpha map, instead of procedural.

[richardpl]

if you want texture alpha map open your own issue.

This issue is about procedural/fractal/perlin_noise clouds

[s20dan]

a texture alpha map, instead of procedural

Completely agree with @Richardpl on this one. We don't want fixed textures, why would we want to put anything static on our dynamic procedural worlds?

I'll post this from the IRC logs, it was an idea for clouds by Ae_ which would work nicely:

[01:18] Ae i mean not in the pioneer way, but visualising scientific data [01:18] Ae it doesn't show what the eyes see, more magnetic fields, and high uv emmision lines etc [01:20] Ae i was looking at how we might show solar flares and some coronal volumetric variations [01:21] Ae the atmosphere code does a 5 or so point ray trace, the density function it uses was replaced by a fractal [01:22] Ae_ and the amount of points increased to 10-20 some gaseous object like things could be shown

He does talk about solar flares, however the exact same method could be used effectively for clouds I believe. As we would be trying to achieve the same result, basically by passing a fractal through the atmosphere thickness value. By using the terrain fractals we can also do some pretty cool things like place clouds over the correct land formations

[impaktor]

Clouds discussed on dev forum: http://pioneerspacesim.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=206