Look what I did!
It’s not quite amazing yet, but it’s getting there. This is a completely volumetric cloud, rendering in real-time. I’m still working out the lighting equations for it (which are kind of hard to do when your hand it broken and you can’t draw the situation on a piece of paper) and then I’ll work on making it prettier. However, I’m pretty happy with how this looks so far.
My work is loosely based on Schpok et. al,, along with some other information I’ve found scattered about the internet. Most of it is old though, and doesn’t consider the capabilities of current graphics hardware or multi-core machines. Also, Swell, the demo for the algorithm proposed by Schpok et. al, doesn’t work on my machine because of a versioning problem with OpenGL 2+. I’m getting pretty close to what they’ve done though, so I don’t think I’ll be needing it.
I’ve got to say, I’m very happy with C# and the XNA Framework. They take a lot of the low-level details away without seriously hurting performance. I’m still able to do some pretty intensive stuff using managed code. I’m sure it’d probably be a bit faster in C++, but since XNA doesn’t work with unmanaged code, I’m pretty happy using C#.