Nice short talk about the approach Guerilla games used to render clouds.
https://www.guerrilla-games.com/read/nubis-realtime-volumetric-cloudscapes-in-a-nutshell
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Hahah… so used to buzz words that when I read “cloud rendering” I actually thought of some deported way to render frames in the “cloud of ze interwebs”.
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I like the approach that they use very much and came up with something comparable.
However, the color and transmittance are stored in low-resolution 3D textures in my system. I’d like to keep it this way so I can sample it for the use by transparent objects. The main problem is the upsampling at large distances. Anybody here who has experience with that?
Another difference is that I need a longer view distance. I think that Guerilla calculates clouds to some distance (approx. 30 km) and this is not enough for flight simulation. You should also be able to fly into and through clouds, which makes the upsampling even more complicated because you can expect more changes in color & transmittance in a short time.
Interesting talk and respect to the effort put into this.
But I wonder if it was really worth the trouuble when it essentially boils down to well chosen color gradients mixed with a lot of noise at various scales…
Could have use the energy for more interesting game play stuff 
If these are the clouds in Horizon Zero Dawn then they are truly excellent and easily noticeable as something special.
…as is the game itself… worked on by a completely different team.
This kind of statement always bugs me. “Why do you have the janitor emptying trash when he could be adding more gameplay elements?”
Different folks have different jobs. Talent/skill is not 100% fungible.
Sure, I still think they did a great job with this. But it’s only possible in the triple-A space with teams of 200 devs. A small indie team may have come up with a similar looking solution with less effort…
Indeed.
Insert that reasoning for almost any feature of a triple-A game.
…nice thing is when they publish what they did and give us ideas on how we can do it without taking the same amount of man-years.
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Yeah thanks to them for doing the research for us 