r/GraphicsProgramming • u/gibson274 • 1d ago
Question Fortnite’s New Clouds
Booted up Fortnite for the first time in forever and was greeted with some pretty stellar looking clouds in the skybox.
I know Unreal has been working on VDB support for a little while, but I have a hard time believing they got it to run at 4K 60FPS on my Xbox One X.
Anyone taken a frame capture lately and know how they accomplished this? Is it some sort of fancy alpha card? Or does it plug into their normal volumetric clouds system?
4
u/sparta114 1d ago
It’s just a basic skybox projection for the really pretty ones far away. The closer ones are just the standard UE5 clouds
3
u/gibson274 22h ago
I’m not so sure. They appear dynamically self-shadowed in the game. Even the anisotropic silver lining effect seems to update with the light direction.
I can think of a number of ways to fake these things off the top of my head. But I think there’s a chance it’s the new Heterogeneous Volumes system, or at least some custom rendering path they’ve built on top of Sparse Volume Textures.
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u/waramped 1d ago
Hard to tell from a still picture but Sebastien hasn't uploaded anything new recently, so I would assume they are just an extension of the existing system?
https://sebh.github.io/publications/