Ocean Quigley, Spore’s Art Director posted a fairly new blogpost about the design of the atmospheres for the various planets in Spore. Have a read below!
Here’s a prototyping video I did while designing Spore’s planetary atmospherics.
I’ve written about them before, but in a nutshell, the atmosphere needed to be soft and diffuse when seen from above, but make for pretty skies when seen from below.
And the system had to be continuous, so that a zoom would seamlessly take you from the surface looking up at the sky, to orbit looking down at a thin layer of air.This was a pretty successful mockup.
It only addresses atmospherics and the interaction of atmosphere with the sun, background and camera. Everything else is abstracted away (and kind of ugly). It’s only trying to address a narrow set of problems, and as a result, represents a pretty clear design.
I had talked to the engineers to get a sense of what the capabilities of our engine were. So in creating this animation (within those constraints!) I’d represented an approach that we could use for the game.
And here are a few screenshots from the Spore itself, showing how it looked once we had the whole system working.
