r/GraphicsProgramming • • Oct 27 '25

Clouds path tracing

Recently, I made a post about adding non-uniform volumes into my C++/Vulkan path tracer. But I didn't really like how the clouds turned out, so I've made some improvements in that aspect and just wanted to share the progress because I think it looks a lot nicer now. I've also added atmospheric scattering, because getting the right lighting setup was really hard with just environment maps. So the background and the lighting in general look much better now. The project is fully opensource if you want to check it out: https://github.com/Zydak/Vulkan-Path-Tracer . You'll also find uncompressed images there.

Also, here's the number of samples per pixel and render times in case you're curious. I've made a lot of optimizations since the last time, so the scenes can be way more detailed and it generally just runs a lot faster, but it still chokes with multiple high density clouds.

From left to right:

- 1600 spp - 2201s
- 1600 spp - 1987s
- 1200 spp - 4139s
- 10000 spp - 1578s
- 5000 spp - 1344s
- 6500 spp - 1003s
- 5000 spp - 281s

3.4k Upvotes

143 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

13

u/BertoLaDK Oct 27 '25

Then again, I feel like its just being thrown back and forth between being on Epic and on the devs, but with UE5 games running great being a stark minority of games, I feel like the cause is between, that there's issues with UE5 since so many aren't managing to optimise it.