Andrew had created what he called “Frankencloudscapes” — large cloud formations so that the sky could be treated like as a landscape would by a terrain modeler. As a result, the cloudscape acted as both a background element and an environment to explore.
To make this work at the scale needed for Burning Shores, a strike team at Guerrilla tackled the challenge of flying through clouds – the real test of performance and quality. Andrew teamed up with Nathan and brought in Hugh Malan, a Senior Principal Tech Programmer.
The first hurdle they encountered was deeply technical: how do you handle a huge quantity of volumetric voxel data?
“Hugh and I divided this issue to conquer it. I developed a way to take low-detail voxel data and add detail during rendering. Meanwhile, Hugh worked on compressing the data so it could be accessed faster from memory. Together, these processes made rendering Volumetric Voxel Clouds exponentially faster.”
“But it still wasn’t fast enough,” Andrew recalls. “The costliest part of this process was calculating cloud lighting, which, in itself, is complicated. To get around this, Nathan engineered a method to reduce rendering time to a speed that would work for both standard and high frame rate modes.”
“This was also one of those rare situations where an optimization produced a better visual result. It allowed us to cast cloud-to-cloud shadows over a much larger distance, improving realism. At this point, we had a method to render volumetric clouds from the ground and in the air, right up next to them.”