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armchairhacker
These look like watercolor. You can tell they're not realistic but they have a nice design on their own.
latchkey
Previously... from 2012!

CSS 3D Clouds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5193053 (February 9, 2013 — 294 points, 44 comments)

CSS 3D Clouds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3744761 (March 23, 2012 — 17 points, 1 comments)

throwaway0665
both sites are owned by the original author "spite"
robinson7d
What a throwback. Somebody asking whether another used ATI graphics. Another person asking whether they should support PPC Macs.
yieldcrv
the web was such a mess back then trying to evolve to where we are today, so many great techniques got lost in the process
bsenftner
It's just slowly rotating billboards with cloud textures. Effective, but more of an animation illusion than anything approaching any type of cloud simulation.
nnevatie
Apart from the obvious z-popping, looks quite good.
onion2k
It might be possible to reduce that effect by applying a mix-blend-mode to the layers.
rcarmo
I giggled at the “Michael Bay” setting :)
swiftcoder
Works surprisingly well for the plain white cloud case, I guess that's the only one where additive blending works correctly. The other all have pretty glaring z-sorting issues. Still, impressive in plain CSS.
thomastjeffery
Since this is a collection of 2D sprites in 3D space, we could call it "2.5D".

The rotation of the sprites really breaks the effect, though. Then again, having them still would probably be worse. What if the rotation for each sprite was random?