Simple particle clouds (Work in progress): Page 2

Simple particle clouds (Work in progress)

SIsilicon28

Hiya! How are the clouds going? Hope progress has been made. :)

Dschoonmaker

Not much progress at all, I've been quite distracted by some other shaders I'm working on :p Maybe I'll do some work on the clouds tonight.

Off topic, but about your volumetrics plugin:

@SIsilicon28 said: Instead of finishing the demo (which I did), I created a 3D texture generator. Now it's easier to texture fog!

Does this mean you can use any mesh you choose?

SIsilicon28

Nope. It just means you can add a texture to the volumes; a noise texture to be more specific. I made a mesh to volume generator years ago for my other volume plugin; maybe that can be used here, but I don't wanna bother integrating that for now.

Dschoonmaker

Oh, okay.

Update:

This is 64 clouds, each with 64 particles, and each of the 64 clouds is updated each frame. Unfortunately, the clouds usually end up bunched up, so I might have to add a minimum distance each cloud can be from another.

And it looks worse than in the other images simply because the particle scale is too small, it looks a little too much like dots. I was just too lazy to change it; right now I have to duplicate the particle system for each cloud. I'll make that automatic later.

SIsilicon28

Yeah, and the clouds look pretty bright too.

Dschoonmaker

From that angle, they do, but that can be changed if I adjust the color and transmission. I'll do that and see if I can get it to look a little better.

Dschoonmaker

I added some export variables to the parent node, now I can change those and every cloud will change with it. Plus I don't have to go into the materials, the properties are all in one place.

SIsilicon28

Hey hey hey! How's the progress today?

Dschoonmaker

It's going alright, except when I use randf() to move the clouds, they all seem to move in the same direction. This shouldn't be, I have a loop iterating over every cloud to move it, and it calls randf() separately for every cloud....

I have successfully limited the clouds to a certain area, which can be defined with an export variable. This will be used for different environments, e.g. jungle v.s. desert, to change properties such as cloud density/color.

SIsilicon28

It's going alright, except when I use randf() to move the clouds, they all seem to move in the same direction.

Shouldn't they be moving in the same direction? You know, with wind and all.

Dschoonmaker

They should be moving in roughly the same direction, but right now they're all arranged in a line. I think I'll switch to generating a random point inside the area, then adding parameters for wind direction and strength to add some more uniform movement. edit: I might be done with this project by now, but I got distracted by water and terrain shaders.

Megalomaniak

Well, different layers at different elevation might move in different direction, but yeah the same layer I'd expect to move in the same direction, unless we consider something like turbulence, but then I'd think of that as a systems internal dynamic and as a whole it would still be moving in one direction.

Dschoonmaker

Hmm, maybe I could have a texture to simulate wind direction? But there's no texture() function outside of shaders.

SIsilicon28

I don't think that kind of control would be necessary... Most games just simplify cloud movement to at most 1 or 2 constant wind directions.

Also, have you considered sharing the code via GitHub? There might be people out there that could help contribute to it. ;)

Dschoonmaker

Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. I'll look into getting GitHub account(tomorrow).

Megalomaniak

Well, doing movement in shader would be an option but that would probably make more sense if your clouds were just textures. Could do something similar to how river water movement/flow is handled. I think left for dead 2 might have been the first to do it, at least in the way of flow maps: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Water_(shader)#Flow_maps

Dschoonmaker

I made a GitHub account and uploaded the shaders: https://github.com/Dpschoonmaker/Godot-particle-clouds/

SIsilicon28

Oh? Glad you figured out how to upload some of the files, but maybe it'd be better if you uploaded the whole project, so that it's easier to edit.

Dschoonmaker

Good idea, I'll make a new project and import them in.

Dschoonmaker

I added a "clouds" variable to quickly add/remove clouds, without having to duplicate nodes. I also added a refresh button; if anyone is interested, I did this with a boolean export variable and setget; in the setter function I always reset it to false and refresh the particles & positioning. I also added alpha fading by distance from the parent node, and when the alpha reaches zero, it resets. So, essentially, I now have a particle system of particle systems :) . To make the movement smoother, I added velocity/damping, this will make changes in wind direction look better. Lastly, I have a single wind direction variable (Vector3) that is normalized and used for updating cloud movement. Now the movement looks less random.

I will update the GitHub repository soon so you can see the code.

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