Workshop Analysis: Creating Characters in Uncharted 4 with Naughty Dog's Character Arts Team

Brian "Panda" Choi

Referencing this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgDv7njYUWU&feature=youtu.be

Posting this so we can have a group discussion, like one might have in a class.

So the takeaways I got from this:

1) Animated straps, safe to assume riggers prefer them floating a bit above the base geo.

2) Grab pores from highpoly sculpt through a normal map conversion.

3) We still haven't found an artistic solution to hair modeling.

4) Some of the stray hairs and stubble for some of the characters seem like individual poly tubes?  Can someone verify this for me if they can?

Would love to hear what anyone else got.

slosh

I seriously doubt they are poly tubes...I think they are still cards.  I never got the impression they were tubes.

thomasp

is tihs linked from cgsociety somewhere? since they seemed to host it and all. anyway. i have fast forwarded a bit through that.

the approach with the baked/ manually created shadow map for hair sounds mental. so you end up with two UV sets on a 13k deforming hair mesh on a  character? (in the case of that afro).

one thing that sounds familiar is that for the fleshy bits apparently the sculpt basemesh level 1 doubles as the game output mesh. i can only recommend doing that, saves so much stupid retopo/adaption time. also, sharing the basemesh and UV layout between characters. common sense there!

thomasp

oh almost forgot - the comments regarding marvelous made me chuckle. 'stay in there as little as possible'. my sentiments exactly. what a drag to become some simulation hand-holding monkey.

slosh

thomasp said:

oh almost forgot - the comments regarding marvelous made me chuckle. 'stay in there as little as possible'. my sentiments exactly. what a drag to become some simulation hand-holding monkey.

From my short experience with Marvelous, you can lose hours just trying to achieve a certain "look" that you want when you probably could have sculpted it out in that time.  So, I too understand that sentiment of getting in, getting what you can and getting into zbrush quickly to finish it off.

thomasp

that for one, another pet peeve of mine is that the results are not 1:1 reproducable. change the order of steps of upping resolution, rerunning the sim and adjusting cloth parameters and the result may look pretty different. and that's not taking into account the simulation getting flawed and you having to reset in the middle of things. fun times. more of a TD's chore than something an artist should be doing.

Darkmaster

Haha what do you mean there isn't an "artistic solution" for hair modeling?

slosh

Darkmaster said:

Haha what do you mean there isn't an "artistic solution" for hair modeling?

The conclusion for great hair from the video was basically "tons of cards, tons of time, manually place cards."  So his conclusion is there still is no "shortcut" for making great game hair.  

Darkmaster

Oh I understand, I guess I'm just not surprised by that at all. Naughty Dog prides itself on artistry and brute forcing things until it looks perfect. They rarely fall back on one click solutions or overly automating any one part of the workflow. Which is why their stuff looks incredible.

throttlekitty

How do all those cards not kill performance, transparency-wise?

Brian "Panda" Choi

throttlekitty said:

How do all those cards not kill performance, transparency-wise?

My guess is that they just limit the number of actors on screen.  And with non-hero NPCs having less fidelity and/or performance-impacting items, so the enemies using hats or helmets in lieu of really nice hair, or if there is hair, using a limited amount.

Brian "Panda" Choi

@thomasp: I didn't quite wrap my head around the exact nature of the hair shadow map.  Is it anything like light maps for level art?

thomasp

Brian "Panda" Choi said:

@thomasp: I didn't quite wrap my head around the exact nature of the hair shadow map.  Is it anything like light maps for level art?

i'd like to think so. that would require a unique unwrap of the hair cards on a second uv set. that should double the vertex count in game unless i'm mistaken here? hence my comment.

then i guess they just turn off self-shadowing from light sources on the hair geometry and replace it all with their baked/painted shadows, avoiding all the ugly highlighting of planes that you can get from the former.