I have a skydome that I texture with clouds projectively (see screenshot and how they are attenuated the closer to the horizon they get). The problem is the clouds don’t look very convincing. First of all, they are not lit and second they are just basic Perlin clouds. Maybe you can suggest how to get better cloud textures and whether I should intersect the skydome with a skyplane to get more convincing clouds.
Maybe Terragen or something like it? Shaders are a cure for all problems, I know, but I can’t use them for now.
Oh, can’t someone give advice? These clouds are pretty basic.
I have found this, apparently this is a classic post:
http://www.gamedev.net/topic/324413-sky-plane—where-to-start/
Anyway, how do you think my clouds looks like? Terrible?
The only problem I see is the vertical stretching, looks like clouds are mapped to a huge cylinder in the sky.
If you can fix that with more horizontal stretching, it will be perfect for low-density cirrus clouds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cloud_types
Thanks for your advice ZbufferR, I’ll try to implement the virtual plane approach; hopefully it will look good with the fixed pipeline - at least I have linear fade. The author has had shaders already and hence exponential fade.
Here’s the screenshot using the virtual skyplane approach:
The original algorithm requires an exponential fade, but I don’t have it with the fixed pipeline. Would look quite a bit better I think. Well, this is it then.