How are volumetric clouds coming along?
TL;DRSean Tracy doesn't know when planetary clouds will arrive; the current nebula clouds are static, the engine team will work on moving ones, and he expects them to matter for upcoming landing zones.
I actually don't know. If we're talking volumetric VDB gas cloud stuff, I think we just showed a whole bunch of it in ATV yesterday. So, I mean, they pretty much see where it's at. If they're talking about planetary clouds, that's a whole different conversation. Now, you might think that you could just use the same thing, but the problem with clouds, real ones anyways, like on a planet, is they change. They're always moving, they're shifting, they're flowing, these kind of things. The cloud and the volumetric nebula gas stuff is all as good as it looks, but it is static. It is an export of one frame of a voxel simulation from Houdini. So that's not something that we could do unless we had clouds on planets that just don't move, which is just not where we want to go with this. And the Frankfurt engine team, the guys in the engine room, will be working on this. I just don't know when. I think it's going to become very important with our next couple landing zones, though. That's the thing. I just don't know where it sits on the actual roadmap itself. We've got kind of, I don't want to say half-assed ways, but yeah, kind of half-assed ways of showing just the clouds. Intermediate approaches, right, exactly. Kind of particle techniques or just some real simple 2D stuff. But I know Carsten Wenzel, who's one of the best rendering engineers I know, and he's tech director on our project, did a lot of the rendering work for the atmospheric scattering, and he wants to continue that onto the clouds. So I know he's got some great ideas for this. It's just a matter of time. And since he's heading up the performance team, and I hope everybody's been experiencing the huge, huge wins that we've been making on the performance front, once that's in a good state, that's probably where I guess he'll move on to. But yeah, I can't say for sure. I mean, he's my senior, so I don't really know.