Clouds and Bloom

May I comment on that thread?

I don't agree with the posts.
If you look into the Sun (even through clouds), it does hurt your eyes. I don't think the bloom is over-dome at all. It's very realistic to me. Sure it can be disturbing in a game, but that's life, if you are a soldier, your eyes will hurt if the enemy is in front of the Sun. It's a part of the tactics.

And: clouds do have sharp edges. Wow, people are so used to computer generated images, procedural stuff, that they don't know how it looks in the real world, pretty interesting. Reflections should be sharp too.

As for the bloom: AFAIK bloom isn't choosy. If something is bright, it will have bloom effect (more precisely bloom depends on the contrast, since the eye, or a camera adapts).

So maybe you could add a circular gradient (with center as the Sun) to your bloom calculations, so clouds further away from the sun won't be as bright as the clouds nearer the Sun. Simply you could multiply the luminance of the skybox rendering with a factor determined by the distance from the Sun. It seems a hack, but anyway...

EDITED: some typos

[Edited by - szecs on June 8, 2010 2:48:49 AM]

Light the clouds brightly where the sun can shine through the most and just bloom as usual. The cloud edges should then bloom as in the picture. In the few pictures I have of real clouds (covering the sun) they do indeed do the same as that picture (just to a lesser extent).

Yes, what is a good method for lighting the edges brightly of the cloud? I am using the cloud method based on Link .

A cloud is just a clump of billboarded sprites.