We've had a number of questions all related to planetary weather effects. What can you tell us about your involvement in planetary weather effects and where we're going?
TL;DRThey have many weather ideas such as tornadoes, dust storms and rain, but are waiting on some key planet-team work first, and rain also needs shader, graphics and volumetric work beyond VFX alone.
It's going to sound like the same answer, really. There's things that the planet team are working on. There's a couple of things that are going to get done and finished that will then open the floodgates for us to do our thing, if that makes sense. We've got tons and tons of cool ideas for weather. It's one of the things that really excited me about planets in the first place. When I first talked to the guys in Frankfurt, I was like, oh wow, we could do tornadoes and dust storms and rain showers and all that kind of thing. So we've totally got plans to do all that. We're just waiting on a few key things first before we can really go for it.
I need rain over Lorville to really get me to that Blade Runner level that I need.
So the thing about that is, it's not purely a particles thing, because we could make a rain effect easily. We need to have rain affecting how the shaders look on the visor and the canopy and things like that. It's not something that the VFX team alone are going to be solving.
It'll be the graphics guys. It's a big, complex system, really: getting the wetness, getting puddles and such, maybe even changes to the flight model during rain or storms, and possibly, if the storm's happening next to water, fish flying out of it.
Not to mention that you can do particle rain close up, but if you're looking at a rainstorm coming in on the horizon, you can always see that there's rain. You can see this volumetric block of rain, and that eventually turns into actual rain. So we'd need something to do that. The thing that excites me, actually, is that it's volumetric, so it's probably going to be me.
But imagine being up in space and seeing the rainstorm below you as you're going towards that planet. That's what excites me, seeing that storm happening while you're safe from it in space.
But that does mean that it has to be seamless when we do it.
Well, everything does in our game. That's the exciting and challenging thing, isn't it? It's real. It's like, oh, that's a storm in the distance, and now I've flown in and I'm in the storm. Lots of stuff to get our heads around.