This and the other share are both excellent.
The sprite/get base color from baked vertex color tutorial particularly.
Even if it’s not the Fluffy ray marching I’m used to today, those looked 100% better than most other cloud system. Even the paid marketplace sky stuff tbh.
Updating that tut for Niagara usage would probably bring performance up a bit on older systems too.
The baseline problem is the transparent material.
Using non transparent with faked temporalAA may actually work better from a distance to get a more " solid" looking cloud base.
Not sure if mesh is the way to go, but it is a collection of vets with color info that is already accessible.
Don’t think it gets much more optimized than that…
What I was describing was more along the lines of an Impostor Baker for clouds.
You build the cloud up in engine with all the latest BS that makes the engine render at 2fps.
And then you photograph it from multiple angles generating a sprite impostor.
You do this several times with different light vectors, and then you use the correct sprite based on the angle that the light is at.
The end result is somewhat cheap - but at a distance should look quite nice, for a fraction of the cost of actual raymarch…
In theory at least - we all know how the engine gets with too many images of too large a size 