I was outside killing my lungs late last night, and I was marveling at the coolness of some clouds passing by the full moon when I got a idea…

You know how the sunlight makes clouds shadowed in places, something that you can simulate with a texture decently enough, but it still could look better.

And thus I thought why not bump map the clouds with its own map. Since the clouds are white anyway, and I can always color them in-game, I made two textures. One with the clouds and the sky color, the other with just the clouds.

I jumped up the rate of parallax, or bump strength, or whatever its called and applied it to the enviroment light and was rewarded with some dynamic looking clouds. Then I set the cloud model to rotate slowly and with the bump mapping it created a very nice and smooth cloud flowing look.

Screenshots won't show you anything so I got this here demo for you to see what I mean. Its just empty space with the cloud effect going overhead.

Next thing to do is to see how the effect works with a dynamic enviroment that I had built into pre-wrapper builds. As time passes the direction of the enviroment light will change according to the position of the sun and the moon, along with fog/background/cloud color changes.

So check it out and tell me what you think.

Cloud demo