Tiny Tina's Wonderlands - The Storm

I was proud to be able to work closely with Adam May's direction to create the dragon lord's magic storm.

As this is a huge asset that is seen from far away, i actually needed to make three different versions of it, all represented here.

The 3D version, as seen from levels near the end of the game, is a collection of a few different cone meshes which each have an instance of the master parameterized with different settings. this is blended into a skybox that has a flow map on itself to match the movement of the uppermost cone, and the cloud textures also have flow on them in addition to the basic UV tricks to get it to rotate. There is a random lightning effect as well as some extra layers to avoid sorting issues where the clouds fall off softly into each other.

The interior is also fairly simple, there is a atmospheric fog effect that simulated dust around the boss arena. The portal at the top is a mock-up of the death tunnel and magic energy is also a simple panning UV trick, with some noise added to help it appear as if it is flowing. The stars are randomized by overlaying two procedural textures which are actually in screen space, which is how we achieve the effect of twinkling as the player looks around the interior of the portal.

Finally, The vista version is simply a card with a flow map and some tricks to get the lighting to influence it with the same HDR as the sky to ground it better. The flow maps for these stages was created in Houdini off of a very nice painting Lucas did for us. I especially liked how the third stage turned out, pictured here.