Clouds!

A little update on what I've been up to the past four years:

The sixty-second format doesn't leave much room to talk about the specifics of the tech, but it does have some pretty imagery!

The technique is roughly similar to "Volumetric Clouds and Mega-Particles" in Shader X5. We render solid geometry with vertex lighting that approximates SSS to an off-screen quarter-res buffer, blur it, then apply distortion from a cubemap that we look up based on the eye-vector. To prevent the frosted-glass effect where it's very obviously a flat shader applied on top, we use the depth to decrease the standard deviation of the gaussian blur with distance and also modulate the strength of the distortion based on the blurred depth.

Might have a little bit more talking about this in the near future. It's almost exactly four years now since I've started working at Rare and this is just one of the many awesome bits of graphics tech I've had a chance to work on.