Hi, Truckers!
It’s the 4th of July, and since our game is set in the United States, it’s only fitting to celebrate this day. But how? With fireworks? No, with something much, much better: the Northern Lights, or Aurora Borealis! It’s also in the sky, it’s colourful, but it lasts longer, and frankly–looks way more impressive. See it for yourself:
Remember Greg, our Tech Specialist and Enviro Artist? We posted an interview with him a few months ago. He’s the one behind making aurora for Alaskan. We really want to show it to you and talk a bit about how we created it.
The so-called northern lights are a mesmerising light show put on by the electrons emitted from sunspots bombarding the upper atmosphere after being guided toward the poles by Earth's magnetic field. When the particles get to the poles, they deposit their energy while interacting with the ionosphere (the aforementioned upper atmosphere) and it causes the fluorescent effect in the sky.
The colours of the aurora depend on the chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere. Each type of molecule or atom produces its own unique colour. For example, oxygen will produce green light, and nitrogen will have a reddish hue.
Before we started working on our aurora, we did some research: we read about what is aurora and when it occurs, we also watched a lot of YouTube videos and browsed google images so hard we started getting ads for tourist trips to see it in real life.
It’s brilliant, isn’t it? Our aurora is a 3D model with an emissive material. It’s also accompanied by a particle effect – if you look close enough you might notice the shooting stars. And it wasn’t that easy to create. We wanted to make it look as close to the real thing as we possibly could, however, it needed to look good in the game, first and foremost. We think we achieved a good balance here.
Where in the game can we see the northern lights? Just like in real life – in the winter and at night. The best spot to watch it is quite close to our base, near the bridge. If you spot it in the sky, we encourage you to take a break, get out of the truck and just admire the view.