New screenshots, still no cirrus clouds

[Weatherman 193]

3 hours ago, bonchie said:

I’ve seen them in MSFS. We just don’t know how realistic their rate of appearance is yet. 

I don't have seen them yet in a realistic form. And I'm following this project very closely. There have been some screenshots with higher altitude cloud layers that might be supposed to be cirrus but to me they resemble more altostratus or altocumulus layers. This is real cirrus (from Wikipedia):

 

[mp15 138]

@Weatherman those clouds could be drawn in Photoshop by a 4 year old, Asobo has volumétric cloud creations technology, so expect to have those simple 2D clouds in game too.

[Weatherman 193]

6 hours ago, mp15 said:

@Weatherman those clouds could be drawn in Photoshop by a 4 year old, Asobo has volumétric cloud creations technology, so expect to have those simple 2D clouds in game too.

Actually I have never been to South America (where you obviously are coming from according to your profile), so I cannot judge for your region. But here in Europe cirrus like that (sometimes not that crystal clear of course) are quite common, actually one of the most common could types you see on the sky here. Here is an example that maybe is a bit more ordinary than the example in my other post. But I am really wondering how you could call that "drawn in Photoshop by a 4 year old". This is how the sky looks quite often in large parts of the world.

[mp15 138]

i live part of the year in Europe and the other part of the year in South America, because i love being isolated and in contact with nature and i work with High tech holograms,  but I would like to live in the U.S as well.

The cirrus clouds you mention are very common in the sky here as well too, my point though is that from a computational point of view, 3D cirrus Is very expensive to compute and It can be achieved very well in 2D with opacity mappings that áre not complex to create.

I create probably the best clouds in the world like this one below, and I know them very well, so in order to obtain these clouds the spread and spatial enhance Is an important factor and they probably are achieved through a different noise input type, instead of a convolutional input as the usual, the cirrus clouds you desire could be achieved through a Dynamic comb.

Edited May 11, 2020 by mp15

[Skip Talbot 17]

17 hours ago, mp15 said:

@Weatherman those clouds could be drawn in Photoshop by a 4 year old, Asobo has volumétric cloud creations technology, so expect to have those simple 2D clouds in game too.

It might be trivial to throw a drawn texture map on a 2D plane, but why would we assume Asobo is going to do this when everything they've shown has been about dynamically generated volumetric layers? It might not fit in their model, especially when incorporating live weather data with limited information. They might be thinly slicing 3D noise and calling it good for cirrus. 

As a tornado chaser in the US, I've been incredibly geeked following the development of the simulator's weather system. I can't help but imagine "native support of all cloud types" means funnel clouds, mountain top lenticular, and the feathery, delicate structure of mare's tail cirrus. But that's just my own fantasies, and "all cloud types" may simply mean that they can put volumetric cloud stuff on all possible levels, depths and densities, not necessarily that they're modeling the physical processes generating the different structural types in these clouds. For example, they might be using variants of noise density functions to make all cloud types. That looks great for the small puffballs. But deep convection is a really complex fractal structure. The simulator instead appears to be making piles of puffballs to approximate this. Mechanically forced clouds, like when air is pushed up the slope of a mountain to form a lenticular type, have a smooth, laminar structure. Mare's tail cirrus occurs when crystals are swept downstream by the winds aloft, stretching them horizontally into long thin filaments. It may be well out of the scope and practical capabilities of the simulator to try and model all of this. So they approximate it with dynamically generated 3D patterns instead.

Don't get me wrong, the flight sim weather looks great! I still remember the Minecraft clouds of FS5.1 (6?). I can't wait to fly inside of what they've already shown us. But as someone who spends his life staring at the living organism that is the atmosphere, I can really see the bounds of the new effort. From some of the timelapse videos, it looks like they're approximating cumulus updrafts by simply translating a 3D noise function in the vertical direction. it works, but it's a far cry from watching cumulus blossom like a growing tree. 

[JAS8472 10]

@Weatherman and @Skip Talbot

that is exactly why I started this topic. And I‘m still so surprised nobody seems to care... I mean there are discussions about moving wildlife, running rivers, etc. - but beautiful Cirrus  that are already a feature of all current sims seem to be gone... in a Flight Simulator (not fishing sim or safari sim 😉 )

Is there any way to reach out to the guys at Asobo? I heard they are monitoring these forums, but I guess only the largest threads... 😞 

 

let‘s hope for upcoming promising screenshots. When I first saw the weather episode with winds around and over mountain tops (Flow simulation) I was soo shure we would see frayed clouds and cirrus...

[KERNEL32 500]

Let there be cirrus!

Save the Cirrus!

No stamped/baked texture Cirrus, we want random Cirrus so you don't see the same exact Cirrus pattern twice, or at least not very often...

Cirrus would be a great addition to the new MSFS.

Edited May 11, 2020 by KERNEL32

[mp15 138]

11 hours ago, Skip Talbot said:

But as someone who spends his life staring at the living organism that is the atmosphere, I can really see the bounds of the new effort. 

This is the first step and I consider you have certain knowledge and you could become a great cloud artist if you combine your observations and exress them through computational patterns.

I make the best clouds in the world, today I dedicated some time to make some 3D cirrus clouds for you guys, it is something very advanced that involves advection, sinusoid fractals and advanced black art, thats what i am, a black art magician and I'm not sure something like this will be included in game but we can always contact MS to see if we can add them in case you like my 3D cirrus crystals. My name on top right, my artwork in the center.

 

 

[Skip Talbot 17]

19 minutes ago, mp15 said:

I make the best clouds in the world

You make pretty good clouds. I'll give you that. But best in the world? I think my colleagues at UW Madison might have you beat on cloud modeling. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLkghfvE0Rk

[mp15 138]

Not really, that Is a nice simulation but It Is big and It looks too smooth, in order to gain crispiness in the convolutional noise patterns, clustering the volumes is required on that scale.

[mp15 138]

If you could only watch my cirrus crystal clouds rotating with very smooth movements on it's extremities at 4K now that Is very relaxing.

[Dominique_K 10,149]

I am not a specialist but don’t we see cirrus at the 3’03’’, 3’10’’ and 6’13’’ marks ?

 

 

[mp15 138]

@Dominique_K those are "puffy" clouds, the guys in this topic are talking about "crystal sprites" and "brushes" in clouds, see my example.

Edited May 12, 2020 by mp15

[Weatherman 193]

1 hour ago, Dominique_K said:

I am not a specialist but don’t we see cirrus at the 3’03’’, 3’10’’ and 6’13’’ marks ?

That would be better classified as a (pretty high) layer of altocumulus or altostratus, or maybe even cirrostratus. But this leads into too much meteorological detail here. All what I am saying is: I am missing the typical cirrus "fibratus", which has a feather-like appearance and is quite common in the jet stream regions.  My guess is that is is not easy to build these with the volumetric approach Asobo's engine takes. But as I said: The overall cloudscapes in this engine are so outstanding that I can easily live with that gap. And we still have something to hope and wait for 🙂

[mp15 138]

@AviatorMoser  researches cloud physics to improve our understanding of their effects. what can you tell us about these cirrus clouds?