Mini Dev Log: New backdrop and volumetric lighting (Patreon)

Hello all,

Wanted to try make more frequent and shorter dev logs so today I'll be focusing on our new city backdrop and volumetric lighting that I'm excited to show you.

When we posted our last dev log the very kind (and very talented artist) Doomfest pointed out that a lot of cyberpunk settings have an anamorphic lens effect that elongates the horizontal bloom which I wasn't taking into account. 

Here's an example of anamorphic effect on a light and lens flare, see how its stretched horizontally? That's what i'm looking for.

As you can see the light simply blooms over Eri but doesn't elongate, pretty cool but we can do better.

After applying the anamorphic effect you can see more cool looking impact on shooting.

Way too intense lighting to test the anamorphic effect but you get the point.

I was also thinking that the background is too static, it looks like a picture (which it is) so we went to work on cutting it out and presenting a parallax effect which I was pretty happy with. I started work on re-implementing the lights for this "Intruder Alert" room type also.

I reimplemented the intruder alert effect from the launch prototype, which its lighting now hits the floor unlike the prototype which I was happy with. It was at this point I realized that the light doesn't really have an impact that I wanted. Most game lighting is set up like real life where a light is only really visible on what it casts on and not in the air. The cyberpunk genre is pretty gritty and dirty a lot of the time, if we take a look at Blade Runner 2049 as an example we have a lot of dust and smoke and particles in the air which create atmospheric scenes.

Our concept art has also been refined since then, while we had a greenish tint to our world before we're opting for a cooler more vibrant pink-fuschia-red-orange-purple world which I had to take into account, here's a little slice of some world building concept art we'll release to Patrons in the future after more polish:

With all this in mind I set out to add volumetric lighting to achieve this, at the same time I switched from 2D cutouts of buildings to actual 3D buildings with lights and activity, random events which I will work on more in the future. Unfortunately I didn't screen record a lot of this work as I got too into it and I wasn't sure it was going to work out! However my current result which I'm pretty pleased with so far is embedded at the top of this post in the video. 

https://youtu.be/cdeHc-XXWSQ

We're working on new environments with these assets now which we will reveal in the future. Also we're actively working on a variety of different rooms which we are not ready to preview. Anyway I hope you enjoyed this little city backdrop preview!