Jacob · VFX Technical Artist

I think we're looking at, I mean, it's as much as you can think of what other things could use a nebula for. But the data in itself that the VDB offers, such as density, can be used to help populate a level. So instead of having an artist hand-placing asteroids in a vast area as large as the parent is, they could use the VDB's density value to start spawning asteroids in a massive, vast area. And you could have asteroids only in very thick areas. So you'd have asteroids in the more dense parts and then not so many, maybe a couple, in the low-density areas.

Jacob · VFX Technical Artist

We have the asteroid gas cloud entity, which does that. I didn't want to show it today because a lot of the defaults are Squadron stuff, but we saw an image of it yesterday and it was really phenomenal. And I did play around with it. I just popped in a VDB square and put some rocks in the other day and just flew through it. It was really fun, just dodging around all these asteroids.

Jacob · VFX Technical Artist

It could be really good when it ties into gameplay. So if we did have things like EM distortion on your ship and you're mining, or the asteroids are in the dense parts, but the dense parts are really dangerous, you could actually lose a ship or just get hurt mining by getting too close, being too adventurous.