Shadow of the Tomb Raider teases pretty fire and water effects

Shadow of the Tomb Raider looks to be Lara's darkest, deadliest and stealthiest outing yet. Tom was disappointed with an early build back in April, but I'm impressed with how its fire, water and smoke effects are shaping up today. These are all outlined in the game's latest dev-led short.

The following is part of a series, which has so far covered things like cinematic direction, lighting and concept art. Here's Eidos Montreal technical artist Martin Palko with a behind-the-scenes look at Shadow of the Tomb Raider's visual effects.

"One of our main goals is to be realistic," says Palko there, "and we use a lot of real world physical formulas in the game. For the fire, we actually measure the temperature of the flame and generate the colour based on that.

"There's a scene where Lara's wading through a pool of water that has oil floating on the surface. We did a lot of work to make that oil very believable, including the sheen and the colour separation on the top of it."

I'm a sucker for the best water in PC games, and am therefore impressed by all of the above. Perhaps we'll see some more of it in motion during Shadow of the Tomb Raider's E3 gameplay reveal next week.

Check out Shadow of the Tomb Raider's Meet the Team series in full this-a-way.