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Special Gaming Section For flooding in the hallways of the cruise ship level, where Drake searches for the kid- napped Sully, the group used a Next Limit Real Flow simulation that was run through Side Effects' Houdini. The resulting mesh was then imported back into Maya for skinning before it was incorporated into the game. Like in the previous titles, the artists were able to manipulate the shaders to make the characters appear wet for certain sequences. For Uncharted 3, they utilized the same tech- nology to cover Drake with sand; a dynamic process involving particles forced the sand to flake off gradually. The giant mounds of sand off the surface," he adds. "So when you look, there was always some cool movement, and we decided to play that up in the game so it wouldn't feel like a dead level." There are two especially unique sequences in the game that, as Guerrette notes, are "the most densely packed section of smoke and mirrors" in terms of effects. The first involves one of the more unusual set environments that the group has ever done: for the scene in which Drake is dangling from the cargo plane. The environ- ment had to change from a static background into one that is fully dynamic, with its own vis- ibility system. It was parented to a foreground ocean was complete] without knowing what it would mean for them." New Course in Game Graphics It would seem that Uncharted 3, like the previ- ous games in the series, was done with film- making in mind. But as the crew at Naughty Dog points out, while they move in a similar direction as a feature film, they are just try- ing to make the most compelling experience possible in terms of gameplay. "Books, films, games, they all have different challenges, but in some ways are solving a lot of the same problems. It is important for us to look at Two levels especially challenged the team: One involved a sequence that transitioned from a static backdrop to one that is fully dynamic as Drake dangles from the back of a plane (above left), and the other is the cruise- ship level built on top of a complex water simulation (top right) that is physics-based. in the desert environments have their own baked simulations created within Houdini using a similar process as the flooding on the ship but without the use of RealFlow. The footprints in the sand, however, were accom- plished with particles and render buffers that were projected onto various surfaces. "The desert was the first time we had a level that was not that busy, and we had to make it look good without overwhelming the player with lots of detail and emotion," says Morri- son. "We have miles and miles of sand," says Guerrette. A precursor to this level was the train sequence in Uncharted 2. "We knew early on we were going to do the desert, so we spent a lot of time examining what makes a desert fun to look at without being bor- ing," Guerrette says. "A desert itself doesn't have movement. There are just dunes, no shrubs. The sea of dunes makes it compelling." To get a real-life reference for the level, some members of the team drove out to the Impe- rial Dunes near Yuma, where, says Guerrette, they discovered that even when it is stifling hot and seemingly stagnant, there is always some slight trickling of the sand. "It has a very fluid, liquid feel, almost like mercury running downhill, or a slight breeze pulling some sand 26 February/March 2012 object that was animated, so the entire piece of background moves in one large chunk. The challenge was the timing—theoretically, the player could hang out of the plane and watch the sand dunes on the ground go by for- ever, points out Morrison. "The environment looks like it is moving but wasn't; the back- ground was," he explains. "That is a traditional trick used by game developers, and we had avoided it, but in this case, making the environ- ment a looping one was the best option. It was a timed 3D model, and the edges were hidden by a skirt of alpha fog around the outside, so you couldn't see when it finished and popped. It was sort of like a crazy illusion of a horizon line." The other sequence involves quite a mov- ing scene as well. In fact, it is the cruise ship and dry-dock levels, which are entirely physics-based. Both levels are attached to a simulated dynamic ocean, which was built with mathematical curves and particle sim- ulations atop the mesh. "We spent about a year making this ocean work and had to figure out how to attach a level to it; the de- signers were then bound by the mood of this dynamic ocean and all the crazy things it was doing," says Guerrette. "The rest of the team had to build the environments [before the other mediums to see what we can learn from them or see what they are doing wrong and learn from that," says Scherr. While the studio has similar departments as an animation facility, that is where the similari- ties end, says Scherr. "We still have to get our project to run at 30 fps, so there is this entire technical challenge we have that films do not. And it's a game, so all the stuff we are doing probably won't mean anything unless the game is fun," he says. "So a lot of the decisions we make and the paths we go down will sometimes be altered or reversed depending on whether it is actually working as a game experience or not. Sometimes that will be a big, broad-stroke type of thing or something more subtle, like chang- ing the textures in the environment so the player can spot them more easily." Without question, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception is a high-production title that dares to inch close to the line separating games and films, and at times even stepping slightly across into movie territory. But make no mistake, Uncharted 3 foremost is al- labout interactivity and gameplay. The cutting-edge graphics are just an added bonus. n Use your smart- phone to access related videos. Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of Computer Graphics W orld.