Fluffy Clouds

Intro

Some time ago I was looking for a way to render volumetric clouds with easy artistic controls
I wanted to achieve the same visual as raymarched 3D texture clouds, while still allowing gameplay systems to control each individual cloud

It all started while I was working on vegetation assets using baked vertex color pivot points, where I stumbled upon an idea:
I could generate a mesh made of quads instead of tris, bake their center positions into the vertex colors, and then reproject each quad as a billboard

By combining this technique with other shader tricks, I was able to push the illusion further

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So here they are, fake volumetric clouds, less performant than true volumetric solutions (for now) but significantly easier to control, design, and iterate on
While the result looks quite compelling, it's important to note that this is not a production-ready system, but rather a proof of concept

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Showcase

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Clouds Interaction

In order for the character to respond to the clouds, Houdini generates a convex volume used to determine whether the player is inside or outside a cloud
A Niagara VFX and a post-processing shader are then used to create the sensation of flying through a cloud

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Technical Breakdown

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Houdini HDA