Little background story (keeping it short I hope)
I worked as Level Designer at Epic Game on UT2004, than went to school for a while, after that was done, I eventually got to Crystal Dynamics working on TR for 2 years. My Beautiful wife Sharlene Lin got a job down at a vfx company in LA/Santa Monica, lived separate for a year while at Crystal Dynamics to finish up TR. Started applying down at LA studios 3-4 months before the game reached a clear finality. The company I applied to was Naughty Dog I did the Texture artist test while I was in mid crunch, sleeping perhaps 2-3 hrs during the test at midnight or early mornings for 3-4 weeks I remember. It all went pretty well and I am honored I was picked up at Naughty Dog as a Env Texture/Shader Artist, and at the same time I was sad to leave a bunch of my closest friends and colleagues I have had the pleasure of working with at Crystal Dynamics.
The group I worked with in Crystal Dynamics was the Hub team. The core Art consisted of Patrick Sirk, Nicole Tan, and myself. The team either got smaller or larger depending on the time but these were the constants in that team. The team also consisted of four main level designers all different specializations. Ray Yeomans (Technical), Ian Miller (Layout), Nick Eberle (Systems), and Romulo Rodriguez (Combat)
I work on many areas in the game these are the main areas I worked on though, Village Hub, Scavenger Hub, Beach Hub, and Chasm Bridge. Did many more textures and materials than the ones shown here these are just the ones I felt were good to show in this way, others were done via shader and layering of normals and textures to get a surface look... those textures are not very interesting alone. Environment artist that worked side by side with me on these are Patrick Sirk (SR), Nicole Tan, Caleb Strauss, Jericho Green (SR), Osvaldo Villa, and Armando Calpena (SR). We did a good deal of work together and it was loads of fun. Artist in Crystal Dynamics are responsible for Environment Modeling, Lighting, Textures, and Shading; I was involved with all aspects at different times even paper map Designs for Scavenger hub and Beach hub.
Ill post more just have lots of files to go through. Also Since I kind of got out in a rush and moved down to LA I was not able to collect some of my Zbrush files so I really do not have any of those...sniff... Ill see if I can find some, Later ill show what I worked on ND TLOU but that is another thread and later later on.
On to the art
Textures
Looking back at some of the textures from the game I am shocked of how meh some of them are that I made. I have learned so much since first being at Crystal and in the past few months here at NaughtyDog.
Replies
How were the textures done? ZBrush? Photo? A mix? The wood and stone ones are really nice.
Also, congrats on the ND job! :thumbup:
(http://pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/lesson/environments-with-tate-mosesian/)
Fantastic work!, would love to see the Zbrush files if you can find them!
Later ill see if I can post the ND art test since I mentioned it, ill make a general wip or sketchbook style thread for my stuff soonish also.
Oh forgot this shot I had loads of fun building this one room with all the bodies. I actually made the dynamic guys that are hanging too
There's so much style in this, environment are epic, with a great feel of wilderness and hugeness.
I'd love to see your ND art test, and more "behind the scene" stuff!!
oh and btw nice name xD
This is one instance where I wouldn't mind getting confused for someone else =P
edit: nvm, mised the "3-4 months before the game reached a clear" part :P
WarrenM: Thanks, I did too. I actually never saw this game on a pc version till I downloaded it on my pc here. I was actually pretty surprised how it turned out the graphics we did were actually pretty expandable for higher res stuff. Now that I think about it I should have pushed to know more about pc conversion and ask for reverse lods, lods that never appear on console but only on pc, to really give more detail to mountain peaks and such, but it is out nothing can be done now.
travisdreams: We just kept trying to get as much detail as possible. Heavy use of lods in here, and many tricks under the table to get huge vistas with little cost.
jovcem: Everyone worked really hard. The people at Crystal are really passionate.
RogelioD: Wow I thought my name was rare, Thanks
Here is how I did the cobble stone normals out of Maya using procedural noise. below is the written explanation.
This was a test I did at home since I was trying to find fast solutions of acquiring normals. Later on someone saw this texture at work and wanted to use it and it got in.
1-First I modeled all the rocks and placed them so they would tile perfectly on a grid (alike Tate method but in Maya for reference)
2-I setup a camera for a top view with a 2048x2048 pixle resolution and made sure to have the camera resolution gate on to know where to take the snap shot render.
3-before doing the shaders I setup mentalray passes to store a normal pass that is camera based. below is the pass settings. make sure to doc it in associated passes. Plenty of tutorials can explain other passes too depth passes for height maps and all sorts of nifty things. (I found a limitation for the normal pass though you can not use normals or bump texture and have the normals react into the normal pass it will just show geo whatever it is without detail coming from the texture normals, I tried this and I was like damn it to hell!!! If anyone figures it out tell me I tried many things to get it work)
4- make sure to set your rendering settings to production or my fav fine trace.
5- I usually do a render to test it out and than see if the pass worked you can load your pass here in your render view window, it loads it and you can see how it looks.
6- Now that I know the setup is working I move on to building my shader. The shader used for this is a simple displacement shader I mixed a stucco 3d texture and volume noise. This is where it becomes tricky to explain since once you have it setup it is just experimental. Move settings around on both your noise modifiers to get random effects. It is trial and error. You will get some horrible ugly stuff and some random broken stuff and sometimes no effects. this is where I usually tell people go to a displacement tutorial instead of trying to learn it from me... it is simple but also lots of small dials that can affect things.
7- I get the effect I want and I make all my passes in maya and export to photoshop. The awesome part of this is that it is reusable. Say I want to make a different stone texture I just change the models up and place my displacement shader and bam brand new texture.
PROs
-Natural random look
-Can save time if done well
-Reusable
-bake super sharp passes in maya with far less time than x-normal or any bakers... your not baking, your rendering your passes.
-Easier to tile your textures if done correctly
CONs
-Too Random
-Fiddling around too much
-Can not get exactly what you want at times
-Some passes that you would get in zbrush are hard to get here since you might actually need to build a light rig making the time needed to get passes done far too annoying and might actually make it around the same speed of just doing in zbrush. (that is why these are kind of like material rigs you build them and re-use)
-Lose a bit of the artistic hand ( in this case that is what I wanted I hate seeing the trim dynamic tool overused on stone in general looks awesome but it is a tool in zbrush that keeps being abused)
---- here is a thought how about combined these ---
after your done with your displacement you can actually bake out the displacement into your mesh via a Maya tool than you export your high res geo into zbrush and give it that extra love it might need.
Hope this is helpful.
Again I wanted to show a method I used in some textures. I pretty much combine stuff to get the results as quick as possible. I like to experiment. I even did the bean test to get a better understanding of making normals.
http://zarria.net/nrmphoto/nrmphoto.html The normal I did based on real photographs on this actually turned out decent I was all Woohooo about it. I also replicated this test using maya lights on geo... that was super hacky but it still looked like a legit normal and worked.
time to sleep now
Have you used UDK for this game?
Congratulations for the amazing work!
Anty: Thanks. We are using a in house engine the editor is alike UDK I would say better in some ways. As for the cliffs do you mean how I made the texture? or how we built the mountain scape. For mountains modeling it was just poly modeling mostly done in maya, To speed up the process we used many modular mountain shapes than we would collect them into one unique mesh if it needed edits. As for the texture the rock textures we made are made up many tools. Mainly zbrush and Crazybump. No real secret here just sculpting and editing to get the right shapes.
i really enjoyed playing this!
akirasan88: Thanks it was a lot of fun working on this game.
dtschultz: Thanks, I wish we could of spent more time on the textures but overall for what we need to get done I am very proud of the results.
Soon ill post some more stuff just crunching on this end is taking time away, but I will post more and if anyone has a question on something or wants a step by step of a process let me know ill put some time in showing some of the process I went through.
So open door to everyone to pick my mind if you guys want
I really enjoyed the setting, the worth of exploring the environment, the steady drip feed of story and upgrades. It was a brilliant experience for me and trumped games like Halo4 and Bioshock Infinite for example, which while being great experiences and incredibly high quality games, just didnt inspire me to care about their world and fiction.
I haven't enjoyed a games environment this much since Dead Space 2.
i have yet to play the came but I saw some footage of it and it looks even better when everything is in motion!
btw, is that first one a screenshot aswell? cause it looks like a painting, and thta's a compliment!
and if I hade to choose a favroutie, the torri gate with the stairs leading up to it looks amazing, love it!
thanks for charing and the inspiration!
can't wait to see your ND work
This.
There aren't many games that keep me so interested that I want to finish it, and with tomb raider, if I would have had the time, I would probably have finished it in one sitting.
And a lot of time I just had to stop and just stare at the environments ^^
Game is just sitting at my home computer. Need to find some time to play it
LuCh!: I agree this game really thrives in motion we paid a lot of attention in dynamic and general movement in the world, Some areas like the Village hub Night shine way more when your actually playing it. The lightning/light rig that was made was amazingly well thought out and lent it self for optimizations as well. Glad you like the Torri gate scene that is one the art sets to get the feel for the rest of the level when it came to organics and human made structures mixing together, that was put together in a day to get a look and workflow for the rest of the level.
joeriv: Thanks that is a huge compliment to the team Few games do that to me now. The few that I can say have done that is Witcher 2 , RDR, and Arkam (both). Those were the game I personally got a lot of inspiration from when doing designs or Envios for TR.
Iciban: Hope you have fun Enjoy
[Time to play Tomb Raider now and enjoy the environment and the gameplay...]
Care to share some WIPs if you have ? Env. without textures or lightings ... Anything, thats not in-game shots ....
Would love to see more of them.... HUNGRY FOR MORE !!!!
CGTextures spotted
Not that it's a bad thing, but i was always curious if stuff from that site gets used in AAA games.
nice explaination of stone floor process. i've been experimenting with noise in Max as a way to avoid zbrush, my results were nowhere as nice as yours though.
Blaisoid: Nice find yep we used cg-textures pretty extensively in some cases we only had 30mins per texture, the art team was so small. Most AAA studios have around 30-40 plus envio artists we only had 14 at the most I did not mind though that means a lot of work came from each artist.
Here are some Clay renders of Chasm Bridge. Some parts are no in this scene due to them being objects. Like the tower top was an object that would eventually be destroyed that is why it is missing. Jericho Green and I were responsible for this level. Towards the end some other envio artists touched it, but it was almost left the same, 90% of Jericho and my work was retained.
Also do not be fooled this is all lod 0 stuff. From far away most of those wood panels would lod drastically. All these buildings were done with Lego style modular kits.
This was one of the first levels in the game to make it practically to gold well before any other level in the game. This level was pretty much gold visuals wise for like 1 yr and half or more.
Wireframe shots from Chasm Bridge. The actual geo was not all triangulated like this when made, this how the engine spits it out.
This is just the mountains and terrain. I did most of the geo of the terrain for this level re-topo in zbrush. When I got assigned to this level it had rough super dense poly mountain cliff side I ended up taking that into zbrush re-sculpting and doing a re-topo to keep detail where it needed it. I did a lot of hand maya sculpting at the end to get specific forms near main entry points also.
Sweet...
1 question: Do you make the terrain,props and assemble first in Maya then (make modullar)export it in the engine ? or just make a props separately then assemble in the engine to test ?? for eg. those wooden frames+terrain+stairs ...
so great. cant wait to see it textured and some atmospheric lighting
Sniff sniff there's a tear in my eye ...
I can't wait to play this.
Anyway, loved the game ( maybe a litle too easy, go harder on the next one ! ), and absolutely love the art.
As an env student, this is pure gold !
I was blown away when I realized this game was fully real time lit, loved the lighting quality. I'm so happy to see we are entering an era without light maps and overnight bakes.
thank you for sharing
igi- Yep I was the creator of many user maps and a few maps on UT2004. Glad my name still rings a bell in those places Loved the UT community that is what drove me further.
malcolm- yep this was one of the hardest challenges since all meshes had to be optimized with that in mind. A lot of trickery to get levels to run at crisp 30 with fully dynamic lighting.
I would have only liked to see more variations in the environments , I mean like other places not just that Island but , it was indeed great ...
Are the dense geometry used for vertex blending?
And the layers and layers of history and culture was communicated so well in the game. I felt like this could have been a real island. I loved it to pieces!
Im loveing Tomb Raider so far and its obvious from playing it that some read blood sweat and tears went into it.
Just wanted to post this before alt-tabbing back into Tomb Raider :P
I really enjoyed playing this!