Useful Resources for Rendering Volumetric Clouds

CloudsResources.md

Volumetric Clouds Resources List

1. A. Schneider, "Real-Time Volumetric Cloudscapes," in GPU Pro 7: Advanced Rendering Techniques, 2016, pp. 97-127. (Follow up presentations here, and here.)

2. S. Hillaire, "Physically Based Sky, Atmosphere and Cloud Rendering in Frostbite" in Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice course, SIGGRAPH 2016. [video] [course notes] [scatter integral shadertoy]

3. R. Högfeldt, "Convincing Cloud Rendering – An Implementation of Real-Time Dynamic Volumetric Clouds in Frostbite"

4. F. Häggström, "Real-time rendering of volumetric clouds", Dissertation, 2018.

5. F. Bauer, "Creating the Atmospheric World of Red Dead Redemption 2: A Complete and Integrated Solution" in Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games, Siggraph 2019.

6. Realtime Volumetric Rendering Course in Siggraph 2011.

7. R. Brucks, "Creating a Volumetric Ray Marcher"

8. This awesome gamedev.net thread about clouds.

9. Volumetric Methods in Visual Effects in Siggraph 2010. (Thanks Gavin Graham for the link!)

10. Volumetric Clouds plugin for the Autodesk Stingray (RIP :() engine. [Source code] (Thanks reddit user /u/haiddasalami for the link!)

11. A. Arora, "Volumetric Clouds (WIP)"

Bonus: A few awesome looking OpenGL (and 1 Vulkan) implementations I found on github which also include compute shaders for generating the noise textures for the clouds.

• NadirRoGue's version (OpenGL)
• Clayjohn's version (OpenGL)
• Federico Vaccaro's version (OpenGL) (This one is interesting, it performs the entire cloud scattering calculations in a compute shader.)
• Aman Sachan & Meghana Seshadri's version (Vulkan)
• OfenPower's version (OpenGL)

Bonus^2: A few shadertoy examples:

• Himalayas by Reinder Nijhoff
• Enscape Cube by Thomas Schander
• Clouds by Inigo Quilez
• Real Time PBR Volumetric Clouds by robobo1221
• Swiss Alps by piyushslayer (my own little attempt at volumetric clouds :D)