Game Developers Conference 2012

Wanna know some tips and tricks in regarding fx in the game industry? You're in luck! A whole slew of bad asses from Naughty Dog will be giving talks at the Game Developers Conference this year. Hold on to your hats and let me brush over a few of the talented people who will be giving talks from our studio.

Keith Geurrette: Lead Visual Effects Artist on Uncharted, will be giving a 60 minute lecture on our fx pipeline and the unique situations we are often tasked with resolving. He'll be going over some tricks we use in creating dynamic textures for our particle systems. Keith is super clever when it comes to thinking on your feet and a lot of what he creates at work usually leaves me thinking "Damn, I don't think I would have thought of that". He is going to be giving away a lot of good info at his lecture so I wouldn't miss it if I were you.

Eben Cook: Lead Visual Effects Artist on The Last of Us, will be giving a 25 minute lecture on something a little more specific. Eben will be discussing the hall flood scene in the Cruise Ship level of Uncharted. He came up with several uber clever techniques to tackle some of the difficult limitations we face daily for the flood. Eben has a brain that I would eat if it could make me smarter. You'll kick yourself if you miss this one too.





Marshall Robin: Rendering Programmer on Uncharted and The Last of Us, will be giving a 60 minute lecture on the tech behind our particle effects in Uncharted. His talk will cover our particle tool pipeline, data structures, and shader techniques. That is just a rough idea of what will be covered. Marshall was our dedicated programmer for fx on Uncharted 3. The tech he gives us to be able to do what we do is brilliant. That shouldn't surprise you. The man is brilliant. This talk would be good for artists to see because understanding how things work is all a part of creating great work. You have to know how your are doing something so you can collaborate with people like Marshall to push the tools. Respect your programmers world.

Carlos Gonzalez-Ochoa: Rendering Programmer on Uncharted, will be giving a 60 minute advanced programming lecture on the water system in Uncharted. I have mentioned Carlos before in this blog and if you want to to know what his water systems can do, you need only look at the ship graveyard level below. This procedural water system will blow you away. I worked a lot with Carlos using his system for levels in Uncharted 3 and it never stopped amazing me. He is also the creator of our flow shader that we use in our water shader. Even if the dialogue in this talk is over your head, I wouldn't miss it because you will get to see this tech in action and it iiiiiiiiiiiiiiissssssssss niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice.

There will be other Dogs there giving talks so I suggest you get signed up asap. There are going to be a huge number of other talks to add some wrinkles to your brain, and who wouldn't want that!?

The Last of Us

I am currently working on The Last of Us. We recently unveiled the game at the VGA's to a great reception. I'm sure you have seen this trailer by now but it's still really really good. You can tell my control over the English language is astounding. This is our first M rated game. This is a snippet taken from our studio's website briefly describing the game.

"The Last of Us is a genre-defining experience that blends survival and action elements to tell a character driven tale about a modern plague decimating mankind. Nature encroaches upon civilization, forcing remaining survivors to kill for food, weapons and whatever they can find. Joel, a ruthless survivor, and Ellie, a brave young teenage girl who is wise beyond her years, must work together to survive their journey across what remains of the United States."

A large part of the visual effects were handled by Mike Dudley. A really talented artist on our team. Of course there are a huge number of great artists who worked on this reveal trailer. That's all I can say for now. For more info go check our studio, Naughty Dog's site. Enjoy.

The Ship Graveyard Video

So here is a quick run through of some stuff showing off the water and what not in the level It is in HD so that's good. One of the other cool things about the water was that Carlos added the ability to darken the water with hand painted maps. This created some really cool shadows on the water. Enjoy

The Ship Graveyard

Water

Ahhhhhh The Ship Graveyard. Water everywhere. The hollowed out remains of ships scattered about. This is a very dynamic level as the water that drives the movement of the objects is completely procedural and it's movements are evaluated at runtime. I can't begin to describe how amazing the tech that controls the water is..........but I will try. Carlos Gonzalez Ochoa, one of our rendering programmers who I have mentioned before, developed the ocean system for Uncharted. I won't reveal all of the super intricate details behind it's functionality but I will tell you how I was able to manipulate it. Carlos gave us the ability to control the ocean system through a series of unique i.d's. Each unique i.d is assigned a set of parameters that control the waves. I was able to adjust these values until we got to what we wanted. This ranged from calm small wave movements escalating all the way up to the huge waves at the end in the Rough Seas. Carlos also created a shader for the ocean that I was able to use to create the look of the oceans for the level and in other parts of the game. One of our gameplay programmers, Ryan Broner, (also awesome) developed a way for objects to move with the surface of the ocean. So the objects and the ocean never move the same way all the time. All this randomness and chaos. How the heck is one to put particles on that? I'm glad you asked. Marshall Robin, our dedicated fx programmer, supplied us with a particle emitter type that could do the same thing Ryan's tech did with objects, except, it additionally could evaluate the velocity of the water as it rises and falls. This gave us a way to spawn particles only when the water rose fast enough. This is how we got splashes on the sides of objects. Randomness plays an important role in making things look more natural. Nature is random.

Tidal Wave

Carlos gave us a way to create a profile curve to make a wave in a shape we could control while the rest of the ocean would still do it's thing. Peter Field, the level designer, created a simple curve that was animated and scripted into the game. Once we had the tidal wave shape it was time for some particles. I key-framed several emitters on and off based on camera cuts trying to get a shape that would look good. I ran into an issue of overdraw with the shader being used on the water particles being a little too expensive and at the end of the sequence these particles would fill the screen tanking the frame rate. Eventually I reduced the cost by using a cheaper shader and this allowed me to increase the particle count by A LOT. Turned out pretty good.

On top of all of this technical stuff, I want to recognize the artistry that created the assets in the level. The amount of detail is amazing to me even now. A lot of hard work and many many hours. Matt Morgan must have created 20 different variations on the lighting, and I saw Simon Craghead at his desk...........he never left it. Check out some images below. I'll add a video in a little while

Artists on this level

Background: Simon Craghead

Foreground: Mike Hatfield, Christophe Desse

Lighting: Matt Morgan

Visual FX: Doug Holder

(I will update with the others)

Dynamic Materials UDK Part 3: Level integration

Here is the final segment of the 3 part tutorial I have made on using dynamic materials in UDK for particles. This one is short and I just go over a few details in placing the particle effect in a level and adding something to one of the materials to assist with it's integration while also demonstrating the dynamic parameter use in cascade. Nothing special but something to tie it all together.

Dynamic Materials UDK Part 2: Smoke

This is the second part of the 3 part tutorial on creating dynamic materials for use on particles in UDK. I learned this technique while working with the guys at Naughty Dog. This technique is really cool because you aren't relying on a flipbook of a sim you created in a 3d package. Flipbooks are usually very specific to what they were created for and using a sim you made on multiple effects doesn't really pan out. With dynamic materials you can use one material for a large number of fx. Most commonly and widley used for me is this smoke material. With the dynamic parameter hook up you can have it move slowly and this material can be used for subtle smoke in corners like lingering dust and ground fog or very fast smoke from a fire. It can be used all over the place. The real control is in the particle system and not the material. Check out the video and keep an eye out for the third part I will be putting together soon.

***UPDATE

Currently this video looks like it is an hour long but it isn't. There is a whole chunk of black that got rendered out and I will correct this but in the meantime just view it until it goes black and that's it. There is no secret ending. :P

Yemen Temple

Yemen Temple was one of the coolest looking levels in my opinion. The puzzles were really cool because they didn't rely on some kind of engine trick, they were all visual tricks that you could see in real life. In the FX department we made these water meshes the require a complicated technique. In the end the water ways were covered by a grate and you never see the animation of the water. You can see it flowing though so it's still cool. Check out some stills from the level below. Keith created some fx for the level as well. He made the fires that light up the words at the end of the level as well as torches. He worked with one of our programmers Charles Tangora to create a torch effect that would inherit some of Drakes movements as he swung the torch. So the torch has a kind of cloth like foreground element that has a material Keith made for it. The material has a threshold value that animates as Drake swings it to break the flames up a bit when it's swung. Nice. I did some atmosphere effects, and water fx including the water in the hub of the level. I also did the fx for the smoke bomb fight at the end. There are also a couple of stills from Yemen Chase for some fx I worked on. The rest of Yemen Chase was done by the talented Iki Ikram.

Here is a list of cool people whom worked on this level.

Background Modeler: David Baldwin

Texture Artists: Adam Marquis/Khanh Nguyen

Lighting: Eva Krzeminski/David Witters

Foreground Artists: Paul Moya/Christophe Desse

IGC Animator: Troy Slough

FX Artists: Keith Guerette/Doug Holder