With the Local mode enabled, the camera can navigate under, inside, and above the clouds.

Obviously, this mode prevents you from ever reaching the clouds. This allows you to keep the camera far plane at a very reasonable distance.

With the Local mode disabled, the clouds are rendered as if they were infinitely far away from the camera, in a similar fashion as an HDRI Sky.One important setup decision is related to the Local mode of the clouds because it impacts your ability to fly into and above them, as well as influences the level of performance indirectly. Usually these are rendered infinitely far away from the camera, and thus they do not feel entirely connected to the world below them, yet they can provide sufficient quality for static scenarios at a very low cost.

A second reason is that a majority of 3D games take place directly on a surface (e.g., a terrain or sea), and therefore they don’t need an extensive dynamic sky system that allows the camera to fly above the clouds.Īs a result, many 3D applications have happily relied on static textures, such as cube maps, imposters, or simple transparent materials. The main reason for this absence is the cost of rendering such clouds, as the computation of the light scattering through the clouds is an expensive operation when relying on ray tracing, or ray marching, to be specific. Attempts to produce clouds that looked volumetric, i.e., that occupy a physical space in the world, were usually restricted to flight simulators and a handful of open-world games. Until the end of the last generation of consoles, volumetric clouds have been a very rare occurrence in video games.

Unity cloud build added to queue