Since the very first day with FS20, something that catched my (our) eyes were the amazing clouds, boy, they are fabulous!, specially when looked from the backlight side. However, there is a caveat. When the view is pointing to the direct illuminated clouds, they look way too “dark” or grey while the edges of the puffed parts are whiter.
Sometimes, things on the ground look whiter than the clouds, and thats something quite rare I would say, other than when clouds are under other clouds of course. Clouds should be much much whiter than they are now.
Looking closely to them (remember I’m refering to the directly illuminated side), I think the way they are colored seems to have something wrong, like they should look “inverted” in colour, I mean, the normal surfaces to the camera look dark while the more tangent (edges) look white. I think it should be the other way around, white normal surfaces and dark edges.
I did a little experiment, inverting the clouds in a couple of pics and adjusting brighness and contrast. Just a quick test to check if this could be correct, and I think there is definitely something to look at.
Real life:
Msfs (first the original, then the photoshoped one):
Shadow casting aside (because of course, in my inverted image, shadows are also inverted and so missing and that shouldnt be the case, I mean, shadows should be dark like in the original FS pic), the rest of the clouds look much closer to the real thing, with white normals and dark edges, which makes sense to me, as the max amount of reflected light should come from the normal surfaces to the camera while the edges (tangent to the camera angle and thus to the light, as remember we are talking about directly lighted clouds) look dark. If this inverted image could have proper dark casted shadows, it would look absolutely fantastic imho.
The original FS directly illuminated clouds have dark normals and white edges.
Here is a little comparison of the 3 images:
Few real life pics to compare:
I suspect, that the problem when looking the clouds at the directly illuminated face, is that the rendering/shaders seem to render these clouds in the same way they are rendered when looked from the backlighted side (dark inner normals where clouds are denser and thus less light scapes and white lit edges), but when looking the clouds from the lighted perspective they should be “inverted”. This would make clouds whiter (as they should), more detailed, less grainy and more realistic.
Of course, this would need adjusting and some work, but I think it would worth it as would make for much better clouds.
what do you think?