I was working for the MS Flight Simulator team when my lead first started doing the volumetric style clouds. It's pretty low tech really, with multiple facing sprites. He wrote a pretty cool little script where you place large boxes to describe the overall shape of the cloud, then hit a button and it fills that bounding…
I was once trying to do the same thing and came up with a quite nice solution. I used spheres in 3dmax to define a cloud shape and made a blobmesh of it.Then it was optimized by hand where needed and vertex painted on the bottom and in the places where the cloud would be occluded.Then in engine i rendered a sprite at each…
http://www.windwardmark.net/index.php Think of it like Speedtree, but for weather. True volumetric clouds. The way it handles the HDR of the sun is awesome.
Zelda: WindWaker, Sid Meier's Pirates, and LockOn:Air Combat all have pretty good volumetric clouds. What perspective in particular are you looking for?
Or the appearance of at least. Anyone got any good pointers to technique? Any ideas of good examples to check out beyond the latest ms flight simulator? Many thanks.
Jane's WWII Fighters had some nice looking volumetric clouds, but since it was 1998 and the world wasn't ready for such things yet it was pretty damn slow
just stumbled upon this http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=439168 looks pretty neat, but probably eats lot of performance as true raytracing is done on the cloud volumes.
Thanks all for the help, especially Vig. Although I'd be inclined to disagree that my question was as broad as all that. Perhaps I wasn't specific enough whether or not I was looking at it from the code or Art side, but my response to Ryno possibly clarifies. I'm confident that there aren't literally thousands of different…