Another great video to watch which gives us all a great look behind the scenes of Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is The Technical Art of Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. We start out in a wooded area where lighting and clip plane adjustments are covered. Next it's to the top of a tall tower near the human city of Thronefast. This allows a demonstration of the view distance and procedural cloud effects. Next it's time to head to the ground at an arch near the tower to learn more about the processes involved in adding details to objects (grunge, moss, etc) and tools created to help cut down on 'grunt' work. Now it's time to head near a lake to see how lighting, shadow distance and rendering works (using custom shadow programing helps improve performance). Why just look at the lake when you can go for a swim right? Custom coding on water and effects (sub-surface scattering) really look great (and this is in the early stages).
Now it's time to hit some cool looking ruins with mist, background sounds and awesome looking skeletons on patrol! This demonstrates one of the environmental effects called 'gloom'. To wrap up the tour, a visit to a dungeon which was visited a while ago. The team showed off the significant lighting and environmental improvements made to an area around a bridge.
Takeaways from the video:
- Improved lighting effects. Increased intensity, details in shadows, ambient lighting effect.
- Procedural cloud generation looking great.
- Shadow effects significantly improved through in-house created coding.
- Custom code for subsurface scattering and water effects look great and will be rolled out to other surfaces such as grasses, trees, etc.
- Intro to Bruno (Technical Artist)