A new video from Ubisoft explains some of the improvements to its Snowdrop engine for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. The Snowdrop engine was first utilized in 2016’s Tom Clancy’s The Division, and has since been used in other Ubisoft releases such as South Park: The Fractured but Whole and Tom Clancy’s The Division 2.
Back in February, it was revealed that Ubisoft’s upcoming, open-world Star Wars game will also utilize the Snowdrop engine, which has been proven to be quite flexible. Both of the Tom Clancy’s The Division games were praised for their large, all-encompassing open worlds, which is made possible by the many features provided by the Snowdrop engine. Some of those features include a realistic day/night cycle, photorealistic lighting, procedural destruction, and various particle and shader effects. With Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora being set in the fantastical Avatar universe, Ubisoft has shared some of the ways it has improved and used the engine.
A new video posted to Ubisoft’s YouTube channel features interviews and behind the scenes looks at what the team has come up with. Technical Art Director Sebastian Lindoff opens the video by saying, “As the world of Avatar is so different from anything we’d done before, we had to do some major upgrades and big improvements to our engine.” Senior Technical Artist Kunal Luthra says that by using this improved Snowdrop, the team at Massive Entertainment can, “propagate thousands of assets in one frame,” allowing for far more detailed and realistic depictions of the open-world of Pandora for players to explore.
Luthra also mentions that using Snowdrop also allows his team to create more complex shaders that players can use to add more life to the foliage on Pandora. Further pros provided by Snowdrop range from, “real-time wind simulations and interactions to intelligent plants reacting to your presence.” Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will also utilize Snowdrop’s ability for ray tracing to, “have real light reflect from the emission and the bioluminescence coming out from the plants.“
The full two-minute video features more upgrades to the Snowdrop engine that the team has found creative ways to use. As stated above, the Snowdrop engine already gave developers the tools to give games a realistic, cinematic feel, which works really well for a game based on a movie. But now, by evolving the engine, Massive Entertainment has been able to push the boundaries even further for the open-world Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
Considering Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora originally was not a Ubisoft game, it feels the developers are pulling out all the stops to make sure this game is everything it possibly can be. The original Avatar movie was praised for being such a technological breakthrough, so it is very fitting that Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora would be pushing the limits in a similar way.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will be available for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, Google Stadia, and Amazon Luna.
