Choose a landscape, paint cloud silhouettes with a finger, and a Metal volumetric engine turns them into three-dimensional clouds — lit by the real sun and moon at the place and hour you choose. Contemplative, slow, satisfying.
Aether — from the Greek αἰθήρ, the luminous upper air and classical fifth element. The name carries the idea: you act upon the sky. There is no complex 3D editor here. A handful of gestures and sliders, and a sky that answers to real light.
Draw silhouettes on a simple canvas; a volumetric raymarcher turns each stroke into real three-dimensional clouds. Paint across three altitudes — cumulus, altocumulus and cirrus — each its own editable layer, with brush radius, softness and opacity at hand.
The sun and a correctly phased moon are computed from the real place and instant. Move the hour slider — or let time advance on its own — and your clouds relight live, from warm dawn through white noon to lunar night.
An atmospheric sky (Rayleigh + Mie scattering) follows the sun. The moon shows its phase and earthshine; thousands of real stars from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue scintillate at night — all of it occluded by the clouds you paint.
Rotate the view with one finger and pinch to zoom — nothing erases. Coverage is painted by the direction you face, so look around and keep painting to fill the whole sky around you.
On coastal landscapes, a ray-marched ocean stretches below the horizon — reflecting the sky, catching a glint of sun, and a path of moonlight at night.
.aether file.Every sky saves to a self-contained file — landscape, clouds, place, hour and view. Reopen it any time and the exact image is recomputed from scratch. No cloud account, nothing to expire.
A few strokes become a real, lit cloud. Drag the hour to relight it; look around to paint the whole sky. Captured on iPhone, nothing staged.
Each landscape is anchored to a real place, time of day, and a fixed weather mood that seeds the clouds — from clear to overcast.
A native Swift 6 and SwiftUI app, rendered by a Metal volumetric pipeline — raymarching through concentric cloud shells, 3D noise, Henyey–Greenstein scattering and a powder effect — held at a smooth frame rate on iPhone through half-resolution tracing, temporal reprojection and a MetalFX spatial upscale.
Solar and lunar positions come from astronomical formulae; the sky is physically motivated rather than a stock backdrop. Everything runs on device. Requires iOS 17 or later.
Aether collects no data. No account, no server, no analytics, no third-party SDKs, no ads. Location, if you allow it, is used only on your device to orient the sky — it never leaves the phone. Read the privacy policy.