Uncharted 3 Interview

oglu

Interesting interview on the area with Hanno Hagedorn, Sze Jones, Christophe Desse, and Inkyo Lee from Naughty Dog.


http://area.autodesk.com/inhouse/bts/uncharted_3_with_naughty_dog


and the mudbox masterclass with Christophe.
http://area.autodesk.com/masterclasses/masterclass/class4_q4_2011

dtschultz

Nice find. It's interesting to see how much they are using Mudbox for texturing.

I love this quote from Christophe:

"Furthermore, it shall not be forgotten that our programmers are all at least Level 91 programming wizards, who are not afraid of burning the midnight oil to give us more memory and frame rate. It’s a catch 22… the more resource they give, the more we fill it with art and animations, forcing them back into their dark corner, chanting their incantation to give us a little bit more resource that we would quickly fill again with even more art and animation…ad vitam aeternam."

PolyHertz

So many revelations!

-Sze Jones left Blur and joined ND
-Michael Knowland (catstyle) works at ND now
-Half the artists at ND use Max

crazyfool

great article, yea was surprised to see them all max now, alot of places are doing the same though where they model in max and animate in maya. Autodesk must be loving it haha

Autocon

PolyHertz wrote: »

-Half the artists at ND use Max

Only Character Artists and 3D Artists have the option to use Max

Great article though

oglu

and the rest of the team have to use maya..?

Entity

There's just something about Max that makes animators say "fuck no". Is it really that terrible? I'm primarily a lighter/renderer so it's pretty much the same in any package..is it different with animation?

samcole

I think the environment artists use Maya because they have custom scripts to model and set dress everything in Maya, then the script takes the .ma file and converts it all into a engine readable format, then its thrust into their engine. At least that was my understanding of their process from the Lead Technical artist's talk on Gamer Talk.

jipe

Entity wrote: »

There's just something about Max that makes animators say "fuck no". Is it really that terrible? I'm primarily a lighter/renderer so it's pretty much the same in any package..is it different with animation?

Let's put it this way: I interviewed at a studio a few months back and we were talking about their rigging system... I asked if they were using Biped and he said no and practically danced a jig. Obviously you could use CAT or PuppetShop or a custom solution; it's not like Autodesk is holding a gun to your head. But I still see a lot of jobs ads for Max animators who know Biped and it confuses me.

The Maya preference may also come down to familiarity, as many animators learn Maya in school (especially the online schools) and most of the great free rigs are Maya-based. The script support is also fantastic... CreativeCrash has almost 1000 scripts just in the Maya Animation section (as opposed to 15 for Max). And while I can't speak for TA's, it seems like Maya is extremely flexible for building tools and an export pipeline.

So if you have good rigs and a solid pipeline, all we really need is to move around controls and a decent graph editor (and animation layers). But hotkeys and scripts are nice, and so is not working with an ancient rigging system.

pinkbox

i spent a couple hours tryin to find out how to bake fur to a texture like they did. couldnt find anything and couldnt figure out how to bake it either.

Polyroyal

pinkbox wrote: »

i spent a couple hours tryin to find out how to bake fur to a texture like they did. couldnt find anything and couldnt figure out how to bake it either.

Go to the render settings of hair&fur and set the output to "geometry". Else it simply wont be rendered.
Using a multi-sup material with a solid material for the hair and an quasi-invisible material for the base model helps with creating better masks.
Proper anti-alias settings or super sampling will increase the output quality quite allot.

pinkbox

thanks for signing up to help me.

I was trying to get the result in Maya so i dont know if that makes a difference.