How Big Budget AAA Games Render Clouds 

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Triple A studio: We need realistic clouds for the games background. Game Dev team: Hold my beer's law.

This gotta be one of your best videos. I can tell you did a lot of research, and it's so well presented!

The clouds in Microsoft Flight Simulator are so realistic that I was waiting for your take on them, but, in the end, this was a very informative video. Thank you

Always loved volumetric smoke over billboard texture layers. Quake III: Arena in 1999 even had volumetric volumes for fog cubes. Well if I remember correctly it was more of planes and you had to tell the BSP compiler that the camera was going to be above or below the plane. It used normalized vector fog coordinates as texture coordinates in order to index a special fog texture which contains the fog density as opacity then it uses alpha blending in order to apply the fog to the fogged parts of the scene. Carmack is flippin' clever. Amazing explanation of new algorithms I always love keeping in the loop, Cook-torrence BRDF is cool but this is even cooler.

You could also make a part 2, showing how the cloud shapes are formed.

The graphical presentation in your videos is amazing!!

Videos like this one never fail to amaze me, well done!

Amazing video. Easy enough for the layman to understand but deep enough that if someone wants to attempt to implement this they definitely have enough to go off off and all inside of 10 minutes. That's real talent.

It sounds as if man just got out of bed at 3AM and decided to make an excellent video on rendering clouds.

I think this is basically the only video on youtube that goes into this much detail on volumetric raymarching. Bravo

I'd love to see, on future deep dives into the history and different approaches to rendering things like this, insight on the performance cost of each change

Raising the bar with each video. Your channel helps fill a big void in game development learning resources. Thank you

Stumbled upon this video entirely by mistake. Instant subscription, Sir. This is precisely the sort of learning I've been pursuing, of late. Appreciate your efforts.

Your channel is invaluable. Thank you for your work! Really excited to experiment with clouds again

Just the work involved in this presentation is pretty mind-blowing

Something to remember too is that clouds are never static. Cumulus will always be fed by rising air, so will have upward motion at the center. The cloud top for cumulus will change as the day goes on, because the rising air is going to keep warming the air at the inversion (where the temperature gradient changes from warming with height to cooling). If you’ve lived in the Midwest or south you’ve seen this effect. Patchwork clouds evenly distributed in the AM but they coalesce into thunderstorms by the afternoon. Stratus come from large air masses of different temp/humidity compositions and will more or less move as one. Their rain is more steady but with smaller droplets. Always love the videos.

Astonishing how much care and effort went into perfecting and optimizing volumetric clouds for the Frostbite Engine, whose games proceeded to use it for...the same shit they were using skyboxes for anyway.

I've been binge-watching your videos, and applying what I've learned to my projects, and I have to say, your content is amazing. You deserve way more subscribers.

One of the few channels that I get notifications for and it never disappoints. Great video!

Been so long since we've had a good shader RU-vidr. Keep making these!

Awesome breakdown :) However, looking at stormclouds, you probably don´t want half resolution, or lower res, you more likely want higher resolution for all the details, that are there. I guess, the higher contrast and rougher light situation in a storm makes those fine details way more visible than in your regular fair weather cloud. Maybe to realize that, it would be good to use some regular high res sprites/textures/particles at the edges to get all the crisp details, and the volumetric cloud for the insides and correct coloring and scattering. The sprites/particles then just would need to get their color info from the volumetric cloud area, they are in.

Why does it take so long for RU-vid to recommend this treasure channel to me! Love your voice BTW

Subbed as soon as i realized what you were presenting and how. This is exactly the kind of thing I love learning about! Someday I will find a way to make this knowledge useful, but even if I cant, thank you so much for making this wonderful, educational presentation with such detail and research put into it, as well as the graphics generation!!!

great explanation and love the look of the end product!

The graphics so clean and beautiful

Incredible video. I've always been a big fan of artistic detail in games(not that I'm very good at it). A quick suggestion if you're fine with it would be a video on branchless programming, figured it might be cool.

This looks so cool! Great work reconstructing this!

That's amazing! I'm on my journey into programming, and your videos inspires me. Thank you

Amazing work and good explanations. Keep on going.

Incredible presentation, impressive research. A+.

Incredibly inspirational and so easy to understand. Simply amazing.

Wow, such a good job, just stumbled across your channel and I have to say this really reminds me of sebastian lague, overwhelmingly good job!

Wow your explanations are phenomenal!

As artist learning about how clouds work is pretty amazing

That was an amazing well-explained video. Thank you!! 🙌

Very good video, thank you for this! I would love to see a similar video on real-time explosions and smoke. That would be much related to this topic. Keep up the good work!

Amazing as always. Thanks!

Just found this channel, love your videos!

Man this makes me wanna get a beer! Awesome video

If you want to check out implementing this into a game, Sebastian Lague used this technique in his "Geography Game"

Incredibly good visualisations, especially at the start :)

Mind blowing this channel exists

This looks awesome! I can't wait to take a look at your code. Thank you for making this video.

Very informative and awesome presentation

Really great video man, keep it up, I learned a lot.

Really good job! Appreciate the effort of explaining everything in detail with amounts of video feedback! Keep it up!

You honestly put out the sickest content, I love it

This is a great video! I had my eye on the Guerilla games paper for a while but never figured out what their noise really did. I will need to go read the frostbite paper your mentioned. :) thanks!

This presentation is amazing.

I bet if we had beer's law clouds in real life rain would be something a lot of people would look forward to!

Super informative, especially since I've been struggling to make performant clouds my own way for a few weeks now.

Amazing analysis, ty!

Damn this video summed out something I've been reading about for so long. That's great thanks!

Amazing tutorial, learning about temporal techniques is something I'd love to see converted as its very popular these days.

Very interesting, and super illustrations!

Great video. Thank you, learned a lot. I was in charge of creating a cloud material within a game engine at my work, I.. didn't like it because there were few infos online (for a non programmer like me) this video explained perfectly clear

wow, what a great explanation! really well done.

Amazing work, learned something cool today! Thanks.

Amazing videos! Keep them coming!

Superb video, very interesting.

I'd love to see one about water, rivers, oceans with waves, etc.

I was configuring the clouds in Arma reforger and didn't know what some of the settings meant, this helped, thanks

Fantastic information, thanks a lot!

Insider did a two-part video a year or so ago listing off one new piece of tech that was introduced for each Pixar movie. For _The Good Dinosaur_ it was volumetric clouds. It's amazing how closely what's state of the art in games follows what's state of the art in CGI; I always figured it would be way behind because the CGI people have whole render farms at their disposal and can brute force everything, whereas games have to do the same thing in a fraction of a second.

awesome stuff mate

Amazing video as always

Love technical stuff like this. Thanks!

these videos are amazing! learned alot

Beers law: when your glass is empty, fill it.

Very cool! Want to try it out myself now

Now this, is cloud computing.

Those final clouds look dope!

Loved this, thank you!

I got interested in this technology after I played some Kerbal Space Program 2; the clouds are beautiful, this is so intriguing!

Thank you for this video!

Great content as always.

awesome presentation, you are amazing, thanks!

I'm going to buy your Shader course, you seem to know what you're talking about!

Nice work !

This stuff is so useful. Thanks!

Great video!

Awesome work!

Simon, you are an amazing teacher.

Very underrated channel. Something else like you said at the end; a-svgf would probably be a good match for this, together with killing off samples more frequently if they are too dark (Russian roulette)

This has really helped me understand why Volumetric Clouds tank the performance on Ark Survival Ascended so much, especially as you amp up the sample count. It does suffer with a major pixelation issue, that reduces as you increase the sample count, mostly going away by 512, though new formations still pixelate, unless you switch to Unreal Engine 5's VolumetricRenderTarget Mode 3.

What a cloudy video (good stuff dude)!

Very informative thank you

I am not well versed in programming, but one thing I would have loved to try to program is how autumn leaves would look in games, with the brown colours that become super vibrant when backlit. Inspiration came from this video from posy: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ci_ZSoMz9lg.html

You sir, deserves a medal.. I wish you a million of subscribers soon... what an underrated channel... thanks for the knowledge shared!

Joni Mitchell would be proud! Nice work Simon.

This is amazing, Rayleigh next

Pretty cool ! Thx

Amazing content 👏👏👏🙏🙏🙏

This is great! I've actually just started working a week ago on trying to apply light effects into a volumetric cloud in threejs and i've been kind of lost, but i think this puts me on the right track!. I would love a tutorial on how to apply this with the threejs api.

Great video! Any chance you could link the papers you mention? Your videos are such an excellent instructional resource.

really good video

This is soo cool!

Can you provide the link to the noise video u mentioned at 6:41 pls

I love your videos, keep it up