5 hours ago, GSalden said:

From what I have seen sofar is that MS likes dramatic looking clouds most ….

You mean the silly looking volcanic ash type clouds hehe?  And then there's the fake stalactites and stalagmites hehe.

2 hours ago, Mikeingreen said:

Oh great, another cloud thread

My post was complementing both MS Live Weather and REX for convincing overcast depiction.  My interest concerned how the cloud type was chosen, given both were displaying the same METAR.  Some interesting replies from others on how cloud type could be discerned from the METAR.

Maybe it would be best for you not to enter a cloud thread if the subject doesn't interest you?

29 minutes ago, ryanbatcund said:

You mean the silly looking volcanic ash type clouds hehe?  And then there's the fake stalactites and stalagmites hehe.

I've been saying this since the first images were released of the sim. These clouds look just like a volcano erupting.

15 minutes ago, Keirtt said:

I've been saying this since the first images were released of the sim. These clouds look just like a volcano erupting.

But it's dramatic haha.  I'm not a programmer but I'm wondering if it's just a shader thing.  It seems like the clouds shade themselves too much.  Or, something to do with the metering of light.  You know in the sim when you see mostly white how it darkens the scene?  Or if you look at a dark cockpit you can barely see details in the clouds outside.

2 hours ago, ryanbatcund said:

But it's dramatic haha.  I'm not a programmer but I'm wondering if it's just a shader thing.  It seems like the clouds shade themselves too much.  Or, something to do with the metering of light.  You know in the sim when you see mostly white how it darkens the scene?  Or if you look at a dark cockpit you can barely see details in the clouds outside.

The eye adaptation I think you're referring to at the end is going to use a different rendering technique.

Cloud rendering is complex, to say the least. The techniques employed here are mainly established ones, I believe, based on research and equations both established and evolving among the development community. There are research papers on real-time cloud rendering. And real-time is the key term here, because whatever is done, it's all approximate. Scattering light around the inside and outside of a fluid, volumetric asset, self-shadowing, preventing light leakage, etc. -- it's expensive in processing terms. I mean, I am still astonished that I can run ultra clouds (along with everything else on ultra and the underlying physics, etc.) on my i7, GTX1070 machine. Clouds are a marvel. But they aren't perfect, and I don't expect we will see them much better in terms of graphical quality, because of the necessary approximation of the rendering techniques. To get close to realistic clouds, as seen in movie CGI -- that can't be done in real-time on any home computer.

So, the shadowing technique might make them appear a little closer to ashy smoke, but maybe it's the best that shadowing can be presented with the amount of calculations that need to be handled.

Time will tell how much Asobo can do, given contemporary hardware, but I certainly expect imperfections and artifacting to remain to an extent, with the sheer number of clouds being rendered on top of everything else going on under the hood.

I still wonder how likely it is they could do convincing, feathery cirrus clouds... It would probably be done with either classic flat sprites, or particles. They already use particles on top of volumetric textures/voxels, though, and that's expensive enough. I'm certainly interested to find out how far they can go with clouds...

I've seen the Unreal Engine cloud rendering system, and haven't seen cirrus produced in their engine.

We'll find out in due course how far they can go with cloud depiction... But we might have to wait until Flight Simulator 2030 for even more realism, when hardware has advanced exponentially 😉

7 hours ago, March Hare said:

The sim is capable of displaying overcast correctly. REX isn't doing anything, really, that the sim can't do. Timest can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that REX manipulates the data used for presets in the sim, based on whatever is incoming from their weather data server(s), i.e. it isn't exactly live weather, not the way the sim is doing live weather. If you select the overcast preset within MSFS, you will get the same conditions depicted in the above screenshot labelled "REX overcast". And you can manipulate the preset to your liking.

REX doesn’t utilize the presets built into the simulator to manipulate the weather conditions within the sim. We have full control of the key elements of the weather engine. Our weather is live weather as compared to Asobo’s. What I mean is that we use metar data which is the most recent report of weather. 

7 hours ago, March Hare said:

...REX is using Asobo's engine for their sky conditions.

REX has full control of telling the engine precisely what to render.

7 hours ago, March Hare said:

Who knows? I don't. This is speculation. But what is factual is that Asobo's engine certainly is capable of rendering overcast, because it does in preset mode, and it does when REX is utilising Asobo's engine in their add-on.

REX is not using their engine to generate weather. We are using facilities to set weather, but we do not touch the engine itself to manipulate it. Again, we do not use presets.

7 minutes ago, timest said:

REX has full control of telling the engine precisely what to render.

Thanks for responding. You kind of contradict yourself, though, it seems to me... At the end, you say you aren't using their engine, but prior to that you say you have full control of telling their engine what to render... So you are using their engine to render the cloud depiction. You haven't replaced their engine with your own? Therefore, Asobo's rendering engine is capable of creating the same clouds that your add-on is displaying, as shown by their presets. That was my point, even if the speculated specifics were incorrect. Although I didn't say you were using the presets per se, rather the same data that Asobo's presets use, i.e. "the key elements of [their] weather engine"?

Asobo also uses METAR now, then live forecast modelling away from METAR zones, but I think the problem is the accuracy of the data being fed into the sim, and/or some current bugs.