I spent the past few months diving into the realm of Raymarching and studying some of its applications that may come in handy for future 3D projects, and while I managed to build a pretty diverse set of scenes, all of them consisted of rendering surfaces or solid objects. My blog post on Raymarching covered some of the many impressive capabilities of this rendering technique, and as I mentioned at the end of that post, that was only the tip of the iceberg; there is a lot more we can do with it.

One fascinating aspect of Raymarching I quickly encountered in my study was its capacity to be tweaked to render volumes. Instead of stopping the raymarched loop once the ray hits a surface, we push through and continue the process to sample the inside of an object. That is where my obsession with volumetric clouds started, and I think the countless hours I spent exploring the many Sky Islands in Zelda Tears of the Kingdom contributed a lot to my curiosity to learn more about how they work. I thus studied a lot of Shadertoy scenes leveraging many Volumetric Raymarching techniques to render smoke, clouds, and cloudscapes, which I obviously couldn’t resist giving a try rebuilding myself:

source: HN