Atmosphäre № 001, clouds you can shape
A Three.js tool that grows a cloud from noise, lets you turn it in your hands and watch it drift in the wind. No two are the same.
I wanted a place where you can make a cloud. Not pick one from a library, not paste a photograph, but grow one: press a button, and a cloud that has never existed before forms in front of you, thick in the middle, torn at the edges, lit from one side. Then you leave it alone and watch it move.
What it does
The whole thing runs in the browser, in Three.js. A cloud is a volume, not a surface, so it is built from layers of noise that decide, point by point, how dense the air is. Where it is dense, light gets stuck and the cloud turns white or grey; where it thins out, the sky shows through. That is why the edges look torn rather than cut.
Every cloud is generated from a new seed. Press the reset button and a small note says "your cloud is forming" while the next one is computed, and it is never the one you had before. Drag to turn it, scroll to come closer. Below it, a faint reflection on a still surface, so the cloud has a place to hang above.
Weather
Two choices, kept deliberately small. First the kind of cloud: a cumulus, round and friendly, or a thunderhead, heavier and more ragged. Then the light: daylight, golden hour or blue night. In daylight the cloud is bright, the sky a soft gradient, the shadow side gentle. In the golden hour the light comes in low and pink and the underside glows. At night the thunderhead goes violet and heavy, the light drops, and the cloud darkens until it is barely more than a denser patch of sky.
The wind
The part I care about most is the slowest one. A live mode moves the cloud the way wind would: it drifts, it turns a little, its shape keeps changing while you look at it. Nothing loops. If you pause it, it just hangs there and waits.
What it is for
It started as a study in volume rendering and turned into something I keep open in a tab. A calm thing to look at. I can see it as the background of a weather product, as a screen in a waiting room, or as the opening of a site that wants to feel like a window rather than a page.
Next: more weather (fog, evening light, snow), several clouds at once, and a way to save the one you like.