The Witcher 3 Has Realistic Sky And Clouds
The flood of information about The Witcher 3 hasn’t stopped yet. We just spotted an interesting interview published on RPGSite, with CD Projekt Red‘s Senior Visual Effects Artist Jose Teixeria who talked mainly about his primary area of work on the game, confessing that the sky is the single visual aspect he’s most proud of in The Witcher 3.
Yes. I can even tell you! It’s the sky. It doesn’t sound very exciting, unfortunately, but we’re trying to make clouds. The sky is always above you, it’s always something you pay some attention to… so I’ve tried to make these really nice clouds that react to the sun direction, to the changes in weather and so on.
Hopefully, if that goes well, it should paint a very nice picture, especially when you’re looking at a large landscape with the sky above.
This isn’t a skybox. It’s not as close to real-time clouds as we’d like because of performance, of course, but we’re really trying to take it one step further. None of this rotating skybox, an image that moves.
It’s one of the things that I’m always disappointed in. I love open world games, but one thing you see a lot of now, on YouTube and such, are in-game time lapses. It all looks so great… but then you see a rotating cloud texture. It ruins the immersion! If I cover the sky, everything down looks amazing. It always strikes me!
In The Witcher, Geralt can meditate to pass time, and in that, you see a time lapse, the sky moving. Initially it was that rotating texture, but it was really in your face. I said no, no, we’ve got to make something better than this. I’m going to make sure that we have a nice panning sky that actually travels. The sky composes the image, in an artistic sense.
As you can see in the featured image, the sky and clouds look great indeed, but there’s plenty of visual splendor overall in the game - it’s not that surprising, then, to learn that over 100 members of the studio are working on visuals alone, more than half of the entire team (which is somewhere around 200 right now).
Certainly over 100… probably slightly over 100 on visuals, but… hmm, that’s tricky, because then we have the story team, the concept art team and so on… It gets pretty big!
The wait is still long, with the release date set for 24th February 2015, but if you’re a fan of roleplaying games there’s plenty to tide you over this year.