75TB of Photos Required to Make Realistic Skies in Forza Horizon 5

Forza fans will agree that the game prides itself on realism. Well, the devs have taken it to the next level with the upcoming Forza Horizon 5. The game’s art team has revealed that they had to take over 75TB worth of photos and physically ship the hard drives back to the UK, just for the most realistic in-game skies possible.

Playground Games elaborated on the dynamic weather system during a video blog on the studio’s official YouTube channel and how it required a massive amount of photos to ensure that the skies were as photorealistic as possible.

According to the devs, the team had to use a rig of three high-resolution cameras set up to take 12K (resolution, not quantity) images of the sky every thirty seconds.

This resulted in over 400 hours of photos and a whopping 75TB worth of data. Now, this can’t exactly be attached in an email, so the hard drives had to be physically shipped to Playground Games’ studio in the UK.

Lukas Koelz, the Lead Lighting Artist, explained the improvements of the weather system in Forza Horizon 4 is one of the significant factors on why so many photos had to be taken.

When the user creates a custom race they can choose to race at midday [when it’s] rainy, for example, or during a clear sunset. In Horizon 4 the system would then pick one preset from our skies to give them their selection, and we had about 300 of them. This time we have over 2000, so there’s quite a lot more variety.

Lukas Koelz

Forza Horizon 5 was announced earlier this month and is set to take racing fans to Mexico. Mike Brown, Creative Director, went on record to say that Forza Horizon 5 will be “the most fun and accessible” Horizon game yet, and is also aiming to be the biggest Horizon game to date.

The map will be one-and-a-half times bigger than the previous game and will feature a diverse range of seasonal weather.

Forza Horizon 5 is launching on the 9^th of November, 2021, and will be available on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X. It will also be available to download through Xbox Game Pass upon its release.

About Forza Horizon 4

Forza Horizon 4, a 2018 racing video game published by Microsoft Studios and developed by Playground Games was released on 2 October 2018 for Xbox One and Microsoft Windows after being initially announced at Xbox’s E3 2018 conference.

The game takes place around a fictionalized representation of Great Britain.