Graphical Features of Fallout 4 Creation Engine

Bethesda Games Studios has published an extensive blogpost, detailing all the peculiarities of the latest version of the Creation Engine. This graphical technology is the foundation of the upcoming RPG Fallout 4. The article details all the features of the engine and the tasks that this technology has to solve.

Fallout 4

While developing the latest version of the Creation Engine the tech team had to work closely with the artistic department. The company wanted to make the game as smooth as possible, while maintaining all the latest visual features modern gamers like and expect from an AAA-title.

The first thing we did after Skyrim was to enhance the Creation Engine’s graphical core by adding a physically based deferred renderer. This new renderer allows us to add many more dynamic lights to every scene, and paint our surfaces with realistic materials. We want objects and characters in the world to feel tactile and grounded, and a big part of that is ensuring that these materials are distinct – that metal reflects light in a distinct manner from wood, for example.

As always, our world features fully dynamic time of day and weather. To create that volumetric light spilling across the scene (sometimes called “god rays”) we worked with our friends at NVIDIA, who’ve we worked with dating back to Morrowind’s cutting-edge water. The technique used here runs on the GPU and leverages hardware tessellation. It’s beautiful in motion, and it adds atmospheric depth to the irradiated air of the Wasteland. Like all the other features here, we’ve made it work great regardless of your platform.

When a rain storm rolls in, our new material system allows the surfaces of the world to get wet, and a new cloth simulation system makes cloth, hair, and vegetation blow in the wind.

The player can go anywhere in the world at any time of day, so we added dynamic post-process techniques that enhance the vibrancy and color of our scenery for maximum emotional impact. Our virtual cameras received a major upgrade as well.

Bethesda Game Studios

The latest version of the Creation Engine includes the following features:

• Tiled Deferred Lighting
• Temporal Anti-Aliasing
• Screen Space Reflections
• Bokeh Depth of Field
• Screen Space Ambient Occlusion
• Height Fog
• Motion Blur
• Filmic Tonemapping
• Custom Skin and Hair Shading
• Dynamic Dismemberment using Hardware Tessellation
• Volumetric Lighting
• Gamma Correct Physically Based Shading

On paper it has all the cool visual stuff you’d expect from the modern FPS game. We’ll just have to wait and see the newest Fallout in action. Let’s hope the cool lighting effects and new shaders will make the game look much better. So far, the few lucky people, who played Fallout 4, praise the animation of NPCs and characters.

Source: bethesda.net