Even if I'm not working directly on rendering clouds at the moment, I still somehow take screenshots of them as I work😀

I had previously used triangle meshes to render giant planetary atmospheres but after many unsuccessful attempts to fix all the artifacts, especially when intersecting atmosphere geometry, I decided to add support for spheres to my renderer. It works much better

I store the texture with additional roughness separately with BC4 compression. Unfortunately in the case of a material with a custom shader additional complications are added, for example when a normal blend is needed.

Because of texture streamer it became necessary to almost always use mip maps, so I had to do basic normal map filtering, otherwise the surfaces become too shiny and flat. Only roughness without anisotropy for now. Images in order: mips disabled/enabled/+filtering. More below...

Another experiment with beautiful clouds by @samuel_krug. All colors here are just from the planet's atmosphere and lightning, just different angles of the sun. It's slow but interactive and without lightning mesh light it's 2-3 times faster. Something needs to be done about this

Intersecting heterogeneous volumes with multiscatter + exponential high analytical + mesh lights is hard. Now it's 30-40 percent faster for such scenes (more bounces more performance gain)

Quick test of the atmosphere rendering at long distances. The camera is in an atmosphere roughly the size of the Earth. The second volumetric sphere on the horizon with the same size, but at a distance to the Moon. I think I need to switch to doubles for positions in my engine

And a few shots

One day I started working on my engine/renderer and I haven't been able to stop yet