Fluffy 3D clouds

What different methods are there for doing nice/realistic clouds?. 3D texturing isn’t supported yet so thats out. And billboarding a couple of quads with some spheric cloud texture could look good but… Any other ways?. I’m not looking for a skybox here, I want to fly around in clouds!.

Any ideas?

Maybe a particle system with an alpha-blended, noise-textured quad for each particle?

To be honest, realtime fluffy clouds are still an unsolved problem. Look at any of the commercial PC flightsims, and while the clouds may look pretty in screenshots, they generally look a bit cheesy when the viewpoint is moving past them. Most people seem to use billboards.

Its suppose to be a file somewhere called cloud3d.c in the example files from SIGGRAPH 97, but I can only find cloud.c wich is some simpler cloud drawing method…

Anyone know how to get the cloud3d.c?

Yea… billboards, that was what I thought… Haven’t got my spherical billboard matrix building function to work that good yet… Guess I have to go that way then…

Although particle system sounds good, the problem is I think, that you would need so many particles that it’ll not be “realtime”…

Cheers!