Have you ever just stared up at the clouds sometimes to admire their shapes? Or are you troubled like me and constantly wonder how they might be best simulated by a computer? I’ve tried it, using a raycasting technique in a fragment shader to try and draw their ‘volume’ that blocks the sunlight. Results were not that great, but it was a fun exercise.

Some other people propose a much more accurate method that takes advantage of the fact that clouds move slowly. Basically, you can sort of memoize the results (if your camera is moving slowly too), updating the imagery with progressive passes with more advanced computations.

I’m a skeptic when it comes to computers getting much more powerful at this point, though I am curious what might be possible if everyday computational power was increased by another factor of ten.