thanks guys!!
there are more images on all of our websites.. i'll post a couple wireframes here though..
here is the matcap that i made as well for the skin.. feel free to use it..
wayniac - the wigs ranged a bit dependent on the character.. Drake's hair is around 4k tri's.. chloe's is around the same..
Drake's hair was done with a couple different alpha and texture cards.. really one alpha and texture map just different ones scattered.. nothing too crazy actually.. pretty standard..
the in game renders do use a fake SSS shader.. its used for our cinematics and the game version uses a slightly dulled down version. It renders the skin to a separate target and does some magic there :) .. pretty amazing stuff actually. have to thank our graphics programmer John Hable for that one!
time frame is a hard one.. things change so much here that things are really never done until the game is shipped.. if i had to put a time on a character, i'd say about a month and a half to 2 months.. but again, some were done with tighter deadlines, others changed so much that I'm not sure I could even put a time on it..
our lod's were originally hand modeled.. it was annoying.. we then went with an automatic PM solution which is what you see in game.. Drake however never gets LOD.. except for multiplayer.. but single player is the high resolution model the whole time.. same model that is in the cinematics.
the models ranged a bit as well.. drake was around 37k .. chloe was at 45k at her highest... each level of LOD was cut in half with 3 different levels. lowest being around 2500 poly's..
DBriggs- I can try to go into our workflow a bit later.. if any of you guys will be at GDC i'm doing a talk which will cover a lot of that..
sometimes I would texture the high poly before going onto the low poly.. however, this time around I tried a slightly different approach of sampling first, then texturing the low poly.. it works pretty well.. however, it makes it harder when big changes happen or when you need to show off the work.. I think next time around I will stick with doing everything on the high and transferring to the low..
the hair is actually modeled full in Maya.. not zbrush.. I just bring it in zbrush to see how it looks on the full model.. but most of the time its tweaked after the low has been made..
the skin again is a custom SSS material.. the texture maps are hand painted to work with the material.
if I missed anything please ask again.. I'll try to go into more detail at a later time. in a little bit of a rush as I'm going on vacation in the morning :)
by the way... I wanted to thanks all the character guys on our team.. I should have stated this above..they deserve it! so awesome job and big thanks to Hanno Hagedorn, Darcy Korch, Bryan Wynia, Corey Johnson, Judd Simantov, and Ryan Trowbridge. You guys kicked ass!!
Also big thanks to the rest of the team at Naughty Dog.. Our work would be nothing without all of them!
-Rich