THE ASCENT - Environment Effects
We at Tuatara were also responsible for a part of The Ascent's environment effects, done by Bruno Afonseca and José David Garcia Mora, collaborating with Magnus Larsson and Tor Frick at Neon Giant.
Those effects included ship thrusters, smoke, steam, clouds and rain and they had to be as customizable and flexible as possible, to be reused in different environments.
https://www.artstation.com/bruno
https://www.artstation.com/darkzide
https://www.artstation.com/magnusl3d
https://www.artstation.com/snefer
An usage example of an ambient smoke blueprint.
An in-game example of the previous blueprint.
A thruster blueprint that can be customized and used in different ships and robots.
Gutter, drips and rain puddle effects.
Usage example of a rain puddle blueprint.
We also created a rain system where the raindrops tile around the camera, using only a static mesh and no particles. All the motion is done in the vertex shader.
A secondary mesh can be used for the rain splashes. The splashes check the surface slope and the scene depth, and reposition themselves if they happen to be spawned inside level geometry.
We built several kinds of ambient smoke and steam, that had to feel volumetric and be affected by level lighting.
A mix of opaque, vertex shader based rolling clouds and sprite based clouds used in vistas in later levels in the game.