April, 2009

My final task on the quest for wet weather was figuring out what to do with the road surface. When roads get wet, they become reflective. It was particularly important to reflect the bikes, because we disabled shadows during wet races. Without either...

In videos of real life rainy MotoGP races, one of the most dramatic visual effects is when raindrops land on the camera lens. We wanted to recreate this in our game, so we needed to understand what happens when light passes through a raindrop. Had we...

If you've been following my series of posts about wet weather effects in MotoGP, you may have noticed we had a habit of abusing the fog settings to create other effects . Ok, this is the last time, I promise :-) The artists designated a couple of the...

When a bike races over a wet surface, its rear wheel sends a lot of water flying backward. Most goes up into the air as spray, but some shoots sideways across the road, creating a visible wake. The spray part was easy. We had an efficient particle system...

To make a MotoGP track look wet , our first task was to desaturate the colors, reduce the contrast, and soften the shadows. Remember how we abused the fog settings to implement fake HDR ? We reused the same idea here: Create a separate rainy sky texture...

Of all the work I did on MotoGP, I think I am most proud of the wet weather effects. Official Xbox Magazine were kind enough to call it "The World's Best Rain Effect (TM)" . What can I say. I grew up in England, and now live in Seattle. I know...