Clouds in Video Games

I worked at Realtime Worlds, maker of Crackdown. In the first week of joining I was privileged to attend a small talk where Hugh Malan explained how he rendered the skybox. It was fascinating, if somewhat over my head. I still think that Crackdown had one of the most beautiful skies—it holds up nearly two decades later.

It seems that Hugh worked on 'Horizon: Forbidden West' too.

The article says surprisingly little about the state-of-the-art in realistic cloud rendering.

It's now feasible to pretty accurately simulate light propagation through the atmosphere and the clouds. The blue skies and red sunsets can be calculated based on physical properties.

Raymarching can be used to accurately render any shape of the clouds from any viewpoint. It's amazing how a couple of relatively simple formulas (Beer-Lambert law, Henyey-Greenstein phase function) can be used to realistically render almost everything about the clouds: the silver linings, darkened bodies, crepuscular rays, various appearances from thin fog to white powder, and colorful graidents at dusk and dawn.

https://youtu.be/GOee6lcEbWg?t=1422 https://youtu.be/mGHCOOnI5aE?t=1640 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj_tK_mdRcA

My personal favourite 'Clouds in Video Games': I used to play Quake 3/Quake Live competitively, and spent a lot of time in a small 'arena' map called 'Thunderstruck'[1]. The clouds in this map are absolutely ridiculous in terms of their realism, but there's something really nice about them. There's certainly no time in a Quake game to just sit and stare at the clouds, but they definitely add a bit of flavour!

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6wwMSIWCWw

Playing some of the games mentioned here doesn’t heat up my phone as much as reading this article for 2 minutes did

I can't even read the article because the cookie banner won't close. What the hell.