Magic Storm

Magic Storm is a volumetric raymarcher running entirely on the GPU, in three phases per frame:

1. Noise bake (only when Seed changes): a 128³ Perlin-Worley base volume and a 32³ Worley erosion volume are computed into 3D textures.
2. Temporal march: a half- or quarter-resolution raymarch pass accumulates into a ping-pong rgba16Float pair, blending each frame with the previous one. The history blend is 0.85 - 0.35 × Sharpness, so a crisper look uses a shorter history. The accumulation buffers reset whenever the viewport size, quality tier or seed changes.
3. Display grade: a full-resolution pass applies exposure, grain, stars and the filmic grade into the node's texture, with premultiplied-alpha blending.

Quality picks both the ray step count and the march resolution divisor:

The cloud volume itself is shaped by a chain of controls: Coverage sets how much sky is filled, Clumping morphs between continuous fog (0) and distinct cloud bodies (1), Form is the remap steepness that sculpts hard cores, and Billow carves the cauliflower lobes. Density and Softness control opacity and edge feathering, Detail adds the high-frequency Worley erosion, and Scale zooms the whole noise field. Cloud Base and Cloud Height define the slab the volume occupies vertically, Wind X / Wind Y translate it, Churn and Churn Speed drive the curl-noise evolution that makes the clouds boil, and Tilt rotates the slab in degrees.

Shape source: when a generator texture is cabled into Image, the storm stops rendering a sky slab. The image's white/opaque silhouette becomes the cloud body, inflated to Body Depth thickness and moving with the shape. The source is downscaled into a 256² mipmapped pyramid, so Mask Blur is a single trilinear LOD read — cheap softening of the silhouette. Mask Invert flips which side of the silhouette becomes cloud.

Lighting and grade: the cloud color comes from a connected Gradient node (base → lit top). Without a gradient cable, the palette is deliberately pure neutral gray (0.10 → 0.92) — all color mood is yours. Light Azimuth and Light Elevation place the key light in degrees, Light Contrast deepens the self-shadow, Ambient lifts the shadows, Moon sets the key intensity, and Silver adds forward-scatter rims (silver lining). Relief carves folds via N·L plus cavity darkening, Fibers adds anisotropic ridged strands for a muscle-fiber look, Sharpness applies an unsharp mask (and tightens the temporal blend), Grain / Grain Size overlay film grain, Exposure scales the final brightness, and Stars adds a starfield behind the volume.

Lightning is a CPU-side scheduler feeding up to 8 simultaneous flashes to the shader as positions plus energies. Each flash uses an exponential decay envelope multiplied by a stuttered restrike flicker (0.72 + 0.28·sin(age·80 + …)) — real lightning pulses rather than fades. Auto Lightning with Flash Rate > 0 spawns flashes at seeded stochastic intervals; with Auto Lightning off, the storm strikes only on a rising edge of the Trigger port. Flash Points accepts a point cloud (up to 256 points) that constrains where strikes originate; otherwise strikes are placed inside the cloud slab (or over the mask body). Two outputs close the loop: Flash is the current total flash energy (0…1) and Strike is a one-frame true pulse per new flash.

Aurora overlays animated auroral curtains over the sky: Aurora is intensity, Aurora Speed the drift rate, Aurora Height the vertical extent, and Aurora Gradient re-colors the curtains (default teal → green → violet when no gradient is cabled).

Time comes from an internal clock advanced by dt × Speed (frame delta clamped to 1/15 s, so a stall never jumps the storm) — set Speed to 0 to freeze it, or drive the Time port with any value ≥ 0 to scrub deterministically. Width and Height report the full viewport fit size in Grafit units (origin at center, shorter edge mapping to [-1, 1]), so a Canvas covers exactly the visible frame. Setting Enable to false clears the texture.

Core

Clouds

Shape source

Grade & lighting

Lightning & aurora

• Logo in the clouds: Text or Image generator → Magic Storm Image, Body Depth 1.2, Mask Blur 0.1 — the wordmark inflates into a real cloud body that churns in place
• Beat-synced lightning: Audio Beat/onset → Trigger with Auto Lightning off, and the Strike output → a Canvas flash layer or a Do Once-gated cue for the rest of the patch
• Reactive exposure: the Flash output → Remap → another node's brightness, so the whole scene lights up when the storm fires
• Aurora night sky: Coverage 0.25, Stars 0.9, Aurora 0.8 with a Gradient node feeding Aurora Gradient — a calm polar backdrop under a Canvas
• Deterministic render pass: Time driven by a Time node or a counter so the storm scrubs frame-exactly instead of running on the wall clock
• Directed strikes: Geometry to Points or L-System Tips → Flash Points, so lightning only fires from chosen positions in the frame

• Magic Storm renders every frame by design (living volume) and is the most expensive generator in the library — drop Quality to 0 while designing and raise it for the final look
• The default palette is deliberately neutral gray; cable a Gradient node to set the mood, and remember an unconnected structure input is ignored on purpose
• Sharpness does double duty — it sharpens and shortens the temporal history, so pushing it high can reintroduce raymarch noise; balance it with Quality
• Resizing the output window or changing Quality resets the temporal accumulation, so expect a brief re-converge
• Speed = 0 freezes the volume without freezing the rest of the patch; use the Time port instead when you need exact, repeatable playback
• Like every generator, the Image output only appears on screen through a Canvas node, and layer ordering is a Canvas property, not a Magic Storm one