Sky
The sky's the limit
Ways to draw the elements of the sky or distant objects that looks stationary even as the player move. They can be combined so one can have a skybox for stars and skyscene for the ships that fly around a space station the player walk around in.
Clouds
When the player can jump in a plane and take to the sky the clouds can no longer be part of a skydome or box.
- Realistic Cloud Rendering Using Pixel Synchronization, 2014
- A Simple, Efficient Method for Realistic Animation of Clouds, 2012
- Let There be Clouds! Fast, Realistic Cloud-Rendering in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight - 2004
- Real-Time Cloud Rendering, 2001
- Dynamic Volumetric Cloud Rendering for Games on Multi-Core Platforms, 2000
A sky scene is similar to a skybox but a whole scene is used a rendered centered on the player. It can be used to show distant movable things such as rotating planets in the distance or spaceships that fly by outside a space station.
Skybox
A skybox is a box centered on the camera where each side has a texture of that represent the view of the distant world in that direction. So the upside show the sky and the side ones show the distant mountains. The down one it not normally seen in a game with terrain but the skybox but it can be seen in a space simulator. More then one skybox can be used if some of them are transparent. For example a distant ones with stars and another one with the moon. The moon skybox can then slowly rotate to make the moon move. Skyboxes are often used to show content that do not animate.
- Creating a Sky Box - 2011
- XNA Skybox - 2011
- Creating Backgrounds for 3D Games, 1998
- Skybox DirectX
- Skybox
Skydome
Put a half sphere (dome) centered above the camera. Use a texture on it, modify the vertex colors or a combination of both. By changing the vertex colors it is possible to model dusk and dawn.
- Journal Entry 26 – Skydome - 2013
- Drawing a simple skydome - 2011
- A fast, simple method to render sky color using gradient maps, 2006
- Real Time Rendering of Atmospheric Scattering Effects for Flight Simulators, 2003
- Sky Domes, 1999
- Tutorial 11: Bitmap Clouds
Skyplane
This is a plane that is always above the camera. It can have some textures on it of clouds and it can also be animated.
Solid
Set the background color to blue and you are done :).
Reference
Physically Based Sky, Atmosphere & Cloud Rendering - 2017
Nubis: Authoring Real-Time Volumetric Cloudscapes with the Decima Engine - 2017
The Real-time Volumetric Cloudscapes of Horizon: Zero Dawn - 2015
A Novel Sampling Algorithm for Fast and Stable Real-Time Volume Rendering - 2015
Sparkly but not too Sparkly! A Stable and Robust Procedural Sparkle Effect- 2015
Assassin’s Creed 4: Lighting, weather and atmospherics effects - 2014
Volumetric fog: Unified, compute shader based solution to atmospheric scattering - 2014
Stunning Procedural Skies in WebGL - 2013 - Part 1, Part 2
Advanced WebGL - Part 2: Sky Rendering - 2011
Nubis: Authoring Real-Time Volumetric Cloudscapes with the Decima Engine
Dark and Stormy - 2018
Dark and Stormy - 2018
The Real-Time Volumetric Cloudscapes of Horizon Zero Dawn - 2017
Nubis: Authoring Real-Time Volumetric Cloudscapes with the Decima Engine
Stormscapes: Simulating Cloud Dynamics in the Now
http://computationalsciences.org/publications/haedrich-2020-stormscapes.html