Horizon Zero Dawn’s Real-Time Sky Technology Featured in Screenshots

Guerilla Games, which is currently developing the PlayStation 4-exclusive Horizon Zero Dawn, released a slew of screenshots (seen below) from their work-in-progress skies and vistas during a SIGGRAPH 2015 presentation.

The accompanying description for the slideshow presentation reads:

Real-time volumetric clouds in games usually pay for fast performance with a reduction in quality. The most successful approaches are limited to low altitude fluffy and translucent stratus-type clouds. For Horizon Zero Dawn, Guerrilla need a solution that can fill a sky with evolving and realistic results that closely match highly detailed reference images which represent high altitude cirrus clouds and all of the major low level cloud types, including thick billowy cumulus clouds. These clouds need to light correctly according to the time of day and other cloud-specific lighting effects. Additionally, we are targeting GPU performance of 2ms. Our solution is a volumetric cloud shader which handles the aspects of modeling, animation and lighting logically without sacrificing quality or draw time. Special emphasis will be placed on our solutions for direct-ability of cloud shapes and formations as well as on our lighting model and optimizations. 

Guerilla Games hopes to release Horizon Zero Dawn, which was unveiled at Sony’s E3 2015 press conference, in 2016. The skies shown during the E3 2015 trailer were “painted custom skies,” the developer said in the presentation.

“In the case of the E3 trailer, we overrode the signals from the weather system with custom textures. You can see the corresponding textures for each shot in the lower left corner. We painted custom skies for each shot in this manner.”