Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores – Stunning New Images Tease “Frankencloudscapes”
Guerrilla Games’ Horizon Forbidden West expansion Burning Shores is out next month, but we still haven’t seen much gameplay. In a new PlayStation Blog post, the developer discussed the clouds in the expansion while also showcasing some stunning new images.
Principal FX artist Andrew Schneider said, “When we think of a horizon, we imagine vast expanses like the open ocean and how the clouds and the sun arc down to touch them at some immeasurable distance. Open-world games present developers with metaphorically similar challenges. How do we push the experience so that the player feels that they are in an environment that could be endless?”
The cloud system is based on the volumetric cloud system used in Horizon Zero Dawn. In Forbidden West’s Burning Shores, the team wanted to convey more emotions and add “movement, variety and definition” to its clouds.
As Andrew notes, “We looked to artists who were part of the luminism movement for inspiration, like 19th-century painter Albert Bierstadt. These painters had mastered the interplay between clouds and the land beneath, using light and detail to create space, producing truly dramatic landscape paintings.
“To recreate this effect in 3D, we had to develop a way to model clouds. ForHorizon Zero Dawn, we explored various methods for creating cloudscapes. Voxels are blocks that can build volumetric 3D clouds. We’d actually made a cloud simulator and experimented with rendering three-dimensional ‘voxel’ data in real-time.”
“But technologically, it was too early for this. The hardware and software just weren’t at the right stage of development. So, we settled with modeling clouds in an efficient-to-render way that still yielded high-quality results, but with more modeling effort
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