In the dev diaries dedicated to Forza Horizon five, talked about the process of creating a photorealistic sky for the new part of the series.
To collect the material, the studio brought to Mexico an improved rig of three chambers, which were also used to create the third and fourth parts. With their help, every 30 seconds, they captured the sky and combined the resulting images into one image with a resolution of 12K. Thus, the developers filmed about 400 hours, fixing the heavens not only in different weather conditions, but also in different natural conditions.
These developments are enough to create about 2000 sky presets in the game. For comparison, the fourth Forza Horizon had only 300 of these sets. At the same time, the developers especially emphasize that weather effects will now be generated not only around the player, as it was before, but also at long distances. In other words, if somewhere on the horizon you notice a storm gaining strength, then it will be quite realistic to get to it and drive it in bad weather.
Interestingly, all the photos took up almost 75 TB of hard drives. In order not to waste time on transferring such amount of data over the Internet, data from Mexico to England was sent on physical media.
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