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The Real-Time Volumetric Cloudscapes of Horizon Zero Dawn

Talk Advanced

Andrew Schneider, Nathan Vos

Proposed by Egor Nikolaev

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Description

Andrew Schneider and Nathan Vos's SIGGRAPH 2015 Advances in Real-Time Rendering talk introducing Nubis, Guerrilla Games' procedural volumetric cloud system for the Decima engine. The slide deck documents the prototype that replaced Killzone-era billboard skies for Horizon's open-world, time-of-day environment.

Schneider explains why asset-based domes failed, then details a ray-marched shader using 3D Perlin-Worley noise, vertical profiles, and coverage maps for stratus, cumulus, cirrus, and cumulonimbus layers. The talk covers phase-function lighting, adaptive march steps, and half-resolution upscaling that cut cost from roughly 20 ms to about 2 ms on PlayStation 4.

Advanced graphics programmers familiar with shader volumetrics and ray marching benefit most. The PDF is free on advances.realtimerendering.com in the SIGGRAPH 2015 course archive, with a companion page on Guerrilla Games' site.

A practical case study in procedural skies under a strict millisecond budget. Widely regarded in the graphics programming community as the canonical reference that later volumetric-cloud implementations trace back to.