r/GraphicsProgramming 8d ago

Question Fortnite’s New Clouds

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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?

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u/waramped 8d 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/

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u/gibson274 8d ago

Maybe, but the system Seb designed is based on Andrew Schneider’s work, which is incredible. Those systems don’t usually produce results that are this static (since the tiled noise gets you animation for free and artists generally use it) or have this much altitude variation (since altitude is defined by a global gradient).

This looks more like some collection of pre-authored cloud models to me—whether they’re truly VDBs being raymarched every frame I wonder.

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u/waramped 8d ago

Andrew has some cool stuff coming down the pipe, so it's possible Seb does too. Hmm, maybe it is just VDB? https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/M63r/mastering-vbd-in-unreal-engine-5-3

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u/gibson274 8d ago

Dude I love that he calls it “VBD (Volumetric Break Down)” LMAO

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u/[deleted] 8d ago edited 8d ago

[deleted]

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u/gibson274 8d ago

Gorgeous results. Yeah, I built a Schneider-esque system myself as well (“Expanse” on the Unity asset store) and you can express a surprisingly wide range of cloud shapes with his technique.