Forza Horizon 2 on the horizon! [XO,X360]
- Thread starter Cyan
- Start date
As the sun.
even with the sun moving the shadows should follow the path of the clouds
like here, clouds do not move in the same direction as the sun but the shadows follow the movement of the clouds.
http://a.pomf.se/vnqeet.gif
but i presume the clouds in FH2 are just part of the skybox and not moving in a 3D space, so you can't project their shadows in the ground.
like here, clouds do not move in the same direction as the sun but the shadows follow the movement of the clouds.
http://a.pomf.se/vnqeet.gif
but i presume the clouds in FH2 are just part of the skybox and not moving in a 3D space, so you can't project their shadows in the ground.
L. Scofield
Veteran
Another time lapse could solve the mystery.
The shadows should mirror the movement of the clouds. If the clouds move 50 mph from east to west, the shadows should also move 50 mph from east to west. There's no optical arrangement by which objects moving in front of a light cast shadows that don't move in the same direction; at least not without lenses/prisms!Well, not exactly. Position and motion of light sources matters; if the Sun was rotating around the Earth (taking our scene to be "static") once every few seconds, the motion of clouds would obviously have only a minority impact on the velocity of shadow boundaries.
The important point is that that's not what's happening... Not only would the magnitude of effect be wrong, but Sun motion should be having a front-to-back impact on cloud shadow motion, not back-to-front.
Clouds are moving from left to right and the sun is moving from the inside of the screen (distance) toward the outside of it (toward the car), they are vertically moving compared to each other. So, it should be hard to see their relation correctly especially when we can't see the sun in the movie. Also i think that clouds speed is lower than sun in some points. Trust me.
But we can see the Sun in the movie, to an extent. We can see it rise in the mornings, so we have some vague sense of its path across the sky. And we can see the way the car's shadow moves due to the motion of the Sun.Clouds are moving from left to right and the sun is moving from inside the screen (distance) outside of it (toward the car), they are vertically moving compared to each other. So, it should be hard see their relation correctly especially when we can't see the sun in the movie. Trust me.
The Sun's motion should NOT be giving cloud shadows a far-to-near motion.
That's the opposite of how it should work. If the sun is moving back-to-front, the component of shadow motion due to sun motion should be front-to-back. Look:
Last edited by a moderator:
We have a perfect reference for the sun's movement and position and that's the car shadow. If the clouds were stationary, their movement would be from near to far as per the car's shadow. We also have the sun's position in the second part of the vid, where we can see the motion path it'd have tracked on the first day. If the clouds were stationary, they should have moved from bottom to top given the direction of the sun's movement.Clouds are moving from left to right and the sun is moving from the inside of the screen (distance) toward the outside of it (toward the car), they are vertically moving compared to each other. So, it should be hard to see their relation correctly especially when we can't see the sun in the movie. Also i think that clouds speed is lower than sun in some points. Trust me.
But we can see the Sun in the movie, to an extent. We can see it rise in the mornings, so we have some vague sense of its path across the sky. And we can see the way the car's shadow moves due to the motion of the Sun.
The Sun's motion should NOT be giving cloud shadows a far-to-near motion.
That's the opposite of how it should work. If the sun is moving back-to-front, the component of shadow motion due to sun motion should be front-to-back. Look:
When I said "as the sun" I was trying to say that the sun is moving in correct direction compared to the clouds (just like what you are saying).
This is the best example that I found in the video:
We can't see all of the clouds in the sky (as the sun) and their directions.
Most of these games don't really have a real direction at which the clouds are moving to, and I believe that's the case with FH2. They just have a dynamic skybox that rotates around the world to create some motion. In that sence all clouds are pretty much just circling around the camera. Now if cloud shadows did just circle like that it would definetly look much more odd.
I'm not at all convinced that the shadow is cast from that cloud. The cloud is moving in a very left-to-right way, and the component of shadow movement due to sun movement should be going away from us, but it feels like the shadow is coming straight toward us right up until it disappears.When I said "as the sun" I was trying to say that the sun is moving in correct direction compared to the clouds (just like what you are saying).
This is the best example that I found in the video:
You can make that argument on that freeze-frame, but not the video in motion. ALL the clouds are moving left to right. ALL the cloud shadows are moving back to front (top to bottom). The car shadow, in relation to the sun's movement, is moving front to back. There's zero correlation between sun's movements and cloud movement. At best, the clouds should be tracking a slight diagonal path as they move due to wind and the as the sun slowly moves changing projection direction.
It could just be something a little odd like the shadow texture has been 'turned' 90 degrees (swapping U and V coords over).
I'm fairly positive that clouds lighting/shadows are not built into FH2. From a development standpoint I don't see the value of putting your budget there. For open world where you can drive everywhere are everything with huge fields I can only see this as a massive drain on available resources to really make this work. This is probably less of a drain where viewpoints are controlled.
Though in the future maybe something like this can be handled by remote processing?
Though in the future maybe something like this can be handled by remote processing?
I feel like Roger Rabbit trying to resist making the obvious cloud joke here.
http://i6.minus.com/ibr2hRdNdrQD7y.png
https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5600/15438328791_effe4d9cc1_o.jpg
photomode models have a higher polycount, i wonder if they are using the same models as in forza 5 or if they tweaked them a bit, i could not find an ingame picture of the 458 in forza 5.
They might be using forza 4 autovista models but with way better material shaders.
https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5600/15438328791_effe4d9cc1_o.jpg
photomode models have a higher polycount, i wonder if they are using the same models as in forza 5 or if they tweaked them a bit, i could not find an ingame picture of the 458 in forza 5.
They might be using forza 4 autovista models but with way better material shaders.
You can make that argument on that freeze-frame, but not the video in motion. ALL the clouds are moving left to right. ALL the cloud shadows are moving back to front (top to bottom). The car shadow, in relation to the sun's movement, is moving front to back. There's zero correlation between sun's movements and cloud movement. At best, the clouds should be tracking a slight diagonal path as they move due to wind and the as the sun slowly moves changing projection direction.
It could just be something a little odd like the shadow texture has been 'turned' 90 degrees (swapping U and V coords over).
My last thought is that the sky-box is actually a rotating hemisphere with dynamic cloud creation (just like what milk said) and the sun is moving on arc-shaped path (if you consider the shadow of the car that revolves around it, you may be agree with me). So at that specific moment the cloud and sun are rotating/moving alongside each other in the same direction, so shadows are going from right to left (compered to the clouds) and toward the car.
You can watch this video which the sun position is perpendicular to the clouds and the shadows are moving in the direction of the clouds (from 2:30 to 3:10).
Not as trivial as you think if in fact all they just have is a rotating skybox. It can be easily tested by booting the game and rotating the camera at the speed of the clouds to see if at any point they get to be coming toward or away from the camera instead of just moving sideways. I´d do that myself if the demo did not have that long unskippable introductory video, and really, I´m pretty sure they just have a damn rotating skybox.
In that case, the fake cloud shadows can´t ever seem to move in tandem with the sky clouds at all angles, unless their movement is also camera-direction dependent, which I believe would look much more jarring and distracting. As it is, they will animate correctly when the camera is facing the magic angl in wich both unrelated movements match up.
Driveclub, on the other hand, has an actual volumetric sheet of clouds, but without a ps4 I haven´t seen it in person. It would be more feaseble for them to have geometrically correct cloud shadows there, if they don´t already, but still, its not like shadowing of volumetric semi-transparent objects in real time is easy as pie currently. Specially in large volumes...
For the sake of another example, GTAV and Red Dead had a mixture of both aproaches. They did not have a fully volumetric cloud system, but they had a cloud "ceiling" surface in adition to their dynamic skybox to add some extra 3-dimentionality to their skyes. That ceiling was just a flat sheet though, but didn´t look such obviously so most of the time thanks to its dynamic lighting. I don´t know how they handled cloud shadows though, but using the same texture of that sheet to shadow the environment is not that hard to implement on that case, but still could not be worth the run-time cost compared to just using some generic tileable texture considering how few people would spot the difference. Matching the general direction at least, should not be difficult in those games though, so Yay! I guess...