Hello NtinosFerret,
as with everything, it depends on what you’re trying to achieve. If you want dynamic clouds, it would require a different approach than still images.
Hello NtinosFerret,
It depends on the complexity, style and degree of realism you’re trying to achieve. As you stated, you don’t want to use volumetric clouds. I’d like to point you towards Inigo Quilez, although I don’t know how knowledgeable you are with shaders, his works might get a little bit complicated.
Also ClockworkOcean gave you a good hint, you can look into the default sky shader (it’s called ‘M_Sky_Panning_Clouds2’, if I’m not mistaken). They use multiple textures to create the shape of the clouds, you can adapt and change this, I strongly recommend creating a new material. You can change this behavior so the textures pan into different directions and multiply them to create a ever changing noise and work from that.
If you want further resources on how to create clouds, SIGGRAPH articles or research papers on real-time 2D clouds would be a good starting point, but I don’t have any on hand right now; maybe the paper from Mark J. Harris on ‘Real-Time Cloud Rendering for Games’, although it’s quite old it can give you a push into the right direction.
That said clouds are pretty complicated, and have been studied for ages. To achieve the best results possible you might have to go the volumetric route, however this might not be possible or feasible depending on your target platform. If you, despite that, want more information on volumetric clouds, you can look up Guerilla Games’ Nubis system (SIGGRAPH, their blog), which is their cloud and weather system from ‘Horizon: Zero Dawn’.
After getting tired of using a sky system not made by me I really have to get into making 2d clouds for my game. There is absolutely 0 information online on how to do it. Some YouTube tutorials only deal with volumetric clouds and when I stumble upon a video that actually shows 2d clouds, it’s either a “test” video, meaning someone is showing off without giving any how to’s or a “Soon on the Marketplace” promo video. Is it really that hard to make my own 2d clouds? A water material turned out not so difficult to make so why is everyone relying on someone else’s work for clouds? I had to dump my own very well working sky system because of this, the default UE4 clouds are too simple and I needed to make my own but no info anywhere. If anyone knows of a good tutorial or method to even start doing this, please show me the way!
Ntinos, I think the ‘method’ is basically put a noise texture on a really big sphere, but it’s how you do that that’ gonna make the difference.
If you already have UDS, for instance, you can pull it to pieces and use it as a basis for what you think is a better system.
There’s still plenty of space in the marketplace for better water / skies…
Yes, I think dynamic 2d clouds describe it better. I would like to have the clouds move and change shapes!
Thank you for taking the time to give me all those points of interest! I will look into each of them, including studying the default clouds and post an answer on how I did it (whenever I actually manage to do it) for everyone to see!