Bio
Andrew Schneider is the Atmospherics Lead at Guerrilla. He spends his time developing the Nubis volumetric cloud system and driving cohesive solutions for all atmospherics in the Horizon franchise games. He has presented three talks about real-time cloud rendering in the Advances in Real Time Rendering Course and three SIGGRAPH talks before this on cloud and volumetric rendering for feature animation.
Description
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.
