Anyone know how to go about making clouds that are not just high up in the sky. Clouds that complement the surfaces of mountains, or hang low above a surface of water.
I’ve provided pictures where the clouds go up and down with the surfaces of mountains, hanging beneath the peaks they make the scene look so much better.
Those screenshots are not volumetric, they’re just flat planes with a cloud texture on them. Most likely they’re using depth fade to seamlessly blend in with the terrain.
You can set the volumetric cloud bottom layer altitude to 0 and it will start ray marching the clouds at ground level (as defined by the SkyAtmosphere)
But whether or not it actually looks like the clouds are on the ground depends on the volumetric material.
If by flat planes you mean a 2d texture that is correct. But my goal is to have unreal engines volumetric clouds generate both high up in the sky and also above certain terrain like mountains, as seen in the images. I dont have much experience with unreal but I think something similar can be done with the particle system, not sure if the volumetric clouds are quite that customizable yet.
Hi @ouzi_g,
You are correct, this can be done. Unreal released something in UE 5.3 called Heterogenous Volumes that allows for the use of VDBs within the engine.
This tutorial is a good basic overview of how to use it:
This is another tutorial that quickly goes through the process and also provides some free cloud VDBs to test with.
Note that the VDBs do seems to have some issues with translucency sorting- particularly when interacting with water. Since you plan to use these for background mountains however, I don’t see that being much of an issue.
