Popcorn clouds occur naturally in the real world, why wouldn't it happen in the sim? I can't understand why people make so big a deal out of this...

 

Because AVSIM is populated mostly by we armchair pilots who really have no idea how a plane really flies or how real weather actually works when you aren't standing on the ground, but are ready to argue about those two things as if we are 100% Oxford-Certified Experts who fly everyday and twice on Sunday.

 

In short, there are way too many "Google experts" on these forums ready to latch onto the newest idiotic idea and run with it as if their existence depended on it.

I've seen them, but never had a "problem" with them, such that they were the only cloud types during my flight. I'm more pleased that the "rotating cloud" issues seems to be gone in v3, but that is a different subject.

 

As for "popcorn clouds," couldn't some users with this "problem" and some without this problem use historical weather data in ASN and fly from the same location/date/time, with similar settings, and take pictures and compare?

There's something of the Emperor's new clothes going on here. P3d V3 is great in many respects, but in my view the default clouds are terrible. There, I've said it. They are if anything worse in V3 than previous versions. Yes, popcorn clouds do occur - sometimes. But they are not the norm in the vast majority of world regions on a typical day. Whatever settings of clouds one tries in p3d, they are still largely a collection of unconvincing clumps of vertically oriented but horizontally threadbare clumps, and that's with maximum depth set. In P3d V3 of all iterations I find the default clouds simply do not look convincing, and little better in V1 and V2 either, not that the default FSX clouds were anything special. It is as though the people designing them have never looked upwards.

 

I see what looks like an extracted piece of slightly soiled cotton bud held aloft, or a clump of cotton wool made into rather small square blobs that have been neatly cut with scissors underneath to create a boringly straight line. These clumps have no length or breadth, or character, even when you set them to be 6/8ths or 7/8ths with highest settings for distance and thickness. The concept of cloud streets seems lost. At their worst one could suggest they are the remnants of a candy floss offering at a fair:

 

https://www.pinterest.com/ninjakitteh/cotton-candy-fairy-floss-spun-sugar/

 

Here is a typical cumulus day in Europe ot USA:

 

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/clouds/l2.htm

 

Here are some p3d clouds:

 

http://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=102871&start=15

 

Of course someone is now bound to come along and prove me wrong, but I do think that the default clouds are very poor without a lot of tweaking and manipulation. I used to run the excellent freeware HD V2 clouds in FSX and they were wonderful considering they were low res and free. They do not work in P3d V3 so well. They become the same hideous clumps as the default clouds.

 

I do concede that things get better if you vastly increase the altitude thickness of cumulus clouds in P3d. Somehow 9000 feet high clouds also get to be a greater length horizontally and more satisfying, but you should not have to set a high cloud vertical thickness to get a horizontal coverage.

 

Now exiting smartly and ducking..

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/clouds/l2.htm

 

Here are some p3d clouds:

 

http://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=102871&start=15

 

 

 

Mine certainly don't look like that with Opus (will post some pics when I get back).

There's something of the Emperor's new clothes going on here. P3d V3 is great in many respects, but in my view the default clouds are terrible. There, I've said it. They are if anything worse in V3 than previous versions. Yes, popcorn clouds do occur - sometimes. But they are not the norm in the vast majority of world regions on a typical day. Whatever settings of clouds one tries in p3d, they are still largely a collection of unconvincing clumps of vertically oriented but horizontally threadbare clumps, and that's with maximum depth set. In P3d V3 of all iterations I find the default clouds simply do not look convincing, and little better in V1 and V2 either, not that the default FSX clouds were anything special. It is as though the people designing them have never looked upwards.

 

I see what looks like an extracted piece of slightly soiled cotton bud held aloft, or a clump of cotton wool made into rather small square blobs that have been neatly cut with scissors underneath to create a boringly straight line. These clumps have no length or breadth, or character, even when you set them to be 6/8ths or 7/8ths with highest settings for distance and thickness. The concept of cloud streets seems lost. At their worst one could suggest they are the remnants of a candy floss offering at a fair:

 

You are absolutely correct in that they are terrible. All clouds derived from MSFS are terrible. There is no development animation. There is little breadth and they spin when you fly over them. They are way too fibrous or appearing glaciated, and as if they are all aged and well mixed with the environment. They lack a sharp outline indicating high liquid water content. Little variance in horizontal and vertical scale. No visible detrainment layers. And since they are sprites, there is no realistic lighting.

 

The best these simulators can do is simulate a static stratocumulus or cirrus layer.

@ Bob, very good  :smile:

 

 

I don't/cant fly, but i know what clouds look like.   ASN looks pretty good to me 

Because AVSIM is populated mostly by we armchair pilots who really have no idea how a plane really flies or how real weather actually works when you aren't standing on the ground, but are ready to argue about those two things as if we are 100% Oxford-Certified Experts who fly everyday and twice on Sunday.

 

In short, there are way too many "Google experts" on these forums ready to latch onto the newest idiotic idea and run with it as if their existence depended on it.

Yes yes and yes, spot on.

The GetScreenQuadPositions(quad, width*0.65, height*0.65); tweak still works in v3 (at a cost in some cloud conditions of course), and now you can set up an external ShadersHLSL folder for your tweaked shaders and link 'em via the shadersHLSL.cfg leaving the default shaders intact.

 

LMAO @ Phil, yup...

The GetScreenQuadPositions(quad, width*0.65, height*0.65); tweak still works in v3

Where might one find this tweak?

Because AVSIM is populated mostly by we armchair pilots who really have no idea how a plane really flies or how real weather actually works when you aren't standing on the ground, but are ready to argue about those two things as if we are 100% Oxford-Certified Experts who fly everyday and twice on Sunday.

 

In short, there are way too many "Google experts" on these forums ready to latch onto the newest idiotic idea and run with it as if their existence depended on it.

+1 ...... +1

Spirit

Problem is these are really quite beautiful while the sim ones are just butt ugly, as mentioned above.

 

If it is so easy to tweak a cloud cfg somewhere to make the sim look like these I don't think it is unreasonable to ask the LM to do it.

 

gb.

I have flown commercially for years and have seen them all the time. I guess I should have asked the pilot if he could change them for me. 

 

You should have asked if he is using the wrong version of real world or the wrong weather addon  :smile:

Hi. Try this. Made wonders for clouds in my P3D v3.

 

After installing v3 for the first time, all clouds look amazing with ASN activated. Soon as I installed Soft Clouds, the infamous popcorn clouds began to appear again. So I went back to a thread by Richard Sennet, where he had posted some tweaks to the cloud.fx file (scroll down and you'll find it). I applied these once again to v3, and bam - beautiful rendered clouds. I think my second final post is attached with an image of the result, but the clouds were very dark to my taste. You can tweak the saturation as well, to make them more "white".

 

http://www.avsim.com/topic/472632-ideal-flight-weather/

Hi there,

 

two things, these popcorn clouds formation do exist in the real world. I have seen them very often. Personally i dont like em they look ugly but cant change em neither via any shader edit nor via any settings . I think i have to live with real weather. BTW one must not be a pilot like a few of us just raise your eyes into the sky and you might see em once in a while.

 

In the sim they appear mostly if you go far north for ex fly @ norwegian airports like Tromsø or Bergen. That is a sim thing which has been discussed many times and it is a relic from the old FSX/FS9 as i recall.

 

As of Jims suggestion check out this vid i made months ago which shows the effect on the quad size, differences between weather engines ASN, OPUS and theme as well as appearance. For this test I was flying around Yakutat /Alaska. It is almost 60 North the chances of getting popcorn clouds are very high.  I also described how and what to change in the shaderHSL

 

Thanks to everyone who takes the topic seriously!! Yes, the "Popccorn Clouds" on the the real world picture looks nice and I would be glad if they would look this way in the sim. I agree that they look ugly and I also think that they have a unrealistic structure compared to real world ones (a way to small - downscaled). 

 

This is by the way only a problem when you are flying in higher flightlevels, FL300 or so for example).

 

Seems that the cloud.fx tweak is the only solution for now ...

 

Thanks again!