How did they do the Elite: Dangerous powerplay map influence effect?

I figured I'd create a separate topic for this question as it's not really anything to do with my black and white thread. Does anyone have any idea how you would implement the effect shown where you have blobs of influence shown where there are no overlapping lines of any kind?

I think I'm most obsessed now with learning how to achieve this effect as it looks so damn good the closest thing I could think of is maybe metaballs but somehow with how smooth it all is I don't think they've done that.

 

Hi @Lethn

Couldn't code such a thing, but it looks like it could be points in grid, like voxels, where you have influence, value get set, maybe based on your power or whatever that game uses.

Then the voxel cells get a blob when its rendered, and like many marching cubes kind of setup, these smooth/melt together when there are cells in more than one or two directions set. You can see those diagonal, two separate blobs in one part of video, and bigger blobs where there are solid areas of set points. Also, some blobs seem to be set to different sizes. To not have overlaps, different factions/owners have their own ids, and blobs of different ids only merge/melt between themselves.

Those blobs are probably aligned to grid too, camera angle and FOV just make it harder to detect in this video. Then they have added some noise on top of those perfect shapes to break profiles, and then a rim / Fresnel shader.

Something like that, I didn't google maybe there are some articles about this.

 

Thank you, that's something I'll definitely check out, now that you mention it voxels make perfect sense and then the voxels generated would simply have a transparent material and use the empties for position coordinates.