How Big Budget AAA Games Render Clouds

Explored a few of the latest techniques in procedural cloud rendering used in Horizon: Zero Dawn and the FrostBite engine.
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In this video, I walk through how cloud rendering generally works, as well as covering some of the more recent tweaks/improvements and optimizations.
Referenced Papers/Talks:
www.ea.com/frostbite/news/phy...
www.guerrilla-games.com/read/...
magnuswrenninge.com/wp-content...

[@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

[@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.

[@youtubebannedme]

@@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.

[@ciristudios]

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

[@robertwyatt3912]

The graphical presentation in your videos is amazing!!

[@megahombre24]

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

[@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.

[@ardavanansari]

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

[@DogwafflDan]

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

[@cosmotect]

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

[@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.

[@aliphian]

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

[@DarkSwordsman]

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

[@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!

[@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!!!

[@mooncatcher_]

Incredibly inspirational and so easy to understand. Simply amazing.

[@artyomkazakov9414]

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

[@lunkums]

great explanation and love the look of the end product!

[@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

[@visuallization]

This looks so cool! Great work reconstructing this!

[@bluecup25]

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

[@SirNightmareFuel]

Incredible presentation, impressive research. A+.

[@redsteph]

Amazing work and good explanations. Keep on going.

[@stephenvanbellinghen933]

Mind blowing this channel exists

[@pitchblack5422]

Wow your explanations are phenomenal!

[@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.

[@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.

[@robertwallace5498]

You honestly put out the sickest content, I love it

[@Michelcomin]

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

[@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.

[@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!

[@MysteryPancake]

Incredibly good visualisations, especially at the start :)

[@fuzzyhenry2048]

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

[@simondev758]

Thanks :D

[@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.

[@NathanHedglin]

Amazing as always. Thanks!

[@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!

[@RayznGames]

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

[@kipchickensout]

Man this makes me wanna get a beer! Awesome video

[@simondev758]

Way ahead of you!

[@tokyospliff]

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

[@Memeieli]

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

[@crybirb]

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

[@TechTackleTerritory]

The graphics so clean and beautiful

[@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.

[@ethanmitchell505]

Amazing work, learned something cool today! Thanks.

[@ZooHair]

Very informative and awesome presentation

[@jinchoung]

wow, what a great explanation! really well done.

[@jsierra88]

Love technical stuff like this. Thanks!

[@bigkobelive]

Just found this channel, love your videos!

[@TennessseTimmy]

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

[@romarbetc123]

As artist learning about how clouds work is pretty amazing

[@b4ph0m3tdk9]

Very interesting, and super illustrations!

[@gmjammin4367]

Amazing videos! Keep them coming!

[@cubrman]

Amazing analysis, ty!

[@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

[@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

[@mushylog]

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

[@cameronfisher1786]

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

[@JulesHatton]

Great content as always.

[@ChronicWhale]

Amazing video as always

[@GoldSrc_]

This presentation is amazing.

[@BadgerGamePlay]

these videos are amazing! learned alot

[@sleeping_dragon]

awesome stuff mate

[@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.

[@sanderbos4243]

Loved this, thank you!

[@smallbluemachine]

Now this, is cloud computing.

[@VoidloniXaarii]

Fantastic information, thanks a lot!

[@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.

[@gordonbeeman5387]

Superb video, very interesting.

[@basgerrit907]

Very cool! Want to try it out myself now

[@denizorsel1029]

Simon, you are an amazing teacher.

[@iamsunil21]

awesome presentation, you are amazing, thanks!

[@johngrey5806]

Those final clouds look dope!

[@toastedcrumpets]

Awesome work!

[@FromLake]

Thank you for this video!

[@simondev758]

You're welcome!

[@boukhadc]

Nice work !

[@while.coyote]

This stuff is so useful. Thanks!

[@UnderdogDen]

What a cloudy video (good stuff dude)!

[@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.

[@dariocardajoli6831]

Very informative thank you

[@ChronicWhale]

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

[@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)

[@ELEKTROZARYA]

Great video!

[@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.

[@foxy2348]

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

[@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

[@FinaISpartan]

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

[@stevphiericardo2790]

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

[@marcelinouzerrio4937]

Pretty cool ! Thx

[@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!

[@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.

[@holdenthompson1449]

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

[@duelsoldier3048]

I love your videos, keep it up

[@Ascyt]

This is soo cool!

[@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.

[@Povilaz]

Very interesting!

[@thebirdhasbeencharged]

This is amazing, Rayleigh next

[@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.