As someone who is doing a lot of environment art at work right now, THANK YOU. This is really helpful and insightful. Is there an ETA on the Polycount Book, or an official thread somewhere?
As someone who is doing a lot of environment art at work right now, THANK YOU. This is really helpful and insightful. Is there an ETA on the Polycount Book, or an official thread somewhere?
Goal was end of this month but got hit with side jobs and work shit as well as waiting on a few edits. But FOR SURE BY THE END OF THE NEXT MONTH. I am shooting for way sooner though.
Goal was end of this month but got hit with side jobs and work shit as well as waiting on a few edits. But FOR SURE BY THE END OF THE NEXT MONTH. I am shooting for way sooner though.
You, sir, are a badass, and so are all of the contributors!
Nice work Anthony. This was one of the levels which I enjoyed the most in Uncharted 3. One thing is a few typos on your site, not a massive deal but a shame to see considering the quality of the work I'll stop being an ass now.
Very interesting, thank you for sharing I wonder ...
How do you, environment artists, work with the level designers? Do you make first a very draft shape for your models, for him to build the map? (In that case do you both think about the shapes, the size, the number of models, etc)
Or does he make a draft block mesh on his own? And then you have to follow his first pass?
man i loved the canyon level, it's funny how much better everything looked in motion on the screen - thats how it's supposed to be, work the best at the target medium, great stuff!
Astoundingly lovely stuff and very inspirational! One thing I'd love to know is how the Uving was planned to avoid seams or was it just in the cracks and hidden by the height and cavity materials?
Thanks again everyone for the kind words, really appreciate it
Sorry for the bit of a delay, work got in the way but I got around to getting 3 wireframe screen shots of some of the collapsing Sandlantis stuff I did as requested. I will take a look back through some of my level files and see if there are any that would be cool to show wireframes of assembled scenes straight from maya. Might get a bit messy with the wireframes so might not be worth it.
As for questions...
@Olli - Yes the palm leaves too kinda bleed together at a distance. Our shaders and the PS3 in general dosnt handle alpha transparency well, nor is it cheap. But there were also some stylistic choices made on them. The Battlefield ones are suppose to be photo realistic where we wanted to keep a sense of stylization to ours. Since we had a lack of color in the desert and wanted to make things pop we put less cuts in the leaves to cover more area with green, which of course in tern makes the leaves easier too bleed and clump together. Just stylistic choices, but thanks for pointing it out, its a good thing to notice.
@fearian - As for how long sections too to make, it honestly varied so much I couldn't say. With things constantly changing and things getting more detailed/new assets being created things were always in flux. Also every section, even the first ones I ever did got retouched a few times near the end to achieve the final result. The earlier sections of course took longer as there was a lot of making new assets and figuring things out. I also rarely built a section from scratch to 100% all at once, it was a lot making sure the broad strokes for large sections were working, the design was set before going back in and detailing.
@nathdevlin - ha yeah a few friends pointed out a typo or two on my website, I am honestly god awful at spelling but will try to get around to fixing those this weekend
@pik - There is a lot of communication needed between an environment artist and his/her designer. For blockouts of things the designers supply artists with really simple blockmesh that we use for scale and to tell where the player is in the world/important landmarks he must hit. The designer blockmesh ranges from hundres of annoying 1x1 cubes that make up buildings too mesh blobs representing mountains.
The designers have a general idea of what they want for the level but for the most part the artist is given freedom to figure it out themselves. They generally care more about things that block sections of gameplay when needed, areas for guys to spawn behind, take cover, paths to follow and overall flow of an area. The rest is usually up to our imaginations! With the help of reference and concept art of course
@Asyme - As for UV seams, yes they were mostly hidden in the undercut cracks of rocks, or areas that were seen as little as possible. For terrain Brad (my texture artist) too the too connecting pieces of terrain and just line the UV's up together. And occasionally when that wasn't an option I would hide the seams with models on top of those splits.
@SirCalaot - The only issue with modeling for mainly vertex based lighting engines are you occasionally have "burried verts" where verts are hidden inside of a mesh and you dont have any other verts near by to catch lighting so they light black. So you have to add in extra cuts in there. We do have lightmaps and use them where they are needed.
Halo Reach was the same way where things were mainly vert lit.
Thanks for sharing those great, clean meshes May I ask you about purely technical details, including polycount, actor count etc ? How much memory do you have for your 3D stuff ?
Do you do any modeling with lofts or splines? I notice a lot of the models in Uncharted and Halo Reach make heavy use of modular texture sheetes and trims, and I know that maya for example allows you some pretty awesome control if you use lofts rather than shift-extrudes/edge-extends because they create the UVs automatically.
Also, I know you answered that you don't make the high-polies for your rocks, but do you sculpt any of you environments' terrain to get a rough blockout over wich to retopo? (Not bake or anything, just a quicker way to get some interesting organic forms in low poly form than box modeling)
I guess using a mix of vertex-lighting and lightmaps really gets the best of both worlds, and that certainly shows in your level. The whole area is pretty brown (as it should be) and yet it still has such great contrast and interest.
I don't know a single person who played it and didn't say, "wow".
Sorry if I'm gushing, I just get really inspired by Naughty Dog's games
Cool work, reminds me of the workflow/process for the river level in Kinect Adventures I layed out and the visual success I was shooting for on a project I will not mention. One question, in the first Oasis shot, did it not bother you to hell that the sand material and edgerock materials meet so abruptly? I know that would drive me crazy and I would be inclined to have the rock material blend into the sand! For the rocks inbeded along the trails, did you simply squash the rocks vertically? That's what I did. Sadly, the majority of them were either deleted, moved from their specific location by inexperienced artists or forgotten forever beneath countless retarded revisions by numerous hands, shipped in that state and accounted for horrible frameloss. Oh what it must have been like heaven to be the only artist responsible for the level...
The trick with the texture is diffuse light baking, done in for example 3ds max? Or is there some raytracing function in the engine (baking done within the engine, like UDK)?
Designers that know how to make blockouts are pretty rare, you guys are lucky! Rhinokey and I tried to spearhead a "blockout first" workflow at Mythic but the designers did not seem to grasp the reason for it and would complain about the ugly blockyness of prototype areas.
So during the construction of the Oasis Map I decied it would be awesome to take pictures like every day and make a gif out of them too see how the map builds up. Didnt do it everyday but got enough that I thought it was worth a share to some of the guys at work, enough people liked it that they posted it up on the ND website since patch 1.1 released today.
Wish I got more of the early design and at the end it jumps a big deal because I forgot too keep taking pics but hope you guys enjoy it
@Computron - No I dont use Maya Lofts/Splines for much. I really think the fucking SUCK in Maya, espcially compared to Max. The 3 tools I use the most are Extrude (I build most things by edge extrude modeling), Insert Edge Loop and the Split Polygon tool.
As for sculpting the ground and decimate it later, no beyond using Maya's sculpting tool too smooth things our or raise some areas up (used this tool a lot in the sand dunes) I start out with super basic terrain shape, get the big forms in there, smooth out and then detail where I need too. Also since you move over the train quite fast on the horse and the trucks are bumping alone the terrain actually has to be quite smooth or it becomes really difficult for most players to aim with this bobbing up and down.
@cyborguineapig - No the sand meeting right up to the rock didnt bother me at all. I can see why people would want things blended all the time so there is no harsh division but in reality that dosnt always happen. When sand butts up right against rock, many times it is that very hard line of sand and then rock. There would be no blend between the too.
@martin.hedin - Yes we have some light AO painted into the texture. Depends on the texture artist but this is generally baked out of xNormal from the zBrush sculpt.
@Justin - Ha yeah, the designers range here from some that use to be artists which is extreamly helpful, to those that make there block outs entirely out of 1x1 cubes >.>
Replies
You, sir, are a badass, and so are all of the contributors!
This is beyond inspiring. Thank you so much for sharing!
How do you, environment artists, work with the level designers? Do you make first a very draft shape for your models, for him to build the map? (In that case do you both think about the shapes, the size, the number of models, etc)
Or does he make a draft block mesh on his own? And then you have to follow his first pass?
Playing through UC3 now with my girly and really loving it. Haven't hit your level yet but looking forward to it now!
Sorry for the bit of a delay, work got in the way but I got around to getting 3 wireframe screen shots of some of the collapsing Sandlantis stuff I did as requested. I will take a look back through some of my level files and see if there are any that would be cool to show wireframes of assembled scenes straight from maya. Might get a bit messy with the wireframes so might not be worth it.
As for questions...
@Olli - Yes the palm leaves too kinda bleed together at a distance. Our shaders and the PS3 in general dosnt handle alpha transparency well, nor is it cheap. But there were also some stylistic choices made on them. The Battlefield ones are suppose to be photo realistic where we wanted to keep a sense of stylization to ours. Since we had a lack of color in the desert and wanted to make things pop we put less cuts in the leaves to cover more area with green, which of course in tern makes the leaves easier too bleed and clump together. Just stylistic choices, but thanks for pointing it out, its a good thing to notice.
@fearian - As for how long sections too to make, it honestly varied so much I couldn't say. With things constantly changing and things getting more detailed/new assets being created things were always in flux. Also every section, even the first ones I ever did got retouched a few times near the end to achieve the final result. The earlier sections of course took longer as there was a lot of making new assets and figuring things out. I also rarely built a section from scratch to 100% all at once, it was a lot making sure the broad strokes for large sections were working, the design was set before going back in and detailing.
@nathdevlin - ha yeah a few friends pointed out a typo or two on my website, I am honestly god awful at spelling
@pik - There is a lot of communication needed between an environment artist and his/her designer. For blockouts of things the designers supply artists with really simple blockmesh that we use for scale and to tell where the player is in the world/important landmarks he must hit. The designer blockmesh ranges from hundres of annoying 1x1 cubes that make up buildings too mesh blobs representing mountains.
The designers have a general idea of what they want for the level but for the most part the artist is given freedom to figure it out themselves. They generally care more about things that block sections of gameplay when needed, areas for guys to spawn behind, take cover, paths to follow and overall flow of an area. The rest is usually up to our imaginations! With the help of reference and concept art of course
@Asyme - As for UV seams, yes they were mostly hidden in the undercut cracks of rocks, or areas that were seen as little as possible. For terrain Brad (my texture artist) too the too connecting pieces of terrain and just line the UV's up together. And occasionally when that wasn't an option I would hide the seams with models on top of those splits.
-Anthony
Have you had much experience with lightmap-based engines? If so, how does modelling for a vertex-based lighting game (such as Uncharted) compare?
Halo Reach was the same way where things were mainly vert lit.
Thanks for sharing those great, clean meshes May I ask you about purely technical details, including polycount, actor count etc ? How much memory do you have for your 3D stuff ?
Really? interesting....
Also, I know you answered that you don't make the high-polies for your rocks, but do you sculpt any of you environments' terrain to get a rough blockout over wich to retopo? (Not bake or anything, just a quicker way to get some interesting organic forms in low poly form than box modeling)
I guess using a mix of vertex-lighting and lightmaps really gets the best of both worlds, and that certainly shows in your level. The whole area is pretty brown (as it should be) and yet it still has such great contrast and interest.
I don't know a single person who played it and didn't say, "wow".
Sorry if I'm gushing, I just get really inspired by Naughty Dog's games
Wish I got more of the early design and at the end it jumps a big deal because I forgot too keep taking pics but hope you guys enjoy it
https://web.archive.org/web/20120602110546/http://www.naughtydog.com/site/post/return_of_the_lab_patch_111_deployed/
@Computron - No I dont use Maya Lofts/Splines for much. I really think the fucking SUCK in Maya, espcially compared to Max. The 3 tools I use the most are Extrude (I build most things by edge extrude modeling), Insert Edge Loop and the Split Polygon tool.
As for sculpting the ground and decimate it later, no beyond using Maya's sculpting tool too smooth things our or raise some areas up (used this tool a lot in the sand dunes) I start out with super basic terrain shape, get the big forms in there, smooth out and then detail where I need too. Also since you move over the train quite fast on the horse and the trucks are bumping alone the terrain actually has to be quite smooth or it becomes really difficult for most players to aim with this bobbing up and down.
@cyborguineapig - No the sand meeting right up to the rock didnt bother me at all. I can see why people would want things blended all the time so there is no harsh division but in reality that dosnt always happen. When sand butts up right against rock, many times it is that very hard line of sand and then rock. There would be no blend between the too.
@martin.hedin - Yes we have some light AO painted into the texture. Depends on the texture artist but this is generally baked out of xNormal from the zBrush sculpt.
@Justin - Ha yeah, the designers range here from some that use to be artists which is extreamly helpful, to those that make there block outs entirely out of 1x1 cubes >.>