The screenshots shows spherical debug clouds. The red light is the ground contribution. The camera is currently somewhere in the lower half of the planet.
The Ground Contribution should point towards the planet center. As you can see in the screenshot the bright red ground light color it is pointing downwards instead.
I assume this is an optimization since this would be unnoticable when the camera is somewhat close to the north pole. It would be very nice, if we could have a variant that works globally too.
I will work with the cloud/atmosphere for the foreseeable future and build a global weather system for a flight simulation. Maybe we could collaborate on the cloud improvements?
Issues can be reported on UDN if you have access otherwise here.
Cloud shadow map: that has been only designed the top of the planet also.
Weird blue color on cloud: when we sample the aerial perspective on cloud, we only do that once instead of per sample for the sake of performance. It is done using a single distance according to each samples and their coverage. It can cause such visual discrepancy, but it is the first time I see it that strong. We could add an option to evaluate aerial perspective per sample but that is going to cost more.
Thank you, I will check with the team to see if we have access.
When evaluating the aerial perspective per sample, it is assumed that there may be several layers of transparent clouds before the last sample is hit.
An intermediate setting could be to evaluate only the first and last samples, while interpolating for the samples in between.
To ensure that the camera never sees clouds behind multiple layers of translucent clouds that are far appart from each other. One could simply make the rain or fog denser as the camera distance increases. I doubt anyone would notice the difference, and the blue glow should still disappear.
