/ About
Currently Atmospherics Lead at Guerrilla. Also developing the real-time voxel-based volumetric Cloud Systems at Guerrilla for the Horizon Franchise games.
Previously Senior FX TD at Blue Sky Studios, specialized in clouds and other volumetric effects.
B.F.A. Computer Art, Savannah College of Art and Design
/ Publications
Nubis, Cubed: Methods (and madness) to model and render immersive real-time voxel-based clouds (SIGGRAPH 2023 Course - Advances in Real-time Rendering in Games)
In less than 6 months, we developed a highly detailed and immersive voxel-based cloud renderer and modeling approach. The Nubis voxel clouds act as traditional volumetric skyboxes, which support a time-of-day cycle when viewed from the ground, while also supporting high frame rates and atmospheric gameplay when explored on the back of a flying mount in the sky. To achieve these goals, we solved or mitigated several open problems in immersive volumetric cloud rendering with solutions such as ray march acceleration using compressed signed distance fields, fluid simulation-based modeling of clouds, a method to up-rez dense voxel data that avoids memory access bottlenecks, light sampling acceleration, and new methods to approximate cloud-specific lighting features like dark edges and inner glow. This talk covers these subjects in detail and offers a glimpse into our reasoning for leaving behind the now widely adopted 2.5D methods of real-time volumetric cloud rendering, which we introduced in our 2015 and 2017 Advances in Real Time Rendering Course Talks, in favor of the benefits and opportunities presented by voxel-based clouds.
[ RTR Advances | PDF (50mb) | PPTX (1.4gb) | PPTX (3.5gb) | Voxel Cloud Pack ]
Nubis, Evolved: Real-time Volumetric Clouds for Skies, Environments and VFX (SIGGRAPH 2022 Course - Advances in Real-time Rendering in Games)
Real-Time volumetric clouds in games have seen broadening adoption over the past several years. Many of the new applications use systems based on or similar to our approach, Nubis, which was introduced in 2015 in the Advances in Real-Time Rendering course. Nubis could produce a variety of cloud types in various lighting conditions for use in dynamic volumetric skyboxes that could render in under two milliseconds on the PlayStation 4 for the game, Horizon Zero Dawn. With the arrival of the new PlayStation 5 hardware and the sequel title, Horizon Forbidden West, we were able to push Nubis further into the game experience. In addition to improving our rendering approach for volumetric cloudscapes for use in skies, we started to use volumetric clouds to create environments such as clouds that the player could fly through. Additionally, we began to use them as VFX elements such as fast spinning superstorms with internal lighting flashes. In order to extend Nubis in these directions, several open problems in real-time volumetric cloud rendering had to be mitigated or solved. Rendering cloud environments up close, especially flying through them, can easily become computationally expensive. We will present a new cloud modeling and rendering approach that delivers performant and detailed results at 1080p resolution without the use of temporal upscaling. VisualFX are often synonymous with speed and lighting effects – two things that temporally upscaled clouds on a budget cannot do easily. We will present a way to mitigate temporal artifacts in fast-moving clouds and a near zero cost method to add internal lighting effects to clouds. Finally, we will explain how these three approaches are integrated and unified into the new Nubis Cloud System. As a bonus, we will offer a look at some future work.
[ RTR Advances | PDF (50mb) | PPTX (1.4gb) | PPTX (6.5gb) ]
The Real-time Volumetric Superstorms of Horizon Forbidden West (GDC 2022 Talk)
[ GDC VAULT VIDEO | GDC VAULT PDF ]
Nubis: Real-time Volumetric Cloudscapes in a Nutshell (Eurographics 2018 Talk)
This talk is a distillation of all of the previous publications about our cloud system, Nubis. Its purpose is to make the concepts behind our approach more accessible and to give the reader some insight into our process at Guerrilla. This was originally presented at the 2018 Eurographics Conference in Delft, The Netherlands on April 19, 2018.
Nubis: Authoring Real-Time Volumetric Cloudscapes with the Decima Engine (SIGGRAPH 2017 Course - Advances in Real-time Rendering in Games)
In the 2015 Advances in Real-Time Rendering Course, we presented a prototype solution for real-time volumetric cloudscapes which produced a variety of cloud types in various lighting conditions and rendered in under 2 milliseconds on the PlayStation 4. However, many practical challenges remained in the way of it becoming a successful production tool for use in our game Horizon: Zero Dawn: authoring cloudscapes on a regional scale, animation and transitions, integration into our atmospheric system, further optimization to pay for these new features, and the task of creating a language and long term plan for what we want to achieve in the context of our game engine, Decima. Nubis is our solution to these challenges. This talk will explain how and why the Nubis system works and highlight some advances beyond the prototype that we presented in 2015, including changes to the lighting model. In addition, we will go a bit more in-depth for several topics that have garnered interest in the development community, namely Perlin-Worley noise generation and our weather simulation. Finally, we will offer a quick look ahead to where we are going next with Nubis.
Real-Time Volumetric Cloudscapes for Games (GPU Pro 7 Article: pp 76-112)
The Real-Time Volumetric Cloudscapes of Horizon: Zero Dawn (SIGGRAPH 2015 Course - Advances in Real-time Rendering in Games)
Real-time volumetric clouds in games usually pay for fast performance with a reduction in quality. The most successful approaches are limited to low altitude fluffy and translucent stratus-type clouds. For Horizon: Zero Dawn, Guerrilla need a solution that can fill a sky with evolving and realistic results that closely match highly detailed reference images which represent high altitude cirrus clouds and all of the major low level cloud types, including thick billowy cumulus clouds. 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.
Crafting the Vision Effect: An Interactive Particle-Based Hologram for Epic (SIGGRAPH 2013 Talk)
For one sequence in the movie Epic, we created the illusion of millions of dust particles suspended in mid-air, which represented a scene from earlier in the film. This presented four major challenges. First, the hologram had to represent a scene filled with characters and plant life, so we would have to sample surface and shading data from render time procedural geometry. Second, it needed to exist in the form of millions of dust particles which interacted with the motion of a character who walks through the hologram. Third, because Epic is a stereoscopic movie, the hologram had to fill interior regions of our character and set models that are modeled as empty space. Finally, we needed to render and composite these particles in a way that captured the detail of a characters face, and reinforce the scale of the Leafmen world.
A World of Voxels: The Volumetric Effects of Ice Age: Continental Drift (SIGGRAPH 2012 Talk)
The volumetric effects for the movie Ice Age: Continental Drift, presented us with three major challenges. The first challenge was to develop efficient techniques for a variety of weather and destruction effects, such as waterspouts, cloud vorticies, large scale splashes of vaporized water, rolling dust clouds, and dust to go along with rigid body destruction simulations. The second challenge was to improve the capabilities of our renderer so that we could intersect multiple voxel volumes composed of different participating media (e.g., dust, mist, cloud). Finally, we had to do all of this while keeping render times around two hours and RAM usage less than 8 GB on a single thread.
Clouds in the Skies of Rio: A Raytraced Volumetric Cloud Solution (SIGGRAPH 2011 Talk)
We faced four major challenges when creating the clouds and skies in Rio. The first challenge was making volumetric clouds that could be rendered in stereo. Previous approaches involved matte paintings and 2D cards, which lacked parallax and could not be lit correctly. The second challenge was creating an efficient workflow to quickly place clouds into lots of scenes. The third challenge, was producing highly-detailed clouds when they got close to camera. And the last major challenge was finding a way to efficiently ray trace all the clouds while keeping the memory footprint small and the render times short.
/ Gallery
/ Contact
E-Mail: andrew@schneidervfx.com
Twitter: @vonschneidz
Mastodon: @AndrewSchneider@mastodon.gamedev.place
LinkedIn: schneidervfx