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.
Thanks,
Jim
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… 
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!
Great model and bravo for the hair.
Well done!
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!
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!
A really good piece of art keep up the good work.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
Diamant … thanks for taking the time answering all the questions i personaly do appreciate it … great work keep it up 
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 !
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
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.
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.
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
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. 
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