new flight sim

[KirillK]

https://youtu.be/ReDDgFfWlS4
I wonder if it's ray marching rendering turned to become so gorgeous now. Or they did a kind of pre-render trick  for clouds. Sometimes they looks kind of very terragenish?

For a while I am trying to find ways  to bake Terragen  beauties into a real time engine, not very successfully yet.

[WAS]

Volumetric clouds can be rendered live now, for awhile actually but more a tech thing until recently. The first game to use it is Assassins Creed Origin. The game throws out new seeds every day, and the shapes progress with time just like a PF. The static sun image even plays nicely through the clouds. xD Volumetric water is also beautifully rendered in-game.

GPU units are amazing for rendering these days. Pretty much the standard.

PS, Assassins Creed Origins and Odyssey are both beautiful games. Very well optimized and run great on even older systems.

[cyphyr]

Yeah looks great.
Clouds are very good and I agree about Assassins Creed Origins and Odyssey. I thought some of the ground textures looked a bit flat and photo draped (because I guess they were) and that took some of the realism away.
Also I notice we didn't get to fly through any of the clouds. Looks great in the distance ... up close maybe less so ?

[WAS]

Yeah looks great.
Clouds are very good and I agree about Assassins Creed Origins and Odyssey. I thought some of the ground textures looked a bit flat and photo draped (because I guess they were) and that took some of the realism away.
Also I notice we didn't get to fly through any of the clouds. Looks great in the distance ... up close maybe less so ?

Maybe try resetting your INI or something. There is a known texture streaming issue where you'll get LOD textures up close. This drives me nuts when entering towns. I usually just sit still for awhile and let the game hopefully correct itself after few minutes.

Odyssey has a nice dynamic AA feature that scales at distances which is another nice feature I like. It runs AA much smoother for about the same results.

[KirillK]

Well, clouds looks way better than anything I saw in games before done with ray marching, including Assasins Creed.   Some looks straight like what I did in Terragen.     My guess it's maybe  a kind of a hybrid  of pre-rendered/baked things + ray marching?      Is still a question how much true real time it will be. I mean it might be just 3 fps on a regular PC still it does look impressive.

[WAS]

Doing some digging it seems they started with volumetric fog for Unity and than started using 3DS Studio Max to produce clouds. So likely pre-baked in some fashion but due to size and randomness per day I can't imagine full bakes. Game is already huge. Their VRayVolumetric system is proprietary apparently.

Considering they are world Sims taking place in historic places this is a cool feature

[KirillK]

Imo we need a proper texture/UV baking camera in Terragen.  At least something like Clarisse does or better preferably.   Gamedev is a half of all CG and all the content creation soft typically ignore it.   Or doing something irrelevant like Autodesk

  Something  we could bake clouds into some pre- baked slices maybe, special normal maps for clouds lighting,   procedural terrain into UDIM tiles. etc

WASasquatch , please share a link where you found they use 3d max  for clouds

[WAS]

I noticed today while playing the clouds, while the move follow the terrain so I do wonder if with Origin, from Unity, they cracked some sort of procedural fractal clouds. Cause watching it changes for over an hour night and day cycles I can't imagine this packed into the game and I can't find any substantial file(s) for it.