Hey Ryan,
This is all actually inspired by the Zero Dawn paper, and I’ve briefly exchanged emails with Andrew Schneider regarding the texture array creation (the tiling problem was that Houdini’s worley noise doesn’t tile unlike perlin, won’t be able to get around it without wrapping the UV sampling manually it looks like).
The current material is applied to the default SkySphere. When you say to use shell geometry, do you mean actual geometry or just define the shape via coordinates in the ray trace code? I am not sure I am wrapping my head around this correctly.
But I had no idea Zero Dawn was using the “every 16th” pixel optimization. That’s a shame, probably means that this won’t be a viable solution for my project unless I go the same road as TrueSky and implement the whole thing as a pre-compiled plugin.
This means of course that I’ll have to pursue alternatives, which brings me to a tangent - you mentioned in a twitch stream that you’d eventually be able to talk a bit about the sky and clouds you did for Paragon? Any chance you could share some of it?
Best regards,
Damir H.