Mesh-Cloud-Rendering

A re-implementation of mesh cloud described in Sea of Thieves: Tech Art and Shader Development

Basically, it pre-compute occlusion lobe on mesh vertex and use it for real time shading.

A comparasion of ground truth and approximated shading: Left: Houdini's cloudlight node, LeftMiddle: Per vertex raymarching ground truth. Middle: Approximation using occlusion lobe. RightMiddle: Lambert. Right: Combine occlusion lobe and lambert.

After vertex shading, multiple pass of post-processing is employed to blur and distort the buffer, finally composite into background.

Here I didn't sculpt the cloud mesh by hand, instead I generate clouds with L-system in Houdini

Some animations(GIFs, please wait for loading)

My blog On Mesh Cloud Rendering – Reimplement Sea Of Thieves’ Cloud

Requirement

Unity 2018.4

Reference

Sea of Thieves: Tech Art and Shader Development