Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/57248
Special Gaming Section ing textures in 3D, and it is saving us a bunch of time and making the images look really good at the same time." The artists also used Maya to build their game levels. Unlike many developers that use proprietary level editors, the Naughty Dog group uses Maya for that task, noting that the tool gives them more flexibility because there is a lot of lower-level scripting that they as artists are able to do in the software. "And it does not cost us any time since we are not building an editor," says Morrison. "We are focused on the final product, not on making tools for other companies to use." The studio does, however, have an editor of sorts that the designers use mostly for setting up events and scripts in the game—"higher- level stuff," Morrison adds. Despite the flexibility and ease of use that Maya offers the artists in this regard, it is not without limitations. "All our real-time lights in Maya are tricky to do, and seeing our shad- ers represented properly is also difficult," says Guerrette. "Lighting and rendering are prob- ably the biggest impediments [to using Maya to build levels]." For the first time in the Uncharted series, the artists were able to add high-res Maya spot- lights to scenes, which gave the team the abil- ity to create high-res shadows. The artists also made a lot of improvements in terms of general spherical harmonics to better situate the player character into the game environments. Simulations, Effects According to Guerrette, the game contains numerous simulated effects—some far more complex than others. In fact, Uncharted 3 is the first game wherein Naughty Dog had implemented cloth dynamics, achieved with Havok's Physics for various clothing, such as Marlowe's long jacket, as well as for the char- acters' hair and even torch fire. As Jones ex- plains, the low-poly cloth mesh is simulated, and the mesh drives a joint system. The game geometries are then skinned to the joints and transferred into the game. As a result, the art- ists are able to run the sims at 100 percent or weight them using the joints in the scene, so if they encountered cloth penetration issues, the artists could work around them more easily. In addition to the cloth sims, the game also contains particle simulations, rigid-body simu- lations, advanced 2D fluid simulations, and more. When the sims would have to behave consistently within the game, the team would often prebake them in Maya and save them out as animations. For smaller, incidental objects in the levels, the group would use dynamics. A New Dimension As if Uncharted 3 weren't filled with cutting-edge CG technology already, the team decided to take things even further by crafting the game in stereo to run on 3D televisions. "That was a big change for us and posed an interesting challenge for all the departments concerned," says Keith Guerrette, lead visual effects artist. One big concern was producing two rendered views of the scenes. "We questioned what we would have to sacrifice in order to maintain frame rates over 30 fps for both left- and right-eye renders," Guerrette says. The programmers came up with solutions and optimizations so that certain images were processed just once rather than multiple times. For instance, each eye view was rendered at only half-resolution, so the same number of pixels were present but on screen there was double the number of polygons. Also, the artists were selective about what would appear in 3D, and they used a lower level of detail for some characters and objects. "We automatically did that for foreground objects, so you had low-resolution meshes being rendered to achieve the 3D effect in frame rate," says Guerrette. The artists admit there was a learning curve in setting the cameras for the 3D environments. To help eliminate the eye-strain complaint that plagues many ste- reo projects, the crew for the most part had the programmers use Drake's back as the convergence point for the left and right eyes, so anything in front of Drake was in the screen at all times. "As a general solution, that worked pretty well. Occasionally, you would have some stuff sticking out of the screen and some unpleasant clipping, but because everything is moving quickly in the game, that is not something that would necessarily cause eyestrain in the long term," adds Josh Scherr, lead cinematic animator. And where they could, the artists would change the camera parameters to emphasize certain 3D moments. "We didn't want to make the 3D gimmicky; we wanted it to enhance the story," Scherr says. While the developers did not have to concern themselves with compositing issues due to the stereo, they did have to change the way they created some of the effects, especially particles, which are basically 2D cards floating in space (it becomes especially noticeable that they are flat within 3D). "For the fog, we tra- ditionally do one bit particle with a cool material on it. We had to cut back and do some more layering due to the 3D," says Guerrette. "We were scared when we were first approached about doing 3D with particles because of that, but when we started to do tests and threw in fire and stuff like that, it looked pretty good. We were able to build the element and layer it with enough different elements that it was hard to tell we used 2D cards. That was a huge relief." Nevertheless, the artists had a lot of happy 3D moments in the game that they swear happened by pure accident. For instance, the group points to scene in the chateau sequence during which a building falls down around Drake, and the hero must hang onto a wall as items fall around him. "We created that level before we actually got the 3D implemented, and when we turned on [the 3D], it was just so cool," says Guerrette. "Things created in 2D became more awesome in 3D," adds Teagan Morrison, lead technical artist. "Yet, we didn't deliberately attempt to make things look cool in 3D. We just tried to make things look cool. 3DTVs are still gaining market share slowly, and we didn't want to spent too much time on something was only going to be a appreciated by a small percentage of the audience." Oh, but how 3D really took some scenes to the next level. Take the one where Drake is hanging out of the plane, for example. "When we played it in 3D for the first time, it blew my mind because there is so much depth to the plane itself," says Morrison. "All this depth and dynamics suddenly popped. It couldn't have turned out better if we had planned those scenes in 3D from the start." Others agree. In fact, Naughty Dog received an International 3D Society Award for best 3D video game due to its effects in Uncharted 3. –Karen Moltenbrey February/March 2012 25