Volumetric clouds, help needed!

[JinxTheCatt_o (Jinx)]

Hello developers!

I have been working on a volumetric cloud system, based on perlin noise voxels. I have been successful in making the part which generates voxels, however I have come to a roadblock in the front of representing these clouds as a volumetric form. The only way I’ve been able to make the clouds look like anything close to good but also performant and able to render from far away, is making 1 to 5 massive particles on each voxel. This is what that looks like:

However, this approach has massive drawbacks, namely that they are particles and so moving your camera will instantly destroy the illusion of depth, as well as looking straight up or down at them

So if anyone has any solutions they can think of, please reply! this system is primarily for aircraft based games, so they need to be able to render from very far away.

If anyone is interested, this is what the perlin noise voxels themselves look like:

[SelDraken]

Are you able to have the particle billboard so that its always facing the camera? Wouldn’t that fix the issue of it looking different based on camera angle?

[JinxTheCatt_o (Jinx)]

If the particles are facing the camera, they still have the same issue of moving with the camera, as well as what seems to be half the rendering range

[computerph1_DEV]

render the outer voxels as balls or a ball mesh that you can scale for more variety
also hide the um voxels which can’t be seen from the camera

[JinxTheCatt_o (Jinx)]

I don’t think I can discriminate voxels which are on the interior and exterior without raycasting every single one, which would obviously be too expensive

As for the spheres, I don’t see any way that doing this can look like a real cloud, let alone better than the particles

[computerph1_DEV]

as the voxels are inside the cloud, make them bigger the spheres