Coverage Texture is animated when animating the Cloud region mask

[werner.poetzelberger]

For a test, I rotate a cloud region mask.

Just by doing that, the coverage textures is influenced by that animation. y?

Turning down the coverage size basically 'stops' the motion of the coverage texture and only leaves the rotation.

Best. Werner

 

Edited October 21, 2022 by werner.poetzelberger

[silent]

Hi Werner,

I'm afraid that's an expected behavior for current clouds implementation.

We do have plan to improve this behavior in the future releases (no ETA at this moment).

Thanks!

[werner.poetzelberger]

Is there a way to control that on our side in the current release?

I am thinking about broader animation of the clouds, the movement of the coverage would be one idea.

A kind of a flow map would also be interesting...

Best Werner

[silent]

I think that direct shader modification is the only way to achieve more control at this moment.

[sareth]

Hi! We would actually like to hear your feedback. First of all you're in fact not rotating the mask, you're rotating the whole layer which is limited by this region mask. So the mask and the coverage texture are rotating synchronously. The reason why you have this strange effect is because of the wind animation. Wind animation is realized through the simple UV offset so the rotation center is moving when the clouds are moving. If you just reload your world it will drop the UV offset to default and the mask and the coverage texture will be rotating synchronously. 
So I would like to ask - what behavior do you expect? Do you want the coverage texture staying still when the region mask is rotated (we'll soon probably implement that through the material and lock the rotation ability in transformations of the layer)? Or do you want the coverage texture always rotating synchronously with the region mask? 
For now it looks like you'd like the second option. It's pretty specific use case but you can achieve it by reloading your world and setting wind speed animation to 0.

[werner.poetzelberger]

 

Hi.

Thanks for coming back to me.
When I was looking into the clouds, my motivation was to investigate animation possibilities.
The Wind direction is pretty basic, and is suffivient for simple layer movements.

Interesting is the dedicated cloud object, to create local weather. For that some more advanced animation would make sense. 
One interesting idea would be to have a kind of a flow-map or flow system for the clouds to simulated wind currents.

My first basic test was to do a rotation of a storm like that in the image, which of course would be just a very basic approximation.

best.

Werner

[sareth]

Now I see. Right now you can't control clouds material via node based shader graph. It would be much more easier to achieve what you want. Unfortunately at the moment the only way is direct shader modification as Silent wrote previously. But I believe that we are going to implement shader graph materials in clouds in the future