Cloud Shadows

[JekSun97]

It's a great plugin, and it's well optimized, which is very rare in the clouds. However, there are not enough shadows from the clouds, which would make it realistic.

[TokisanGames]

not enough shadows

Are there any?

I don't think there are any, and I don't know how we can add them. The clouds aren't really there (mesh/volumetric clouds). They're a shader on a skysphere. Best we can do is look at adding volumetric clouds or making sure it works, which might provide shadows.

[JekSun97]

Are there any?

Translator, I translated incorrectly, I meant that they are not there, and they are missing.

In fact, we could place an orthographic projection to look at the spherhu clouds from the side of the sun, and tie this projection to the sun, generate a shadow map based on it, and cast a shadow on the world, although we would have to add a small shader for all objects that could display this shadow on themselves, which is not very convenient =\

Volumetric fog via shaders would greatly reduce performance, although Godot volumetric fog works well enough for this purpose.

[Radivarig]

Cloud shadows could be made with light projectors, currently directional light does not have it but it's tracked here godotengine/godot-proposals#8237

[tarnishedmoth]

On a small scale, it could be useful to be able to ask from a ray origin if the sun is occluded by a cloud.

[JekSun97]

I decided to explore this possibility, for a simpler version of shadows for now, we can cast a ray from the sun to the dome sphere, get a point in the sphere, then convert the UV spheres to world coordinates and read the sky texture pixel, if the transparency pixel is greater than 0.4, with Tween we can reduce the brightness of the sun so as not to lose performance, we can read the texture pixel at a given interval, this can create the illusion that we are in the shadow of the sky, although I still have a problem with converting the dome UV coordinates.