#its not Just sdf based though only the terrain and clouds

[bobacupcake]

Not sure if it is anything special but I love love the style of journey and sky children of the light, do they use any shaders in specific?

did a pretty deep dive into the sparkly sand of journey but hooo boy sky children of the light

this is my shader white whale . some day i want to know how they do this. holding out for their incredibly talented graphics engineer john edwards to do a gdc talk or something on them like he did for the sand in journey. this game runs on phones!!!! its a mobile game!!!!!!!!

all i know is that journey uses something called "blobs" to do the terrain and clouds , which i imagine is some kind of SDF/voxel rendering, meaning instead of making a sphere out of triangles/quads like most games do, they would just say "hey, put a sphere here" and it is a perfect sphere because you can use math to find where the sphere starts/stops.. like here's a simplified example in 2d, where the left is what most render engines do building things out of triangles/quads (or in this case lines), and right, what sdf engines do

so anyways having these things be SDF lets you do a ton of stuff you wouldnt be able to do like smooth noise displacement and fancy lighting calculations (though i imagine a lot of the lighting is baked ahead of time. this game runs on a phone !!!!! but also this game has a day/night/weather cycle so actually it might be realtime ?!?) if it is run ahead of time the lighting setup is probably run in a very similar way to how Actual clouds are rendered and mapped to the clouds in some way (through a texture? through the vertex color? this thing is a SDF does it even have vertex colors? maybe a point cloud generated from the SDF?) and if its realtime. then they either found a very fast way to do that lighting calculation with the SDFs or they found something that approximates it very well

and then for the surface of the clouds.. my best guesses is they are using a noise to wiggle around the surface of the SDF in a way that makes it look all fluffy and cloudy, or they are using some kind of particle system to add extra little bits of SDF to the surface of the clouds. or both!!! maybe they do one for close-up and one for far.. i dont know!!! i want to learn so bad though. it is such a pretty game