Real-Time Physics-Based Procedurally Generated Clouds
This project is the result of my 4th-year Honours Project and Dissertation research. I developed an application in Unity to explore the methods of creating realistic volumetric clouds in games. Using an atmospheric model approximated from real-life and equations related to the nucleation of vapour I concluded that creating cloudscapes based on real world maths can be achieved without greatly impacting performance, providing the groundwork for much larger and in-depth physics simulations in games relating to weather generation.
The application uses the ray-marching to render volumetric clouds based on 3D Render Textures of Worley Noise. This approach is used commonly among modern videogames to make volumetric clouds. To merge the two roads of this project, Graphics Rendering and Physics models, a Weather Map is used in order to control the positions the clouds are rendered. The equation of nucleation is sampled at multiple positions throughout the cloud volume and passed to a compute shader to create a Nucleation Map, which is used as a replacement to the Weather Map.