How Big Budget AAA Games Render Clouds

[@simondev758]

Patrons can now vote for the next video! Thank you for your support. ❤ Support me on Patreon: www.patreon.com/simondevyt 🌍 Live Demo + Courses: simondev.io

[@Colonies_Dev]

making the noise textures is my worse nightmare, either re-write all your shaders in C# and generate textures that come out weird- or use a compute shader that also fails ☠

[@stephenkentperez7705]

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

[@Roader_021]

you just hape to powder some beer's law

[@Andrew90046zero]

Legit like XD People might not ever notice some of these cool details in big games. But this is what happens when a big company pays you like 100k per year and your job is to: "Add as much graphical realism as possible that the hardware allows" And all this knowledge you've built up over the years has finally come down to this point. And you know that you must make the best damn looking clouds possible, even if people won't notice it.

[@verlax8956]

yea

[@jari2018]

you only need a skybox like in old unreal games nothing more - since the lightning anyway always suck in modern games

[@4.0.4]

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

[@simondev758]

Thanks!

[@ida_haida1580]

,0 vbm j1n😊😊

[@mooooooooooooove]

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

[@Desopolis]

Flight simulator doesn't use volumetric clouds, it uses particle sprites of legit clouds. Essentially just transparent images layered really smoothly. The super close distance actually lets you get away with it

[@joeysipos]

@@Desopolisyeah, this is actually how o do clouds in my game Glider Sim too. Much easier. In theory could have the sprites easily cast shadows as well.

[@NikoKyunKyun]

@@joeysipos not only it's easier, it's also more resource friendly in term of graphical power needed

[@vegardpig8634]

@@Desopolis You sure? In game it says volumetric clouds and in their feature discovery series they refer to them as 3d fully volumetric clouds.

[@jcsk8]

@@Desopolis I think MSFS 2020 uses volumetric clouds. That you said was used in earlier versions, such MSFS 2004 and MSFS FSX (10)

[@To-mos]

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.

[@simondev758]

Carmack is one of those "I can't believe how smart this guy is" kind of people

[@dealloc]

Carmack is very smart indeed, but he didn't come up with the volumetric fog in Quake 3. Brian Hook did a lot of the work on shaders in Quake II and Quake III. I'm sure Carmack had some hand in it, but it was mostly pioneered by Brian Hook, who also presented the Quake 3 rendering architecture at GDC 1999. A lot of the early work was also done in Quake II, which was presented in SIGGRAPH Conference in 1998 by Brian Hook.

[@justamanofculture12]

Absolutely insane comment right here brother. As a CS major i can say you explained the concept beautifully. Thank you.

[@gevelegian]

There's a video on KZbin about it. Q3A Volumetric Fog 1999

[@bluecup25]

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

[@designthings001]

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

[@simondev758]

That'd be really interesting, I figured the weather system was a whole thing in itself and kinda ducked out heh

[@cosmotect]

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

[@robertwyatt3912]

The graphical presentation in your videos is amazing!!

[@ardavanansari]

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

[@devantetoppin7879]

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.

[@simondev758]

Very cool, I was hoping to land somewhere in that zone.

[@megahombre24]

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

[@DogwafflDan]

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

[@elganzandere]

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.

[@chase_like_the_bank]

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

[@stephenvanbellinghen933]

Mind blowing this channel exists

[@aliphian]

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

[@Realghast15]

The graphics so clean and beautiful

[@DarkSwordsman]

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

[@FromLake]

Thank you for this video!

[@simondev758]

You're welcome!

[@wesleydavis3387]

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.

[@simondev758]

Great point! I didn't want to dive into creating the full blown weather system, maybe as a follow up some other time. They describe it in quite a bit of detail though.

[@tristanmisja]

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.

[@TheCompleteMental]

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

[@z-beeblebrox]

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.

[@Suthriel]

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.

[@romarbetc123]

As artist learning about how clouds work is pretty amazing

[@GoldSrc_]

This presentation is amazing.

[@mooncatcher_]

Incredibly inspirational and so easy to understand. Simply amazing.

[@SirNightmareFuel]

Incredible presentation, impressive research. A+.

[@fuzzyhenry2048]

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

[@simondev758]

Thanks :D

[@Ecks1118]

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.

[@simondev758]

Branchless programming? I've kinda had a half-baked video plan about branching in general, might be good to fold into that

[@kipchickensout]

Man this makes me wanna get a beer! Awesome video

[@simondev758]

Way ahead of you!

[@MysteryPancake]

Incredibly good visualisations, especially at the start :)

[@irjayjay]

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

[@simondev758]

There's a lot more to be done here. When I have some time, I'll try out some of the other optimizations.

[@robertwallace5498]

You honestly put out the sickest content, I love it

[@NathanHedglin]

Amazing as always. Thanks!

[@TennessseTimmy]

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

[@lunkums]

great explanation and love the look of the end product!

[@stevethepocket]

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.

[@iaobardar3452]

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!

[@simondev758]

Here's the project the Frostbite team put together: github.com/sebh/TileableVolumeNoise that my code was based off of.

[@bigkobelive]

Just found this channel, love your videos!

[@benruniko]

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!!!

[@mushylog]

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

[@Axeiaa]

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

[@simondev758]

Cloudy with a chance of stout

[@cameronfisher1786]

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

[@redsteph]

Amazing work and good explanations. Keep on going.

[@nielsbishere]

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)

[@ChronicWhale]

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

[@ZooHair]

Very informative and awesome presentation

[@crybirb]

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

[@LollyPoppi]

I really want to understand all of this, but my brain is still in processing

[@pitchblack5422]

Wow your explanations are phenomenal!

[@LittleBallOfPurr]

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.

[@lemonke8132]

this channel is so underrated

[@visuallization]

This looks so cool! Great work reconstructing this!

[@Galakyllz]

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

[@simondev758]

I posted it on Twitter.

[@deerdev6511]

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!

[@johngrey5806]

Those final clouds look dope!

[@Flinsch77]

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!

[@Memeieli]

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

[@Michelcomin]

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

[@efwfew]

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

[@artyomkazakov9414]

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

[@stevphiericardo2790]

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

[@RayznGames]

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

[@tokyospliff]

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

[@foxy2348]

I just do it with one click in unreal. Great too see what kind of dedication lyes beind those things. respect!

[@smallbluemachine]

Now this, is cloud computing.

[@b4ph0m3tdk9]

Very interesting, and super illustrations!

[@denizorsel1029]

Simon, you are an amazing teacher.

[@nazarremerchant]

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

[@simondev758]

Woops! Added them to the description

[@nazarremerchant]

@@simondev758 Thanks!

[@basgerrit907]

Very cool! Want to try it out myself now

[@thebirdhasbeencharged]

This is amazing, Rayleigh next

[@FinaISpartan]

Just wanted to add, by taking an integral of the density function, you can get a more accurate calculation of light / absorbtion.

[@ethanmitchell505]

Amazing work, learned something cool today! Thanks.

[@jinchoung]

wow, what a great explanation! really well done.

[@bigmistqke]

Sometimes it feels like this channel is just made for me

[@frederiklenk7756]

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: kzbin.info/www/bejne/mZrCi4algt9sosk

[@simondev758]

Man, this video is mesmerizing.

[@frederiklenk7756]

@@simondev758 Right!? I recommend checking out his video titled "Hot Water Colors" as well. While not something that you'd really program (I think lol), it it sooo beautiful.

[@mrjohncrumpton]

Interesting to hear what's happening behind the scenes. I've bought more than five cloud/sky assets for Unity and "Expanse" is the most realistic.

[@UnderdogDen]

What a cloudy video (good stuff dude)!

[@maya_gameworks]

Amazing analysis, ty!

[@andyd8370]

Red Dead Redemption 2 also has fantastic clouds and weather.

[@johnsmith539]

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

[@juancruzrabaglia722]

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.

[@simondev758]

I just dropped the code on Twitter, and it's implemented in Three.js, so go nuts.

[@juancruzrabaglia722]

​ @SimonDev man that's amazing, thank you so much! i'll be studying it in the following days for sure. Btw, I appreciate the amount of work you put on your videos, they are insanely good.

[@enfieldli9296]

Now I finally understand why game dev is hard, you either have to be extremly good at either coding with math or art design...

[@jsierra88]

Love technical stuff like this. Thanks!

[@holdenthompson1449]

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

[@unfa00]

For a technical artist like myself, this is not clouds. This is candy.

[@simondev758]

I usually work with technical artists, like yourself, to prevent my programmer art from going out into the world.

[@flynntaggart7216]

What do you mean by "technical"

[@flynntaggart7216]

@tshrpl k

[@TilDrill]

really good video

[@amritmahotsav3378]

Minecraft developers while developing clouds had a beer bottle with them rather than having beer's law in their notes

[@simondev758]

I had both

[@amritmahotsav3378]

@@simondev758 yeah that's good !

[@VoidloniXaarii]

Fantastic information, thanks a lot!

[@rahulprasad2318]

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

[@simondev758]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/qXTLgnaal7GXfqc I was kinda joking around, it's my previous video.

[@gordonbeeman5387]

Superb video, very interesting.

[@kevinbeardslee7587]

Joni Mitchell would be proud! Nice work Simon.

[@iamsunil21]

awesome presentation, you are amazing, thanks!

[@ruix]

its actually simple to implement. Amazing

[@while.coyote]

This stuff is so useful. Thanks!

[@sanderbos4243]

Loved this, thank you!

[@AndreiTache]

Crazy how complicated something that seems so simple can actually be! In terms of optimisation, you could run the simulation at 1/4 the fps and it would probably look the same from farther away (while getting 4x the performance). I'm also wondering if there is a way to bake the result of the simulation and just refference that at runtime, instead of running the simulation itself. I guess the angle from the camera to the cloud couldn't change then, but if the clouds were only used as a skybox, that wouldn't be a deal breaker.

[@simondev758]

Yeah I'd like to do something like that, amortizing the cost over multiple frames seems the way to go. In terms of baking, I think it's a tradeoff vs how dynamic you want to allow the scene to be.

[@Desopolis]

So this is what the current standard actually does. SebastienH (wrote some of the initial papers, now works at Unreal) brought his Volumetric workflow from Frostbite into Unreal, and it was Referenced by Horizon Zero Dawn, which is like... The god reference these days.. First he spreads the cloud modeling and rendering across 9 frames, second, because he's on native he usually has access to hardware accelerated methods as well as bleeding edge pathtracing tools and techniques. The most common is to do 1/2 or even 1/4 scale or density (draw every 4th dot) and then using SUPER FAST or even the latest AI/Neural powered denoisers and upscalers (supersamplers) to get an amazing output 3. The sky is usually rendered on it's own dedicated render target, so it can be cached, LOD, frozen, etc etc. Most of the time it's dumped into a skybox like you mentioned but it can be blended with the main scene as well (Sea of Theives)

[@illusionprods]

@@Desopolis One strategy is to create groups of squared pixels like 1 group would be 2x2 pixels and render them in 1 after the other each frame, and pushing the value of one rendered pixel onto the pixels of your group that haven't rendered yet. After 4 frame they're all rendered correctly, and you repeat this process overtime. This makes you render 1/4th the real screen size, but in the end you get an approximate result that is nice enough to not notice. The downside is fast movement, can cause discontinuity, but since clouds are in general big and not super precise down to the pixel, you don't see the downscale effect that much. This was explained in one of the many presentation about horizon zero dawn I think and it seemed to cutdown a lot of rendering time, without deminishing the result. Also, one developper that was making a jet sim had a strategy to bake the clouds by using signed distance field but the downside was that they couldn't update in realtime, so no weather changes were possible and the clouds couldn't move, although the visual results was amazingly good. Basically, all the data about the cloud would be written into a 3d texture containing the value of the signed distance to the nearest cloud, making it super quick to calculate information about how the ligting should apply. Name of the game is UHawk VR, he has a blog post about it if you search the web a bit, the article name is "Rendering volumetric clouds using signed distance fields"

[@iLife64]

Mojang: just scatter some white pixels on a png and call it a day