The Technical art behind Journey

fire67

Hi,

I just discovered the game Journey and I found it very beautiful.
I am a developer and I am very interested in art and technical art, that's why I am posting here.

I found some explanations of those effects and I want to share with you what I found and of course I would like to better understand those technics.

Document: Sand Rendering in Journey
Link: Talk to me about the sand

Sand Shading
The effects used for rendering sand are detailed in the document but it is divided in 6 parts:
- Sharpened Mipmaps
- Anisotropic Masking
- Glitter Specular
- Ocean Specular
- Diffuse contrast
- Detail Heightmap

Character Shading
The cloth shader seems to be close to the sand shader. It uses an Oren-Nayar model.

Sand Wave effect
The sand is composed of 3 heightmaps:
- One for the terrain generation with a B-Spline interpolation on generation.
- One with tiny ripples used for the wind and the journeyers' trails.
- One with the "sand waves".

The effect is very interesting. And I have some difficulties to understand it.
How do they blend the three heightmaps? How do they make the trails ? Do they simply draw in the heightmap texture ?
It seems to be a mesh deformation and not any normal trick, so how do they change the geometry ? Is it some sort of tessellation ?

Cloth simulation
For the moment I have no precision concerning the cloth simulation but I suppose that there is no particular trick behind it. It's just a simple realtime cloth simulation.

Thanks a lot.

fire67

Yes sorry it's the same document. Yes, know this blog it's fantastic. I've made a request for this game. It could be cool to analyze this.