How Forza Horizon 3 became the most beautiful game on Xbox.
In the age of photorealism, developer Playground Games used intricate HD sky footage and ‘sub-pixel’-detail car models to raise the bar on authenticity.
Last October, video game developer Playground Games sent six staff members from its studio in Leamington Spa to a tiny town 120 miles south-west of Sydney called Braidwood, New South Wales. Armed with a custom built 12K-resolution camera worth tens of thousands of pounds, they weren’t there to capture the scenery or film movie sequences with a cast of actors. They were there to record the sky.
Released in September, Forza Horizon 3 is widely credited as one of the most visually impressive console games ever made. A driving simulation based in and around a fictitious car festival, the game gives players hundreds of miles of accurately modelled Australian scenery to explore, from dense rain forests to sun-bleached outback wastelands.
There are races to enter, challenges to attempt and hundreds of new vehicles to unlock, but it’s the developer’s obsession with detail that has really stood out. The game provides a neat indication of where real-world simulation is heading in this ever-more graphically ambitious industry. And it all starts with those skies.
If you’ve played Forza Horizon 3, you will have noticed them: dramatic, ever-changing panoramas of cloud, punctured by light rays and accompanied by evolving weather patterns.
For the previous game in the series, Playground did what most studios do: they created a bunch of cloud models, then lit and rotated in them in various ways to suggest a seemingly changeable skyscape. For the third title though, the art team had a new idea: what about taking a high resolution camera, pointing it at the sky and capturing the whole expanse over many hours, as a detailed time-lapse sequence.
For a while, it was just that – a crazy idea. Until they tried it.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/18/forza-horizon-3-game-perfect-skies-photorealism-detail
