As beautiful as this is, it still saddens me that the best we have for efficient cloud effects is drifting camera-facing billboards displaying pre-rendered poofs.
I recently read a paper: Volumetric Clouds and Mega Particles[1]. Here's a demo of it in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QqD26SXWDc It looks to be somewhat better than billboards and cheap as well, though it does have some drawbacks.
I'm impressed that not only did this run on my Android phone in the stock browser, but that it was relatively smooth (hitching infrequently but for probably 300ms when it did).
There's a reason that this technique (prerendered sprites on camera-facing billboards) has been used for so many years, and continues to be used to this day. When you have an effect too intensive to be rendered in real time, prerendered billboards are a workaround that can often yield impressive results.
Clouds and other pseudo-particle effects are a really common place to see them these days, but I remember first being aware of them used for the Mumbo Tokens[1] in Banjo Kazooie on the N64.
I remember seeing this a year ago. It's awesome how smooth it has become— last time I checked, it was choppy on my machine whereas now it's butter smooth. Browsers are sure improving rapidly these days.
Hmm, on Chrome 24.0.1312.69 on 64 bit Linux the depth effect is missing. When rotated, it looks like a picture of a cloud painted on an invisible wall. No problem in Firefox.
In Chrome type about:gpu in your URL bar, might give you some clues. (Then check out about:flags to see if there are any relevant options you can change).
til of about:gpu, if you haven't seen it, and you're using chrome, take a quick look. Some of the problems listed for my machine have the relevant issue number next to them. Granted some of them are behind a 403 for me, but it's still an interesting reporting page to me.
I was expecting it to be a complete horror-show on my G5 mac, but it was actually really smooth (once it had settled down of course..). Really nice work. Well done!
How many G5 (or other PowerPC based Macs) are still out there, you think? I am working on an App, and debating whether to go through all the trouble to make it compatible with PPC architecture for the first release.
It seems that if I get all the options to "a lot" I get at least one or two clouds replaced by a white box icon. I imagine it's not loading them properly?
This is apparently based on the WebGL clouds demo, which is equally as amazing: http://mrdoob.com/131/Clouds