Clouds and fog with new skybox?

#1 I am curious how exactly you think this would be possible. Even in most feature film VFX they still 'simple' methods like skyboxes (or HDR sphers) to handle clouds.

Doing real clouds would be very very difficult (how do you render it to work best in all situation? how does it affect the lighting and how does light affect it? does it behave like real clouds would like with a particle system or just a fake looking volumetric object? etc.) and while it would be potentially interesting to have, I really do not know how much of a real benefit it would be.

Personally speaking I would rather have them use the methods they are using now and if a team need a true cloud system its something they can implement since they will end up with a solution that best fits that teams particular needs exactly.

#2 Logan cloud layers and fog layers were profiled in the sky object. It looks like the SkyBox object is replacing that. If so then how are we going to add cloud layers and fog layers? I would personally like to see cloud and fog layers as their own object so that we are not limited to 3 of each. Obviously we can still do all this with the legacy sky object but I want to know what the future might be.

#3 The plan was to break up the old features in the Sky object into multiple objects to give you maximum flexibility.

SkyBox is just a simple cube with a material mapped to it. No wind, fog, cloud or storm junk in it.

Fog settings are now in the LevelInfo object along with the view distance and other global settings.

Thats it in beta 1.

In beta 2 we plan to move over a few other sky objects that we're developing.

We have ScatterSky which is an implementation of mie/rayleigh atmospheric scattering. This is the dynamic sky you've seen in the Pacific demo videos.

We have a mesh driven sky which allows you to create a custom DTS scene for your sky.

And James has started to put together a CloudLayer object which is not too expensive yet produces procedural looking clouds (these are very early results)...


We also have a TimeOfDay object that moves the sun around and provides ticks that other objects can hook into for animating themselves with the day/night cycle.

All these different objects can be mixed and matched together as needed and should allow you to easily plugin a custom solution.

#4 Speaking of fog layers... we removed that from Sky and the engine entirely for now.

We have atmospheric fogging for the scene and a sort of fogging when you enter any body of water.

That covers 99% of what people used the old fog layer system for.

We hope that at some point... most likely not for 1.0... that we develop some real FogVolume objects for providing area fog.

#5 Tom, thanks for the info. I'm glad to here that they have been broken out as their own objects and I can't wait to try them out.

#6 those skies from James Ford look wonderfull.
will they be released as a "pay-for add on"?

#7 Oh no! I use volumetric fog quite a bit...


EDIT:
But it do have problems in TGEA not working correctly.

#8 @deepscratch, nope, they'll be part of T3D, as will the scattering sky.

#9 SkyBox, ScatterSky, mesh driven sky, and a CloudLayer object? Awesome. I like the Cloud object video, even if it is early yet. Every time I turn around there's something new to like about Torque 3D. I was happy to learn that the sky, water, and terrain objects are all separated now. That will certainly make it much more easier to add in custom atmospherics and more.

The mesh sky, how does that work, benefits, any details? Or is that something that won't be included?

Quote:Fog settings are now in the LevelInfo object along with the view distance and other global settings.

Ah ha! That's where that went!

#10 @Michael - The mesh sky is just rendering a single DTS (which can be animated) before the regular scene. The DTS doesn't need to be huge as its rendered from the camera perspective.

#11 @Tom: ah ok, I think I see. Kind of an optical illusion kind of thing, like how you could never reach the old cloud layers no matter how low you set them. For some reason I was envisioning running around and WHAM! or all of a sudden you fall through the sky into the void.

#12 @Michael: In theory all sky mesh type systems in many games should always be infinitely far away, however its not uncommon for some just to be quite big in world space so that they shipped without the camera space thing working.

So if you activate the right cheat, letting your fly around you can indeed fly outside of the sky :)

#13 @Tom and Paul (sichead crew)
Would volumetric cloud be too expensives? Maybe you can add a opition to switch them on/off.

Kory James

They would be awesome in a flight simulation or Jet fighter!
One more thing(not to change the subject) is or will the lightning be addressed in T3D? What I mean is Dyanmic Lightning, maybe!

#14 We've talked about doing volumetric particle based cloud object, but time is our limiting factor at the moment.

You could fake it with a specially made DTS if you really wanted a few larger clouds over your scene.