Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Team Diary

Bethesda Softworks’ official Elder Scrolls website has been updated with a new team diary penned by Oblivion artist Noah Berry. In it, Noah discusses the massive amount of work that went into creating the game’s inviting world. Check it out:

Well now that the tree shapes are established, and our world is looking a little less barren now, what about the greenery, foliage, and the very leaves on the trees themselves? Glancing up at an Earthly forest canopy, we are presented with an amazing array of dense, mottled shapes and complex, overlapping patterns of light and color. Rays of sunlight spill downward, filtering through layers of leaves and needles of varying thickness and weight, while the cell and chlorophyll filled vegetation reacts with and modulates the blanket of the starlight in subtle ways.

This is all well and good in description, or for film and pre-rendering, but real-time graphics of this variety and complexity can bring video cards and GPUs to their very knees. Surely we can’t render each leaf individually as that would be an inordinate strain on the computer, taxing the hardware to its limits. Even the interaction of light and foliage in a real-time environment is beyond our current technological reach. Nevertheless, we’d like to achieve these visual effects.somehow.