The most exciting announcement to come out of Sony’s E3 pre-conference was surely, Horizon Zero Dawn. No one expected to see something like this and it blew us away with amazing visual fidelity, unique concept and enticing gameplay.
After working on Killzone, it’s great to see Guerilla taking such a different path with its next game. Horizon Zero Dawn was recently featured in the Siggraph 2015 during the Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games.
Guerrilla Games Principal FX Artist Andrew Schneider took the stage and showed Horizon Zero Dawn in a section called “The Real-time Volumetric Cloudscapes of Horizon: Zero Dawn.”
First, we were given a look at the sky in four different conditions:
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.
You can also check out a gallery of images below:
Back at E3, we saw a vertical slice from Horizon Zero Dawn where the lead character Aloy faced a giant metal T-Rex. That T-Rex is actually named ThunderJaw and following are some of the details we have about him.
- Thunderjaw is made up 550,000 polygons
- Thunderjaw uses 271 different animations
- The massive beast supports 67 unique visual effects
- Thunderjaw has 60 hit reactions
- Thunderjaw has 12 unique weapons
- Players can knock Thunderjaws massive Disc Launcher down, pick it up and use it against him.
Horizon Zero Dawn will release exclusively on PlayStation 4, but a final release date is yet to be announced.
