Uncharted: Drakes Fortune models

[Diamant]

Hi everyone,
my name is Rich Diamant. I'm the lead character artist at Naughty Dog. Here are a bunch of models from Uncharted that I worked on. Hope you all enjoy them! The full color shots are the in game models lit and screen shot in maya. The two at the bottom are mental ray renders for proof of concept. btw.. the style we went for was not photo-realistic. they are meant to be a little stilized. Because of this we hand painted and hand sculpted everything. Nothing was scanned or photo collaged.

drake.jpg
drake_zbrush1.jpg
drake_zbrush2.jpg
elena.jpg
elena_zbrush1.jpg
elena_zbrush2.jpg
elena-zbrush-wetsuit.jpg
mummy.jpg
mummy_hands.jpg
navarro.jpg
navarro_zbrush1.jpg
navarro_zbrush2.jpg
navarro_zbrush3.jpg
playstation_cover.jpg
elena-render.jpg
drake-render.jpg

[Webhead]

I like your models - particularly the gal in the tank top and scuba outfit - assume that's the same character. The last two faces look the best. :tu:

[Spark!]

Excellent work Diamant! Really love all the detail that you put into your characters, and honestly this is the only game that I plan on buying for my PS3 this christmas, just due to the great art:)

Spark!

www.bbriley.com (http://www.bbriley.com/)

[Lil'sister]

Some impressive work! well done :tu: :tu:

[womball]

Just beat the game! One of the best games (very fun to play) of the year. I do like Elena with darker hair better than the brown/blond ingame hair. I was hoping I would get to see more artwork. I haven't unlocked sections 5 and 6 in the art gallery yet. Are these from there?

How many polys are the main characters? I know they are using a crazy amount of textures per character (20-40).

[nightwoodwolf]

beautiful models .. and great texturing

[dmckim]

These models look ok. My major crit would be....BRING THIS GAME TO 360!!!
Seriously though these look outstanding and the game looks gorgeous. Too bad PS3 doesnt have any more must-have games like this. Congrats and hope the game does well for you guys.

[WailingMonkey]

yikes! how much fun was doing that hair?
(got any special techniques you can share?) ;)


WailingMonkey

[wethand]

Love your style very much!!!
Your models look so "cool", espacialy the guy with the gun!!

RESPECT - top row for me!

love it

[Diamant]

thanks guys!
dmckim - i think you're gonna have to suck it up and buy a ps3! :) I think soon there will be a lot more must have titles exclusive to the ps3 that hopefully will convince people to buy one. Then again... i'm biased :)

womball - thanks! we are all very proud of the game. it really is a lot of fun to play.. i think i've played it like a million times. it is addiciting..

the whole Elena hair thing.. well.. i think just because she is a girl a lot of people have very particular opinions. I never minded the dark hair. A lot of people liked it. However, We did feel it worked a little better as a dirty blond. But really, its all opinions.. Hopefully it really didn't make too much of a difference overall.

all of these actually are in the galleries. I'm not sure if they are in 5 or 6.. i think they might be mixed throughout.

the main characters range from about 22k to 30k poly's. They do have a bunch of textures on them.. not sure really the total amount.. i haven't counted :)

webhead - yep, they are the same models.. just different outfits.

Spark! - thanks! hope you'll have fun with the game!

WailingMonkey- doing the hair was a pain!! i think it took almost 2 days to get to look right. i ended up writing a mel script that helped a little with laying out and bi-railing all the strands. i used nurbs curves and converted them to polys after. each strand i would lower accordingly. it wasn't fun! thats why she had a different hair style originally.. i never got around to doing it right at that point :)

wethand- thanks! drake with the gun was one of my favorite ones as well!

[ZippZopp]

great work rich! great models and i think the hair came out great with all those cards.. everything looks great in the game..

[pummumu]

Truly amazing work! I have beat the game, and I really love it. Going back to play again for the 2nd time. I am very impressed on the art quality of the game ( animated normal map on cloth , the hair cards and all ) :D
Impressive :tu:

[RicardoAriza]

Hey hey hey!
Its good to see this stuff up here. Great looking models! I especially like the image of Drake with the gun. Not to mention the card job you did on Elena's hair looks sweet (although i wouldve changed her hair to red ahahhah j/k).
Cheers,
Biscuit

[Katonc]

Nice Work bro! Glad you posted. This stuff is sweet. Now tyler and ricardo, where you guys at? Lets see it! Rich I still look at that hair and cringe, that looks like a ton of work! Respect

Great work guys!

Katon

[Super Glitcher]

beautiful work :D

[Diamant]

yea Ricardo! when are you gonna stop being lazy and post yours as well!! :)


and yea Katon.. that was a bitch to do haha. hair sux!

thanks Pete ,Pum, and super!

any of you guys going to the gnomon thing this weekend?

[Sebcesoir]

really cool, very interesting...

The dead body is just terrific!:tu: :tu:

[Yari Jindou]

oh wow how did i miss this, these are very nice models, top row easily! they look so lifelike! the hair really does make it instead of break it, you have a very nice eye for composition too, the images flow nicely.

[Kupo]

wow....amazing works present here...
love all the models and i dig the hand-paint textures...
looks really fresh :D

[Gogitason]

Awesome work Diamant, love the models :)

[kolbyjukes]

I seriously love Uncharted, one of the best games I've played in a long time, you and your team should be very proud. I can't wait for a sequel.

-K.

[r0xmys0x]

The dead body sculpt is outstanding, love the gesture in the hands. Well done and congratulations :tu:

[arkm]

Awesome man!

[prince-des]

amazing work :o

[Gaboon]

Wow! Impressive and inspiring. 22k to 30k for IN GAME? Or cinimatic? What engine did you guys use?

Wonderful work :)

[alexleia]

Great work man!

Alex Oliver

[Diamant]

thanks guys!

Gaboon - in game and cinematic.. they are both the same exact models and textures.. no difference.. we created our own in house engine.

[gookle]

Great work. very beautifull model. thank for share this.:) :tu: :tu:

[shellsing]

Awesome work : D

[thunder27111]

very great model but everytime i look at Drake he reminds of Dane cook can anyone agree maybe just a little


Words Cant Even Describe Ur Models:tu: :tu: :tu:

[skulll_monster]

great works !

[ivo d]

nice work, love the low level shapings of all the models, especially visible in the mummy like character, less is more ,they always say,:tu:

[super]

WOW~ Nice work. :tu:
I like your textures, how to do so wonderful textures ?

[Frenchy Pilou]

...movies's posters! :cool:

[Breoniks]

What more can I say? ;) It was a great project and these pics are a perfect example of its quality. Great work bro!

[Jim McPherson]

Hi Rich!
This stuff looks awesome! The game models we just did at Gentle Giant for Goldenaxe were Zbrush sculpted and mostly handpainted with a bit of photo stuff on top. Maybe that's new trend.
I'm wondering what's this mean below?:
WailingMonkey- doing the hair was a pain!! i think it took almost 2 days to get to look right. i ended up writing a mel script that helped a little with laying out and bi-railing all the strands. i used nurbs curves and converted them to polys after. each strand i would lower accordingly. it wasn't fun!

Thanks
Jim McP

[piz]

Wow Diamant! Really cool work!!!:tu: :cool: :tu:
but... honestly I can't wait for a new Jak and Dexter in a Next Gen Way!!! :lol:

[copain]

Amazing stuff Rich, fantastic game!

I know your the lead character artist, but what about the environment art for the game, any zbrush there?

thx steve

[Diamant]

Thanks everyone!

Super - all the textures are hand painted inside of zbrush. I tend to use the colored spray alot as well as alphas with the drag brush to drag random pattern and breakup onto the model. In the end I try to treat the map as a painting reather then a mimick of reality. I put just enough in to let the viewer fill in the blanks. sometimes less is more to quote ivo d.

This is also a personal preference of mine. I tend to like the more hand sculpted and hand painted feel of a model. In the end it looks more like a piece of art then something just trying to mimick reality. I think this is one way to stay away from the whole Uncanney Valley thing a lot of people are falling into these days.

Jim- This could be one of the reasons people are starting to go more down that route. Its also one of the main reasons I love Naughty Dog. We all really want to create a world that is our own. Not one that just mimicks reality. That is why all our work is hand painted and hand sculpted. I think in the end people will look at our game and hopefully not critisize it the same way they would from one that is trying to mimick reality. We really wanted to create our own Universe and I'm very proud at what we all accomplished.

so to answer your question.. what i did was create a nurbs curve.. that was pretty much the guide for the strand of hair. I then created two more straight line curves. These acted as the rails for the first curve. if you snap the ends of the straight curves to the start and tip of the guide curve, you can create a birail from that.. what that does is create a nurbs patch using the first straight line to determine the width and angle, then the second staight line to determine the end with and end angle. The patch will follow the guide curve. Hopefully this makes sense..

now the problem with this is after you create the birail, you wont be able to move the tips or start position of the guide hair. If you do it will break the history and your nurbs patch will dissapear. You'll then have to re snap the ends of both straight lines and re-create the birail.

so what i did was create a mel script that would take the two straight lines and point constrain the tips of those to the starting point and tip of the guide hair. That way if i moved the tips or starting position of the guide hair the lines will stay attached and move with it. Now when i create the birail, i can move the nurbs curves freely without breaking the history of the object.

regardless of this whole approach, I still had to create each strand manually and position them accordingly. So in the end it was a pain but a necessary pain. We are working right now on a better solution that should solve a lot of the heart ache of making hair. I'll save that for Uncharted 2 :)

hope this clears some things up!

piz- we'll see what happens with that. Our focus right now however is on Uncharted. There really is no talk yet about whether we will be doing another Jak. There are a ton of people who do want it though, so i wouldn't rule it out completely!

copain- zbrush was actually used a ton for our environment art. It was used a little differently then the norm however. Our environment guys really utilized the 2d aspects of zbrush for creating thier textures. I'll see if i can get anybody from that side to come on and maybe post some work or insite into thier methods.

thanks again!
-Rich

[nightwoodwolf]

great explanation for making the hair thank you, i used to extrude polys over a curve for female hair DUH ( beginners old trick ) !! which one end represent the root of the hair and the end is the tip; moving CVs then hit extrude , your approach is very professional .. but let me tell you .. you got me really curious now about the new solution. ;) gonna wait for Uncharted 2 so you can share your other approach.:lol:

and the textures are all hand painted inside zbrush ? lil bit of photo layering on top or totally poly painting you mean ??

awesome work really :tu:

[Jim McPherson]

Hi Rich,
Thanks for the hair info! You made me think of another question....
Did you have issues with the cavity masking painting in terms of jagged pixel edges? Maybe you don't use the cavity masking too much. I was increasing the size of the map, then doing some blurring then adding noise , then unsharpenmask.

My coworker thought to get rid of big pixels in poly painted maps that you would have to increase the number of polys to 8 million and export to at least a 6K map, with a document size of 4K if you use any Zapp link at all.

Anyway I really like the stylization you can get with fully painted maps
Thanks,
Jim

[piz]

Don't worry Diamant! I'm sure your company will do a new issue of Jak... he he he... as the Insomniac Guys did a new R&C... ;)

[Zanrok]

Congrats on the amazing characters! They are very very well done!

I had a quesiton though. I know you are the Lead Character Artist and you probably do not have much time for this. But I would love to see some more of your workflow. Perhaps a tutorial? a video and or screenshots would be amazing!

I would even pay for it! :)

Thanks a bunch and keep up the fantastic work!

[ke]

Great model and bravo for the hair.

Well done!

[alannoon]

What an absolutely stellar game. Fantastic.

I bought the game Saturday morning and had played all the way through, twice, by Sunday night. I'll start my third play through tonight. (Just gotta get my brawler medals now!)

Obviously a lot of work went into the main characters, and it shows as you get to see them up close quite a bit during the game. One thing that was a bit unfortunate however was that the player doesn't really get a good look at the secondary characters. During the game, I got the impression that they were of a reduced fidelity, but upon playing trough a second time and unlocking a couple of the new character costumes I can see that they too have quite a considerable amount of detail in them. Can we see some hi res shots of those guys?

I would love to see some of the environment work as well.

Again, top notch work. I can't wait for Uncharted 2!

[Teyon]

Loved the game! The gang at NaughtyDog know how to tell a story! :) The characters are wonderful to look at as well as to watch move. Great work!

[Jason Michaud]

A really good piece of art keep up the good work.;)

[AikoWorld]

This is very cool, thx for sharing, viewing your hair methodes gave me a different perspective on approuching the creation of hair.

Thx very much.

[thegraybox]

Hi Diamant.

You said that the colored images were screen captures from Maya, yes? That's what it looks like in the viewport? Pretty amazing stuff. May I ask if you had to integrate maya with other apps/engines or use any custom shaders to achieve this effect? I'm not too familiar with the game development pipeline.

[slashpot]

That's some damn fine sculpting Rich, the sculpt of the girls face is sublime. The lines and proportions so exquisitely delicate, just beautiful.


The hair too is quite amazing, I'd love more info on the method, although it looks bloody painful!

Congratulations, on the amazing work...I hate you!

;)

[Diamant]

Hi guys, sorry for the late reply.. been a little busy here.

anyway, lets answer some questions!!

nightwoodwolf - the new approach we are playing with now involves a little programer help. its a plugin. but hopefully it will be worth it! you'll have to wait though for full details :) so yes, the textures are all hand painted inside of zbrush. there is no photo layering on top. just straight up poly painting or texture map painting. Drake and Elena were made in zbrush 2 so there was no poly painting at the time. The maps were made with just projection master. Poly painting now is much better though!!

Jim- yes, i've had those same issues. I'll tend to do a similar approach by making a separate map for cavety that is black and white, then bringing it into photoshop, blurring it a bit, and overlaying it on top of the color map if needed. Recently i've just been painting with cavety turned on in poly paint. It does get a bit jaggy but i just smooth and paint over it after. I've always found that too much cavety for humans anyway tends to make them feel a little rock like.. so i use it very minimally.. I used it for the mummy however and just painted over the jaggy edges after and it worked fine.. but yes.. its a little frustrating not being able to adjust how it blends..

I dont really think increasing the poly count makes a difference. I'm pretty sure its just the way they calculate the cavity. The mummy was around 8 mil and i still had those issues. but who knows.. i'm sure you can find some ways around it.. i guess it really depends on how accurate you need the cavity.

piz - we'll see :)

Zanrok - what exactly would you like tutorials on? i've always been thinking of doing something but there are so many tutorials out there already that its hard to really show something unique. let me know what you'd like to see and i can see if its something easy to put together..

alannoon- the secondary characters, pirates, etc, are a little lower in quality. Quality meaning less polygons, smaller texture maps, and fewer texture maps, as well as reduced material properties. The reason for this is obvious. They were not the center of attention and did not need to be as high. They still do have a nice ammount of detail in them. We managed to pull off some impressive results with the small budget we had. Tyler Breon and Ricardo Ariza were the artists responsible for all the secondary characters. I can't really show thier work for them though, they are on these forums and actually replied in this thread. Ricardo is on vacation now, and Tyler switched over to Sony Santa Monica. You might want to hit them up and hopefully they can post thier work!

Environment guys I guess dont like to show thier work either. I'll try to hit them up too.. just up to them ya know.

AikoWorld - glad i can help!! :)

thegraybox - yep, they are screen captures from maya. The only thing i did was put some depth of field blurr in and clean up some of the jaggies since maya doesn't anti alias. so yea, thats what it looks like in the viewport.. remember, these are our custom materials where we overwrite maya's opengl settings for our own. That allows us to have our own custom cgfx shaders that pretty much are the ones used in game. We dont have a direct connection to our game, yet, but we can tweak all our parameters in maya, then just export it to the game and view them in there. There are some limitations but overall its the same shader so what you see in maya is pretty much what you are going to get in the game.

maya is very tightly integrated with our engine. We have a ton of custom tools and plugins that allow us to pretty much do anything in maya and have it come through in game. Its almost like our own custom version.

hope this helps.. i know its a little ambiguous i just can't really get into specifics since its all proprietary software.

slashpot - Thanks for that! girls are hard work! regarding her hair, i gave a somewhat in depth explanation on how i created it on one of the past pages. If you have any other questions feel free to ask!

thanks again everyone for your comments!

-Rich

[RicardoAriza]

alannoon & Diamant - ok i promise when i get back from my vacation (sometime in January)...I'll stop being lazy and post up some of the characters i did from Uncharted (Sully, Eddy, Roman, descendants, pirates, etc). I would do it sooner but i don't have any of that work here at home :(
-Ricardo

[nightwoodwolf]

Diamant .. thanks for taking the time answering all the questions i personaly do appreciate it ... great work keep it up :tu:

[tortilla1]

Beautifull work !
I really like the whole art direction of the game. Reminds me of the adventure comic books I used to read when I was a kid. The facial animation work as shown in that quicktime on gametrailers is very impressive indeed. That's based on Jason Osipa's "Stop Staring" I presume.
Looks amazing with those blended-in normal-crease-maps.
Did you use any normalmap blending on cloth creases as well, or is it just the density of the mesh that makes it deform so convincingly?
I still can't believe the polycount on those characters !
I guess it's just very clever game-design!

Thanks for sharing !

[Diamant]

tortilla1 - I'm glad you like the art direction of the game. We did try to do something a little different from the norm.

The facial animation was not based on Jason Osipa's "Stop Staring" actually. Our Lead TD, Judd Simantov, wrote his own facial system for us that is based off of joints instead of blend shapes. He did a GDC talk on it last year and there should be a paper available somewhere online describing it.

The clothes were all done with normal map blending. There really is no deforming geometry besides the basic weighting. Just some clever use of wrinkle maps :)

The PS3 really is a beast with handling polygons. I'd say its more our engine then game design that allows us to have that much on screen. We have some extremely smart people working here!

Thanks again!

-Rich

[womball]

Would a joint based facial rig be harder to implement? It looked really complex from the movies in the game. I'm currently making an animation, and would like to try both styles of facial rigs for my main characters. Shape keys for one, joints for the other.

[Diamant]

its a lot harder to impliment dependent on how you implement it. Blend shapes are pretty straight forward. Joints, once you've set up and painted the weights, can be sdk'd into poses, etc.. however, what we have is a bit more complex. Its an infinite pose based system with fixer shapes. This is all done within a plugin and probably impossible without writing one yourself.

I'd do a search for Judd's GDC paper and see if you can understand the ideas. Regardless, you might only be able to impliment a portion of it without any API knowledge.

Might be better off sticking with blendshapes. It is the easiest method for quick artist friendly expressions.

[Aery]

My best compliments, you and your guys do a great job and source of inspiration. I'm very happy to see al textures are painted, this give a more deep and personality to the character and the final result is awesome.

Animation and modelling are excellent and I'm sure with a more deeper knowledge on PS3 the art/visual department can include more and more ideas!

At least the game is one of the best of this year, incredible playbility, excellent music/sound and again, great character.

Compliments again, a great work and hope to see more and new Nathan's chapter :)

[soulreaver]

Hi Diamant,

Great work, excellent details & a great game too...:)

....also pls tell Amy Lee to create another Legacy of Kain Game. We fans are eagerly waiting for it. :cry:

[Zanrok]

Rich,

First off, thanks a lot for replying! As far as a tutorial, I would love to see how you create a realistic character from start to finish. Seeing a professional's workflow is always a great help when learning how to use and master techniques in different programs.

Hope all is well at the studio, thanks so much.

-Zanrok

[borden]

Just wanted to congratulate the whole team of Naughty Dog for the great game they've made!
(Beating the game for second time, right now:D)
It's amazing how much detail has been put in this game, it trully is the BEST looking game on the PS 3 or any other platform!
Can't wait for the part 2;) :tu:


EDIT
oh and the "next gen" effect(great way to mock the games that are overusing glow effects):D :tu: :tu:

[aesis412]

great post the models look great i like the female one in scubba gear alot. I have played the game and it looks amazing overall chracters and environments, congrats to a job well done. Thanks for sharing

[lildragon]

Hiya Rich, a colleague here at the office showed me this thread and I'm glad he did, great work and I just started playing the game last night. Mesmerizing!

I was wondering about that GDC document tho, I think it might come in handy. If you can locate it, it would be appreciated!

~t

[OrgoneGhost]

weird that i just saw this thread. i used to work w/ you at naughtydog. my names adam marquis - i did environment art (textures).
i was on uncharted in the *early* stages, but worked on all the jak games.
good stuff man!

cheers

-Adam

[marktse]

how did you texture the skin. was it drivin by a sub surface scattering shader? what is the best way to pain the skin color on to the zbrush model? do you use the paint tools or is there another program thats better?

[bloodstorm]

Some real quality models here, great work! All the faces have a believable aspect too them which is not an easy task. Thanks for posting these!

[splodge]

The game was absolutely gorgeous.

But god that end sequence made me soooo angrRRRrY!! :mad:

Took me a billion attempts to kill that bastard with the gun on the boat. I really hate games with set pieces.

But still, beautiful graphics!. Well done! :)

[Jester]

That game was the best I've ever played, and restarted immediately after finishing it.

By the way, I do hope, that they not switched to mudbox, though Rich' website contains GDC slides suggesting it... :(

[Diamant]

thanks again guys.. I'm glad people are still enjoying the game!

so the texture of the skin was hand painted. the shader tried to mimick a sss feel but was a complete fake.. as are most sss shaders. I painted all the skin inside of zbrush with either poly paint or just texture projection on a map.. nothing too crazy..

splodge... i feel your pain :)

Jester.. We still use zbrush at naughty dog. I was just asked by Autodesk to do a talk on thier behalf. That is why the GDC slides feature Mudbox. Honestly, I'm going to use whatever tool is needed to get the job done. As I'm sure most people will. As of now Zbrush is doing everything we need to do and is the primary tool used at Naughty Dog. Competition is nice though. It'll only bring innovation!

Thanks again everyone!
-Rich

[marktse]

by hand painting you mean in zbrush or in an app like painter or photoshop. i find that i can't seem to blend colors very well just on the spay, intensity slider, vairance and stuff alone and it upsets me. Using a roll on skin texture works sometimes but then scaling becomes an issue. any advice?

its its useful for you in the future i found using turtle i can render sss fairly fast. Except they don't have any tutorials to adjust the slider so it looks like real skin. instead it looks more like a clay surface when i have global illumination with some edge glow.

[BillyG]

Awesome models, unique style of art, great game.

[TDunn87]

wow... just amazing

[Jester]

Hey Rich,

I'm waiting for the next installation of Uncharted! I'm sorry that the girl character is dropped.

By the way, I felt during the game the characters were based upon several actors. For example Drake reminded me to Dean Cain a bit, while the girls has some Jennifer Aniston look, the old guy had a bit of Christopher Walken. That made me feel very good, because I felt that I know these characters.