Where are the Volumetric Clouds?

As they are right now, its just a test feature, far from production ready. The most simple clouds eat 50-60% of performance, in the complex clouds in the plugin examples it goes to 98-99%. Its just a nonsense. Its good to add new features, but this is absurd. Even more knowing that ACE Combat uses unreal and got decent volumetric clouds at 60 fps on consoles last year.

As it is right now, you will still have to make your own volumetric system.

Hello, have you tested this volumetrtic cloud system on XOne or PS4? Because based on what developers said, they have basicallly improved the performance very much. I understand that volumetric system is resource consuming. I have a long story about it in 3DSMax and Afterburn + FumeFX since ages, but yes… for real time application an games this system must be very fast.

I’m not sure if I will implemented in my current project

Hi, I havent tested on consoles since I just downloaded the 4.25 yesterday. With a 1080ti I get 40fps at best with the new volumetric cloud simpelst case in an empty map, with the more complex example in the plugin I get les than 1fps. With this results I woudnt even think on getting the cloud plugin on consoles.

Its obviously a flaw in the process. Take RDR2 for instance.
the clouds work just fine with no FPS drop. The biggest reason for the cost is the light calculations.
I’m sure simplifying this in your own custom system is the way to get something running right…

Hi man, how can I do that? I mean how can I simplify the light calculation?

Create your own ray marcher, or simplify the calculations.

You should be able to heavily customize the released version, which is no doubt still worked on by Ryan and likely includes the very same code.

when working with dynamic lighting the only way I can think of simplifying further is to Not use the volumetric way of doing it, but completely faking it with the use of a static mesh to define the shading.
Obviously this breaks the ability to fly through a cloud and see changes in texture/light, which is not what is happening in RDR2 (only recent game I have seen implementing volumetric clouds, I’m sure there are more, just not privy to them…)

The end result is somewhat similar if not the same. You still get inner shadowed clouds that look convincing at far distances.

While I agree this is not as nice as having the ability to fly through them and having the texture transition like it does with ray marching, the unoptimized performance of the core system is about the same or possibly worse then what is reported above. (Stands to reason since the article is old).

I think, (at this point this is really just a thought)
One could feed a fixed Light Vector to the formula via MPC and re-define the calculations of light passing to essentially fake them within the material.
If you then only change this parameter periodically instead of calculating it every tick, you would likely get a general performance increase.
However, even in this case, the ray is calculated every time the cloud is looked at, making performance degrade based on the size of the volumetric cloud… probably won’t change all that much aside from the general processing improvement of running changes less often.

Anyway, read up on Ryan’s link, and let’s hope he releases some new and improved information now that .25 is live.

yes it appears to be a very useful tutorial… ok many thanks man. Let me have a look more in details :slight_smile: … Otherwise like II_Adn I have to leave the idea to have volumetric clouds in the scene.

In low density can 120fps , but heavy density is 20-30fps

Has anyone found a way in 4.25 to make the clouds cast shadows onto the surface as seen in Sjoerds video?

It’s probably worth mentioning the current volumetric clouds available through the volumetrics plugin and the stuff Sjoerd was playing with are two completely separate entities: The volumetrics plugin is the work of Ryan Brucks where the volumetric clouds as featured are the work of Sebastien Hillaire who also made the sky atmosphere system. Sebastien’ volumetric clouds will only become available in 4.26…

@Chesire Thank you very much for the clarification, i missed that information. Does it mean, that there will be two different cloudsystems supporting the new in 4.26?

No worries, it’s kind of unfortunate that Epic decided to release all those Volumetric cloud teasers last week. No wonder people are confused :confused:
Afaik the one slated for 4.26 will be the ‘real deal’. The current, blueprint-driven, Volumetric clouds are missing functionality to properly work with the system. They work…just ‘kinda’ :smiley:

yes I was looking for the same functions. Just watching the video he said that many more functionalities will be available in UE 4.26

If you can’t see the “Volumetric” folder, its because you need to activate the option to see more than regular files. I believe you need to activate the option to see “Engine Content”. For those new to UE4, you can find that option on the bottom-left of your content browser. There you will see a little eye and the option “View Options” activate there Engine Content and just to be sure all other content (just in case they change the location later after this post). Then, go to the folder structure and there you will find “Volumetrics Content”. Here I put a screenshot of what you should see, and where is this “View Options” menu.

Really I’m more concerned about performance then anything else.
the ones used in the preview vide seems to have much less impact on performance.
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.25 having just been released it will be quite a bit before we get to play around and test the new versions that comes out in .26…

90fps in VR for Ace

The new volumetric clouds for 4.26 have been available in the dev-rendering branch on github for a while now. Including an example cloud material.

I made a thread for it when I first tried it, but it isnt that busy yet Volumetric clouds for sky coming in 4.26 - Feedback for Unreal Engine team - Unreal Engine Forums

The basic cloud material that is currently in the dev-rendering branch costs ~1ms on my system (6700k/RTX2070) according to stat GPU, I haven’t done a controlled comparison but it definitely seems like it will be very performant.

“M_Volumetric_Sky_Prototype.uasset” in UnrealEngine-dev-rendering and in UE4.25.1 are the same! Is there any new example cloud material?

ok so, does this volumetric clouds system will be available in 4.26 right?
because right now I’ve tried the volumetric clouds system but it doesn’t support the new sky system and in a video about it UE dev explains that it will be available with all functionalities in 4.26
Is that correct?