After looking at Spore’s Cell Stage visuals, I’ve recently been experimenting with distortion shaders applied on Thrive’s backgrounds:
https://imgur.com/a/e3YNgIi
https://imgur.com/a/wJGBgQx
And I think they produce a great result.
I wanted to note a few things, both on the distortion, and for some additional effects we could look at - starting with notes on the distortion effect itself.
First, if such a feature was implemented, I think it would be ideal to have the option to vary distortion across patches. You can see in the tidepools, which already has some visual clarity problems, that clouds could be hard to distinguish during the day. And also, being able to alter distortion between patches can create the impression of faster flowing water in certain areas, which would be nice in patches such as the epipelagic.
Second, in some patches, it does seem clear in some areas of the parallax that it is bubbles being visually warped; we might want to disable some layers in patches with a lot of previously static bubbles.
Effects
Looking at the Cell Stage visuals in Spore, distortion is used with other things to create a nice, underwater impression.
- There is blurring of elements which make it harder to understand exactly what is going on behind you, creating a sense of being miniscule. Besides in-game objects you can interact with being layered backwards, objects in the background are also large to the point of not being clear. For example, in the first few growth stages (2:00 in the video), which has the most apparent background in any stage, even the crystal structures of the asteroid are pretty blurred.
- Waves appear to be largely conveyed via particles - if there are currents, they are conveyed by numerous short-lived particles floating in the same direction rather than a traditional, lineated wave (look around 8:00 in the video.)
- Alongside the main background distortion, some smaller scale distortion is applied behind Spore cells to convey the fact that these foreground elements are also in a fluid. This is more obvious around 2:00.
Now for a of where we should try to diverge from Spore’s background. Spore uses things like bubbles a lot. Though they are visually appealing, bubbles technically aren’t very feasible at extremely microscopic scales because of surface tension. If that is an area where we are willing to alter realism a bit for the sake of aesthetics, I’m not entirely against it - but it just goes to show that bubbles aren’t necessary.
Shifting Light Gradients
One other thing which we can include that could spruce up the backgrounds. In Spore, there appears to be fluctuations of light in the background which are largely random (visual around 6:40 in the video). I wonder if we can apply a noise texture and have denser areas of the noise slightly lighten the background. Though the noise itself should be rough enough to result in pretty large areas of the background being lightened at once. That is something I can try to do, but I don’t think I’d make it look good.
Long story short: there are ways to spruce up visuals that don’t necessarily include light sources that constantly shift, such as is seen in Uniow’s concept post.