Speaking as someone who’s made 3D volumetric clouds for feature films, these are actually quite good for something running at real time.  Full volumetric effects needed to capture all of the nuance of real life with proper back scattering, self reflection, proper handling of density variations can be quite compute intensive and no where close to something that can be rendered on the fly.

I agree that a tweak that bumps up the albedo so cloud tops look brighter from direct sunlight would be helpful, but otherwise I’m pretty impressed with the clouds the sim is pulling off.

 

1 minute ago, ADamiani said:

I would be happy with what we had a few months ago, which was pretty good, but they gradually "simplified" the clouds and what we have now is in my opinion pretty unsatisfactory.

A.

That is a good summation of my impression as well.  They've definitely gone downhill compared to pre SU5 for me.  I have to assume this is all for Xbox optimization w/ its total 16Gb of RAM of any kind, and we can only hope access to sliders for PC users will happen at some point.  Silly to have to go into a .cfg file, though PC users are more than used to that rigamarole!

 

A Moire effect is there when you are close from my side:

I found the clouds look in principle good but it has something or better said mostly to do how the Sun shines in them, in this case we see a lot of grainy in there.

cheers 😉

Clouds after the latest MSFS hotfix.

 

21 minutes ago, Claudius_ said:

A Moire effect is there when you are close from my side:

Yup! In another thread I was trying to describe this problem. 

A.

My biggest issue is the way thunderstorms are depicted especially the high clouds, they are blocky and blurry. I am also not a fan of the Moire effect where the clouds meet the horizon or mountain ridge line in a turn. Other than that they are pretty good.  There also seems to be odd lighting inconstancies in regards to sun angle vs how dark the cloud is.  A lot of clouds are dark even with direct sunlight or thin overcast.  My cloud settings are ULTRA.

I had two flights yesterday; a long IFR trip across Scotland and a short jaunt around Orbx's Mumbai scenery. In both the clouds were the main driver for the sense of immersion and reminded me that nothing else offers anything near what MSFS gives us.

I've never been able to enjoy local squalls with rainbows appearing from the right directions with multi-layered fronts building up on the distant horizon, all beautifully and realistically lit / coloured before. I'm sure they can always be improved, but they're already pretty spectacular. 

Edited August 10, 20214 yr by scotchegg

I agree that high level clouds look pretty bad. I hope they will further work to refine the clouds to make them look their best though.

I find the clouds not as good as pre SU5. The green and magenta banding is disappointing as it wasn’t there previously. Yes they can also look grainy at times. Always have.

However the immersion factor of these clouds is just sensational. I did a flight from ESSA to EKCH yesterday. Took of in squalls and isol CB, climbed on top. Descended down through much the same.

On approach to 22R flew the initial GS through a heavy shower until about 500’ AGL, then rain stopped for touchdown as another shower came in from the south just before I took the turnoff. It was just so spectacular and immersive.

This is why I don’t fly P3D anymore. Nothing can touch this simulator for that level of immersion.

I really hope they can clean up the clouds some more but I can live with what we have regarding clouds.

3 minutes ago, michaelray said:

I really hope they can clean up the clouds some more but I can live with what we have regarding clouds.

Shush!  Don't give them a free pass this is 1/2 of the immersion and there is definite room for improvement!

6 minutes ago, Noel said:

Shush!  Don't give them a free pass this is 1/2 of the immersion and there is definite room for improvement!

Yes so true. Never pays to be too enthusiastic. I agree always room for improvement.

One of the recent interviews with Jorge, he said there were some advancements coming with weather “that would blow our minds”. I really look forward to it. Imagine what we will have if they can solidly build on this.

TBH I ended up swapping back to a HDR monitor after the initial patch.

I have tried to avoid HDR because the windows implementation of HDR is flakey in general and often messes up SDR content, my OBS recording software does not support it and the MSFS implementation of HDR was suboptimal and a bit weird.

Post SU5 the HDR implementation in game was much better and the improvement over SDR is now substantial.

It does seem that Hotfix 2 has fixed a lot of the brightness/cloud issues in SDR as well but at this point I think I will bite the bullet and just stay with HDR.

Edited August 10, 20214 yr by Glenn Fitzpatrick

8 hours ago, kand said:

Still, they are leaps ahead of any of the other sims,

Maybe ahead of the default clouds in other sims, but with REX textures in those sims there is no comparison.  None!
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Edited August 10, 20214 yr by fppilot

Oh so nice that we're discussing the nuances of clouds. Beats all the constant threads we used to have on FSX about the word not allowed blurries and popping and stutters and screen tearing and CTDs'. But here we are looking for and being promised even more in clouds that will 'blow your mind'.

 

Notwithstanding the SU5 hotfix issues (does SU stand for Stuff UP by the way?) which I get the impression many are now happy with, this sim is rocking.

 

FWIW I think the clouds look pretty stunning as a default offering but I imagine a third party weather engine like REX could do wonders.  So long as it doesn't affect performance and doesn't cost an arm and leg.  I wonder what Asobo have up their sleeve?

Bring on more cloud discussions 🙂.