Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/57248
Special Gaming Section features a new character, the villain Marlowe, shown here with the umbrella. The artists spent a great deal of time on the skin details and pores of the characters, and repainted the hair on the returning cast. Mocap was used at the base of all the animation, but it was always tweaked by hand to some degree. Charlie Cutter; Marlowe's man Talbot; the pirate leader Rameses; and Chloe Frazer, who assists the heroes in their quest. Most of these characters are returning cast from the series (Drake, Elena, Chloe, and Sully). Making her debut in Uncharted 3 is Marlowe, who, contends Sze Jones, lead char- acter artist, was the most challenging to create. "Marlowe is an older antagonist, and the chal- lenge was to make her appear strong, regal, and beautiful, with a twist of evilness behind her," she adds. "And to bring her into the story and make her the new character that stands out with all these other legendary game char- acters was challenging." The returning characters, while not new, re- quired some work as well. "You don't want to make any changes that take them away from what they looked like before in the previous games, but you also want to take advantage of new techniques like shaders, hair, that sort of thing," says Scherr. Sully, on the other hand, re- quired a more extensive overhaul—because he had little screen time in Uncharted 2, the group used the original model from Uncharted 1 in that release. For Uncharted 3, they resculpted his face and body, taking care to maintain his general appearance from the previous titles. "We did a lot of polishing on the skin de- tails and the pores," says Jones. "We also re- painted most of the hair." While there were only a few characters in the main cast, the artists still had their hands full. Each of the lead virtual actors had a num- ber of variations—Drake had more than 15 alone that encompassed his different looks (from his business wear to his desert attire), and as the levels progressed, the character be- comes more worse for wear, which is reflected 24 February/March 2012 in the model. The artists also created young versions of Drake, Sully, and Marlowe for a flashback scene. "I think we had more charac- ter models in this game than in any of the two previous games combined," says Morrison. Additionally, the game contains numerous non-player characters. "The variety of NPCs are five to six times that of Uncharted 2," Mor- rison adds. To build the models, the artists used Auto- desk's Maya for incrementing the models into the game, Pixologic's ZBrush for the skin detail and general shape of the body and clothing, and Autodesk's Mudbox for textur- ing. They also used Autodesk's 3ds Max for retopologizing and poly modeling, as well as xNormals to extract normal maps. Animating the Characters The game contains a great deal of motion- captured data, which was used as a starting base for almost all the in-game and cinematic char- acter animation. The facial animation, however, was keyframed. "The cinematics start with mo- cap and are edited like you would a standard feature film," says Scherr. For the gameplay, though, the group starts with mocap data, but because the real-time animation has to be pre- cisely tuned to work within the parameters of the design, it gets tweaked and changed, and sometimes completely thrown out. "But it is always a good starting base," he adds. In particular, actions such as the hand-to- hand melee and fighting moves are largely cleaned-up mocap, but most of the base mo- tion, such as running and sliding, tends to start as mocapped data and then is changed signifi- cantly or becomes straight-up keyframe anima- tion. The team also uses an animation layering system for the gameplay that enables them to add, or layer, animations (a flinch during a run, for instance) to incorporate more personality into the character. "Likewise, we have a base cover move and hundreds of different poses that we can then add on top that allows [Na- than] Drake to take cover in 100 different ways without us having to save 100 different anima- tions," says Scherr. "It's an incredibly complex system that has worked well for us." The Naughty Dog team uses a 15- by 12- foot motion-capture stage on the Culver Stu- dios lot that contains approximately 80 to 90 Vicon cameras. The stage was built with the help of Sony, though Naughty Dog had full in- put into the design. The mocap was processed by Sony San Diego using Vicon's tool set, pieced together in Autodesk's MotionBuilder, and delivered to Naughty Dog as a Maya file. At the mocap stage, the crew sometimes cap- tures six or so actors at once, acquiring charac- ter interactions resulting from complex chore- ography or sets, or a combination of the two. For the sets, the group uses a simple modular system of gray platforms and risers that can be configured to be almost anything—steps to an ancient temple or the interior of a bar in Cartagena, Columbia. "We will bring the level geometry with us to the mocap stage and, using markers on the set, will line up everything to match the game level," explains Scherr. The most complicated mocap work for Uncharted 3 involved stunt work on wires for the scene in which Drake is dangling from the back of a cargo plane. "We hired a stunt per- former and did a bunch of stuff on wires so we could get that zero-gravity feel as he is climb- ing up the supports of the truck and grabbing on for dear life," explains Scherr. "That was probably one of the most difficult shots we had in terms of just setting up." Unlike some studios that have separate voice and physical actors, at Naughty Dog, the physi- cal actors are the voice actors, with the team recording the voice/dialog at the same time as the motion capture. "We have been doing that since the very beginning," says Guerrette. Level Building The artists also used Maya and ZBrush to construct the game's environments, which, in Naughty Dog style, are brimming with inter- esting objects and set pieces. The artists used ZBrush to create surfaces and surface textures in 3D, paint them, and bake them down to low-res 2D textures, using the 3D models to complement the 2D textures when applicable. "Our texture artists are sculptors at this point," says Morrison. "More and more they are do- Unc harted 3