I have an idea about why the clouds color is off, brownish too much sometimes

[Hester40MT]

This was brought up once in a Live Q&A (27 April 2022):
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/live-dev-q-a-april-27th-2022/516747

@OlieTsubasa443

Forum question – There are complaints about clouds looking too dark at high altitude, can you adjust the clouds shading to reduce the volcanic ash look?

Martial – The difficulty here is that the cloud system is a system, by that I mean that it’s physic-based rendering and doesn’t take in account specific situation. Basically, a system is rendering all the data we’re collecting and it’s quite hard to do the right balance between situations. We know that we still have some improvement to do and new parameters to introduce. Deep rework would be needed

Seb – I can confirm, it’s been brought up a lot. In a lot of occasion, clouds look great and sometimes it’s looks like you’re flying over a volcano. I spent about 2 weeks on it, I try to change the brightness and the problem is that with dynamic lighting whenever you make something twice as bright in the sim it doesn’t twice as bright at all. In order to have the ash effect go away, I turned the clouds ten times brighter and then in so many occasions there were over exposed.

With real clouds, light goes in and it scatters around and get reflected and comes back out. There’s more energy conversed in cloud than in ash. There’s a little more occlusion and energy taken away because it’s darker. To get the formula right with our cloud system (which is fully 3D), we need to have perfect shadow casting internally of clouds but that would cost a lot of computational power. For the amount of performance, we dedicate to clouds right we get the quality we have right now and it works well in many occasion but when the system is a bit complex it just gets the lighting wrong.

As Martial said, it’s a system, if we do an overhaul of the system at some point and invest more performance into clouds, we can probably get this better but it’s more complicated than just adjusting the brightness.