Uncharted 4 Art Dump

d1ver · May 2016

3DKyle · May 2016

Fantastic stuff! Thanks for sharing this list

Blade113 · May 2016

I just briefly checked few of them. Nice job

FourtyNights · May 2016

That character work... I'm speechless. Amazing reference and inspiration material. Gonna get my hands on this game as soon as possible.

I loved Uncharted 1-3 and The Last of Us, so obviously I'll be loving this one too!

rogelio · May 2016

If you have any questions feel free to ask a few NaughtyDog people here in Polycount that can answer

xChris · May 2016

rogelio said:

If you have any questions feel free to ask a few NaughtyDog people here in Polycount that can answer

Carrying on the conversation from the U4 thread over from the general forum

As a texture artist, what are some more of the technical tasks you have had to carry on your shoulders or have to learn during this project besides optimizations? It sounds like from whats been posted online that you guys have a ton of materials to manage or create. Are you usually heading to work and making textures, or lending a hand in modeling? Basically what's a day in the life of Rogelio at ND haha

Cay · May 2016

I do have a question regarding environments. Looking at the game I believe most of the rocks/cliffs were modelled by hand and got tiling textures right?
I have only seen a few that could be sculpted like the bigger rocks on madagascar. It's a shame there are hardly any wireframes around.

Tits · May 2016

Thanks for sharing the list!!

Polyjunky · May 2016

Nice one.

Cloudydays · May 2016

rogelio said:

If you have any questions feel free to ask a few NaughtyDog people here in Polycount that can answer

All of the work is very inspiring! Your Substance Designer tutorial on Gnomon and the Texturing Uncharted talk at GDC has been helping me gain a better understanding of Substance Designer and Naughty Dog's pipeline.

I see that you're credited with both texture and modeling work and I was curious as to how environment art teams work together at Naughty Dog. Does one person model, another person textures, and then another person does the world building or do team members share responsibilities often like you did?

Thank you so much for the insight!

Nuclear Angel · May 2016

God damn some amazing stuff!

Handwiches · May 2016

Quick one I didn't see on the list for Concept:
Nicholas Schumaker - https://www.artstation.com/artist/nicholasschumaker

Mant1k0re · May 2016

Cloudydays said:

I see that you're credited with both texture and modeling work and I was curious as to how environment art teams work together at Naughty Dog. Does one person model, another person textures, and then another person does the world building or do team members share responsibilities often like you did?

Maybe it changed but I've seen it written several time before that typically they don't do both. So I'm curious about this too.

This being said, what a sick, sick team of environment artists

Jack M. · May 2016

Oh God yes. Thank you for compiling these all together.

And thank you Naughty Dog artists for delivering a fantastic game that's gorgeous AND runs at a hard locked 30fps (I noticed a couple minor drops in transition areas but after playing Bloodborne it was hardly noticeable).

Autocon · May 2016

I suggest dropping your questions in this Uncharted 4 thread so everything can easily found by others as this post will eventually be lost to obscurity in the ever growing News section. Happy to answer anything I can, just feel its better in that thread than this news post

http://polycount.com/discussion/135773/uncharted-4/p1

rogelio · May 2016

xChris said:

rogelio said:

If you have any questions feel free to ask a few NaughtyDog people here in Polycount that can answer

Carrying on the conversation from the U4 thread over from the general forum

As a texture artist, what are some more of the technical tasks you have had to carry on your shoulders or have to learn during this project besides optimizations? It sounds like from whats been posted online that you guys have a ton of materials to manage or create. Are you usually heading to work and making textures, or lending a hand in modeling? Basically what's a day in the life of Rogelio at ND haha

For me day to day is pretty simple as a texture artist. Usually I start by checking e-mails since we outsource many of the props I want to keep track and see if the quality is up to snuff and comment on each one to go to the next step for example or tell them to tweak something. If something related to my level chunk is needed I try to keep the meetings or the one on ones in the morning by either going to design or fellow artists to see what we will do that day. Than usually at that time lunch hits

Usually by the time I come back from lunch it is actual work time. I get in the zone and either texture, model, or anything needed to keep moving forward. I have some days that I am in Substance all day and others were I am frantically going back and forth many programs to get what is needed done. Some days we have longer meetings but we usually try to keep the meetings short or none existent. Each day is a little different honestly but that usually my main flow emails prep in the first few hours and than actual work the remainder of the time.

Technical tasks would be to get a material that works for damage information for example making sure I setup the shader so when the objects break have the right settings so when an object destroys it has a general effect on the material. Or plugging in an incandescence setting on shader so design can trigger those through script. I guess the more technical aspect is tool creation and for substance designer. I ended up creating tools for our substance designer library and making sure those are up to standard can be time consuming but at the end it is rewarding. Not everyone made tools for substance designer at ND, but the few that did made our in house substance designer a lot better. Brad Smith authored and showed many of these in his GDC talks. Another technical aspect is optimization and keeping things organized for level chunks but that happens naturally as you work on a level chunk.

Cloudydays said:

rogelio said:

If you have any questions feel free to ask a few NaughtyDog people here in Polycount that can answer

All of the work is very inspiring! Your Substance Designer tutorial on Gnomon and the Texturing Uncharted talk at GDC has been helping me gain a better understanding of Substance Designer and Naughty Dog's pipeline.

I see that you're credited with both texture and modeling work and I was curious as to how environment art teams work together at Naughty Dog. Does one person model, another person textures, and then another person does the world building or do team members share responsibilities often like you did?

Thank you so much for the insight!

Thanks for the comments on the GDC and Gnomon texturing talks. I hope to make more soon

So generally artists are divided up by discipline, but the reality is if a texture artist needs to contribute to modeling that is also expected to some extent. For example as texture artist I helped my modelers when it came to set dressing or taking entire areas based on what the modeler was doing prior. So depending on the needs some texture artist contributed a great deal of modeling help also. Before I entered ND I was an environment artist which means I would model, texture, and light sometimes. So when the time came and we had whole chunks that needed modeling help I changed disciplines almost entirely towards the end of the project. I went from spending all my time texturing to modeling and not touching substance for at least 4 months for example to get the job done. So that is the reason you have seen that I am credited on both since I have taken full areas from start to completion modeling and texturing wise. In general we are put into a team of three a Environment Modeler, Environment Texture, and Lighter. I will post my dump soon... been in Japan doing some substance masterclass so I missed the massive ND art dump time

but no worries ill add my stuff soon now that I am back.

stickadtroja · May 2016

no art in the thread?

kimmokaunela · May 2016

Awesome stuff!

My question is about the environment exporting from Maya to game engine. I know that Maya is like the level editor your use in ND but how things like object culling/draw call batching and related are handled like can you use instance objects? Another thing that I really would like to know is the lighting. I saw somewhere that there´s a baked lighting in the levels so is that baked in Maya or with external tool?

Again, congrats for the awesome game and my respect for the ND team just keep raising

Can´t wait your art dump Rogelio. Would be nice to have something similar like the one that you did with the Last of Us!

Cloudydays · May 2016

rogelio said:

Cloudydays said:

rogelio said:

If you have any questions feel free to ask a few NaughtyDog people here in Polycount that can answer

All of the work is very inspiring! Your Substance Designer tutorial on Gnomon and the Texturing Uncharted talk at GDC has been helping me gain a better understanding of Substance Designer and Naughty Dog's pipeline.

I see that you're credited with both texture and modeling work and I was curious as to how environment art teams work together at Naughty Dog. Does one person model, another person textures, and then another person does the world building or do team members share responsibilities often like you did?

Thank you so much for the insight!

Thanks for the comments on the GDC and Gnomon texturing talks. I hope to make more soon So generally artists are divided up by discipline, but the reality is if a texture artist needs to contribute to modeling that is also expected to some extent. For example as texture artist I helped my modelers when it came to set dressing or taking entire areas based on what the modeler was doing prior. So depending on the needs some texture artist contributed a great deal of modeling help also. Before I entered ND I was an environment artist which means I would model, texture, and light sometimes. So when the time came and we had whole chunks that needed modeling help I changed disciplines almost entirely towards the end of the project. I went from spending all my time texturing to modeling and not touching substance for at least 4 months for example to get the job done. So that is the reason you have seen that I am credited on both since I have taken full areas from start to completion modeling and texturing wise. In general we are put into a team of three a Environment Modeler, Environment Texture, and Lighter. I will post my dump soon... been in Japan doing some substance masterclass so I missed the massive ND art dump time but no worries ill add my stuff soon now that I am back.

Thank you so much for the reply and I look forward to your own art dump!

It sounds like getting to work in small teams of a Modeler + Texture Artist + Lighting Artist would provide you the fastest workflow/pipeline to see results quickly. Hopefully you enjoyed switching up disciplines and getting to contribute to different parts of the pipeline!

I'm just finishing up my 3rd year at college and am trying to refine and gear my portfolio towards the companies I really want to work for (all of the talks I saw from Naughty Dog at GDC, especially the ones at the Substance booth, were really inspiring - and the studio culture seems amazing!). So far my work has been as an Environment artist as you put it - modeling, texturing, lighting, worldbuilding everything myself if it's a personal project or doing a mix of all of those tasks if it's working in a team. Out of curiosity, should I be gearing my portfolio towards one or two disciplines (such as modeling + texturing or modeling + worldbuilding or just worldbuilding), or would that be selling myself short and making it seem as if I'm not experienced in a wide array of skills?

Again, would really enjoy any advice you give, thank you so much!

rogelio · May 2016

kimmokaunela said:

Awesome stuff!

My question is about the environment exporting from Maya to game engine. I know that Maya is like the level editor your use in ND but how things like object culling/draw call batching and related are handled like can you use instance objects? Another thing that I really would like to know is the lighting. I saw somewhere that there´s a baked lighting in the levels so is that baked in Maya or with external tool?

Again, congrats for the awesome game and my respect for the ND team just keep raising Can´t wait your art dump Rogelio. Would be nice to have something similar like the one that you did with the Last of Us!

Ill see if I can get a lighter to answer some of the lighting questions for you. The basic idea I get from is that the lighting is placed in maya and once saved into a maya lighting file it is taken converted when building lighting into something that our engine takes in and bakes etc or places the realtime light etc. We have other exterior tools that lighters use also besides maya so without saying too much ill try to get a lighter to answer some of these questions.

When it comes to Environment Art we place everything in maya, our maya has tools that reference instances so the engine knows what are instances vs unique geometry and so on. We have real time placement now which helps for foliage also. The Maya we have in studio is pretty much tooled to hell so it will still be a learning experience if you know maya. Modeling is mostly the core tools in Maya with exception of a few that we either use or have made in studio from technical artists. Texturing/Shading we have our shader tool which links to maya via hypershade so we do not need to use hypershade in maya anymore which is good because that would be hell.

Cloudydays said:

Thank you so much for the reply and I look forward to your own art dump!

It sounds like getting to work in small teams of a Modeler + Texture Artist + Lighting Artist would provide you the fastest workflow/pipeline to see results quickly. Hopefully you enjoyed switching up disciplines and getting to contribute to different parts of the pipeline!

I'm just finishing up my 3rd year at college and am trying to refine and gear my portfolio towards the companies I really want to work for (all of the talks I saw from Naughty Dog at GDC, especially the ones at the Substance booth, were really inspiring - and the studio culture seems amazing!). So far my work has been as an Environment artist as you put it - modeling, texturing, lighting, worldbuilding everything myself if it's a personal project or doing a mix of all of those tasks if it's working in a team. Out of curiosity, should I be gearing my portfolio towards one or two disciplines (such as modeling + texturing or modeling + worldbuilding or just worldbuilding), or would that be selling myself short and making it seem as if I'm not experienced in a wide array of skills?

Again, would really enjoy any advice you give, thank you so much!

Yeah honestly I really enjoy working on level chunks in small team instead of having one full environment by yourself. I think it also leads to better quality in the end.

The question abut your portfolio is tricky... for one reason. The portfolio should always represent your best work so spreading thin is not the best. But with that said I still recommend artists especially artist that are heading to environment art to be a jack of all trades better than one in the start. NaughtyDog is one of the rare companies that works this way most studios still hold the environment art position as a modeler and texture artist. So my advice is definitely hone in on a portfolio that has a theme and concentrates on something clear, but learn as much as possible from all disciplines surrounding your core.

If you want to lean to be a modeler doing some texturing will always help and the other way around. Think about it as rolling a new character in MORPG you want to concentrate on a core ability, but you also have the small traits that make your character slightly different than others. For example our lighters in the past use to be modelers and or generalists in till they became focused on one thing. When I first started in the industry I was a level designer and because designers at the time also did art I started to lean towards environment art... the level design background has helped me tons! I have had the chance in some companies to also be close in the design process of some levels with the design team in some ways... as time went on I really like texturing and well long story short I am mostly a texture artist now. The biggest advice if I could put it in all caps to everywhere for artists is to keep exploring and testing out new techniques or styles.

Mant1k0re · May 2016

Pretty specific question here but this particular screen on Brad's page caught my eye.

I'm guessing we're not going to see wireframe for any of this, so I am left to imagine what's behind those awesome visuals. The hanging lamp things on the left are probably mostly alphas, but on the 2 circled areas on the right it looks like an insane amount of geometry especially for something relatively far off the player's camera. Is it just a neat visual trick and normal mapping or it's actual geometry? And if it is, how is polygon budget determined at Naughty Dog? I am aware polycount is less a concern than it was some time ago but you are developing exclusively for consoles, which must be pretty limiting.

Cloudydays · May 2016

rogelio said:

Cloudydays said:

Thank you so much for the reply and I look forward to your own art dump!

It sounds like getting to work in small teams of a Modeler + Texture Artist + Lighting Artist would provide you the fastest workflow/pipeline to see results quickly. Hopefully you enjoyed switching up disciplines and getting to contribute to different parts of the pipeline!

I'm just finishing up my 3rd year at college and am trying to refine and gear my portfolio towards the companies I really want to work for (all of the talks I saw from Naughty Dog at GDC, especially the ones at the Substance booth, were really inspiring - and the studio culture seems amazing!). So far my work has been as an Environment artist as you put it - modeling, texturing, lighting, worldbuilding everything myself if it's a personal project or doing a mix of all of those tasks if it's working in a team. Out of curiosity, should I be gearing my portfolio towards one or two disciplines (such as modeling + texturing or modeling + worldbuilding or just worldbuilding), or would that be selling myself short and making it seem as if I'm not experienced in a wide array of skills?

Again, would really enjoy any advice you give, thank you so much!

Yeah honestly I really enjoy working on level chunks in small team instead of having one full environment by yourself. I think it also leads to better quality in the end.

The question abut your portfolio is tricky... for one reason. The portfolio should always represent your best work so spreading thin is not the best. But with that said I still recommend artists especially artist that are heading to environment art to be a jack of all trades better than one in the start. NaughtyDog is one of the rare companies that works this way most studios still hold the environment art position as a modeler and texture artist. So my advice is definitely hone in on a portfolio that has a theme and concentrates on something clear, but learn as much as possible from all disciplines surrounding your core.

If you want to lean to be a modeler doing some texturing will always help and the other way around. Think about it as rolling a new character in MORPG you want to concentrate on a core ability, but you also have the small traits that make your character slightly different than others. For example our lighters in the past use to be modelers and or generalists in till they became focused on one thing. When I first started in the industry I was a level designer and because designers at the time also did art I started to lean towards environment art... the level design background has helped me tons! I have had the chance in some companies to also be close in the design process of some levels with the design team in some ways... as time went on I really like texturing and well long story short I am mostly a texture artist now. The biggest advice if I could put it in all caps to everywhere for artists is to keep exploring and testing out new techniques or styles.

Yes, I absolutely agree on continuing to explore and test new things! I'm always bugging my friends that are in other disciplines to show me how they do things and picking up new skills - even if it's not something I'm going to focus my portfolio on, so much of the pipeline is really interesting to me. The one problem I do run into like this though is that people have said that they might question my direction in an interview if my portfolio shows off a variety of styles. My professors have recommended that I create a "Personal Work" section on my website to show off side projects/studies that I'm doing to demonstrate a passion for learning.

Also, I am hearing that more and more - the part about you liking texturing and becoming a texture artist. There are a few industry professionals who have expressed that they start out in one field and due to an interest/need of the team, they will try another discipline and end up falling in love with it. I also agree with how working in a small team will produce better quality work in the end - more eyes to critique/give feedback and less being trapped in your own head about the work.

I will continue to create more full environments as that seems to be the best way to demonstrate the full environment art workflow succinctly in one place. Most definitely, I'll try out a Naughty Dog-inspired environment because that looks like it'll be a lot of fun!

xvampire · May 2016

nice!
this is not the first time to see the game 3d assembly entirely build within 3d app such maya and max,
I can say it seems works really well on the game with the scope such uncharted.

but since you work on maya,
do also you need to export the file to FBX?
or you also using other format to support such thing that not in fbx such complex maya deformation?

-------------

now more artistic question,
I saw a lot of ND amazing artist portfolio out there, it seems that you guys are also fit in Fantasy theme game,
would you develop that kind of game in the future?

it would be really cool. ( then again no need to answer this , just fun suggestion )

rogelio · May 2016

xvampire said:

nice!
this is not the first time to see the game 3d assembly entirely build within 3d app such maya and max,
I can say it seems works really well on the game with the scope such uncharted.

but since you work on maya,
do also you need to export the file to FBX?
or you also using other format to support such thing that not in fbx such complex maya deformation?

-------------

now more artistic question,
I saw a lot of ND amazing artist portfolio out there, it seems that you guys are also fit in Fantasy theme game,
would you develop that kind of game in the future? it would be really cool. ( then again no need to answer this , just fun suggestion )

Nope we just save as .ma all our files the engine build tools handle the conversions I am not really aware what happens under the hood but I imagine it converts the files into a clean format than puts it in game etc.

I agree a fantasy theme seems right up our style. I am not really one to decide honestly

rogelio · May 2016

Cloudydays said:

Yes, I absolutely agree on continuing to explore and test new things! I'm always bugging my friends that are in other disciplines to show me how they do things and picking up new skills - even if it's not something I'm going to focus my portfolio on, so much of the pipeline is really interesting to me. The one problem I do run into like this though is that people have said that they might question my direction in an interview if my portfolio shows off a variety of styles. My professors have recommended that I create a "Personal Work" section on my website to show off side projects/studies that I'm doing to demonstrate a passion for learning.

For the portfolio I would definitely keep it clean concise with the position you are applying. Every company i have applied I end up catering my portfolio for that company. When I applied Crystal I made a few environments related with ancient ruins when I applied at ND I took a lot of my envio stuff out and put more or less texture stuff. So this is the important key always change up the portfolio as you develop more work it becomes easier to interchange it etc. For personal work / studies I would recommend using a blog instead of your professional site. With a blog you can interact with people more. Blog or facebook etc.

rogelio · May 2016

Mant1k0re said:

Pretty specific question here but this particular screen on Brad's page caught my eye.

I'm guessing we're not going to see wireframe for any of this, so I am left to imagine what's behind those awesome visuals. The hanging lamp things on the left are probably mostly alphas, but on the 2 circled areas on the right it looks like an insane amount of geometry especially for something relatively far off the player's camera. Is it just a neat visual trick and normal mapping or it's actual geometry? And if it is, how is polygon budget determined at Naughty Dog? I am aware polycount is less a concern than it was some time ago but you are developing exclusively for consoles, which must be pretty limiting.

The pillar is pretty high poly but it is also a really well baked normal map on low. The chandelier on the right is polys with alpha. So when we think about draw computation even something as dense like that is not so bad considering behind that is a relatively simple mesh roof arches shape. so since it is on that spot it is not as bad. What we are finding more and more it is not so much the geo but how it is layered in the scene and is stuff culling properly. Our engine can spit out polys like crazy. The scene is pretty simple geo wise the detail is precise where it needs to be. This is a very heavily optimized scene from materials and geo stand point due to the insane amount of npc needed to be in the scene with a full lit environment. Honestly every scene is different so to give a specific poly count per scene cap does not really say anything. Some scenes have tons of polys and can get away with it since those scenes do not have an insane amount of dynamics and others not so much. So it becomes a balance game of what is the most important aspect and what we can squeeze out of the engine without having to kill ourselves. Tech Artists help on this also to hone in what needs optimization. We also have general debugs that give us color information that says how expensive an asset is for the GPU and we can start to debug if something seems out of place or too expensive for what it is.

Mant1k0re · May 2016

Thanks for taking the time to answer Rogelio, I'm trying to model some ornamental columns at the moment and I guess I will be a little mode generous with my polygons based on your explanations!

AzazelNeyaphem · May 2016

Interesting topic.
Thank you for sharing it with us.

manilamerc · May 2016

No one does game art better than Naughty Dog. I applaud every artist that worked on Uncharted 4. AMAZING STUFF

xvampire · Jun 2016

thx for the answer Rogelio,
wow how convenient for the artist.

I wonder there is some rules not to put modular junks in ma files... ( my bad habit when working on Raw files )
but seems like pretty good solution.

good job to @d1ver or Andrew

for making good foliage sim, ( is that u who help that right?)
it bend individually and the pivot respect its branch parent .

something I have to learn much more in unreal with pivot painter node.

MaYdaY · Jun 2016

Maybe worth sharing the gnomon talk I had last week talking about an environment I did. I had the pleasure joining an Env Art panel with Joy and Helder

http://livestream.com/accounts/13240902/events/5424191
Awesome job everyone greatful beeing part of the art team

Ootrick · Jun 2016

Hey guys! Lovely work as always, you guys are bad-ass for the community and I'm sure we all appreciate you taking time as individuals to make tutorials and educational talks so thank you!

CandyStripes05 · Jun 2016

thanks for all the artstation links to check out!

bradhb3d · Jul 2016

Mant1k0re said:

Pretty specific question here but this particular screen on Brad's page caught my eye.

I'm guessing we're not going to see wireframe for any of this, so I am left to imagine what's behind those awesome visuals. The hanging lamp things on the left are probably mostly alphas, but on the 2 circled areas on the right it looks like an insane amount of geometry especially for something relatively far off the player's camera. Is it just a neat visual trick and normal mapping or it's actual geometry? And if it is, how is polygon budget determined at Naughty Dog? I am aware polycount is less a concern than it was some time ago but you are developing exclusively for consoles, which must be pretty limiting.

Sorry the late response, I just now saw this thread

The actual model for that pillar capital is quite a bit lower than you might think it would be, it was just enough to keep the silhouette from a reasonable viewing distance. As Rogelio mentioned, it really came to careful low poly creation and baking. This level in particular had a ton NPCs and smooth surfaces that demand screen space reflections.. so keeping shaders well optimized and polycounts relatively low in this section (compared to other levels) was really important. Just about all trim work and ornamentation had to be carefully sculpted, modeled, baked, and propagated correctly in order to react to lighting correctly.

Uncharted 4 Art Dump

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