My personal suspicion is having a "next-gen toolchain." And I don't really mean just technology, but I'd take a guess that is one aspect of it... a big one as well.
But whatever workflow they have that is coordinating their efforts which is being done, it seems to all be directing that effort into the right place where it counts and shows on screen, on that I think that is probably one of their very exceptional
I think it may be one of those examples where the human interaction or cooperation and inter-cooperation on tasks, maybe it's really that taking their stuff to the next level. Maybe that is the team managers role that they are doing very exceptionally, I dunno.
After all getting the right people to the right tasks to get the right output is probably what that job is I guess? I'm not a middle manager personally
And not to say Naughty Dog is not talented or doesn't have individual talent. My guess is just that possibly combined with a seemingly ideal workflow or system that is getting.
And a lot of it has to be expert resource management too no? GPU bandwidth and GPU memory at least for sure. There must be a lot of talking going on between teams to figure out just what can be fit into each scene.... the PS4 is a limited console by GPU power I suppose already.... so to fit all this into a PS4 game at 1080p30 is pretty much wizardry imo....
I do wonder how much Uncharted 4 costed though. 80 or 120 million USD maybe? 150 or 200 million? Hard to even ballpark
It's not just the face, but the clothing and peripherals. There are no shadows at all.
Of course it's not, and we can find worst-case images for any game. Your subsequent images have AO around the clothing detailing. That's why I said it looked like a bug. I think it's just more a limit of current rendering tech by and large. We just need someone to take lighting forwards as far as ND have taken AA in UC4!
I think it's probably shaded on a more macro level. Like his arm will usually cast a shadow on his body, but generally his nose will not cast a shadow on his face even if the lighting direction would suggest it should.
The only time the shading is really exceptional in gameplay is in Drake's house. I think they allowed a lot more shading and higher resolution shadows from the face in there. This is Drake in his house, even his nose is shaded correctly with multiple light sources in the (very small) scene I think. This one is photo mode though, but the shadows are the same actually in gameplay. Even his head and hair is casting a pretty impressive shadow on his body, and his nose has a nice shadow too, same with his eyebrows above his eyes and over his nose too.
If you compare "Bathroom Gameplay Drake" to "General Gameplay Drake" there is a very large discrepancy between the self-shadowing of his face. Like I mentioned there's far more self-shadowing of small features of his face over his body and even onto other parts of his face, which is just not present in other gameplay scenarios. Here you can't really look up his nose, where in the picture I pasted on the last page you can definitely look up his nose and it's very unnatural without the shading ^^
I mean in most games like this you're looking at the back of the character the whole time, and from a certain distance. So it makes more sense to really focus on the "macro" shading in there. Like a few pictures on the previous post show, the Drake gameplay model really fits in the scene especially viewing him from the back more (and further away too). The scale of the game is very large of course. We can't expect that much self-shading (yet
). Maybe the PS4 Neo version?
I also noticed in this game the camera seems like wider FOV and pulled further back from Drake in general. This probably gives some advantage to not having really high resolution self-shadowing on Drake's smaller character model features in general. And again from the back he looks like he fits in scenes far, far better than looking at him from the front.
The amount of detail, the quality of the detail and the sheer scale of it is absurdly good in UC4, I don't see Division, Doom or Battlefront coming close to match it honestly.
http://i.cubeupload.com/vFK6c2.jpg
http://i.cubeupload.com/lVkVdf.jpg
http://i.cubeupload.com/4TdZX2.jpg
Those are excellent screens. There's something about the way they put the scene together that just takes something that should look "just great" to a much higher level. It's very impressive.
I think DOOM and Battlefront are the best competition here for Naughty Dog. But I also think Naughty Dog steals the cake in the end.
They seem to be wizards at LOD management too. Most areas it's very difficult to notice LOD transitions, especially with how large the draw distance is for the foliage. The sheer density of micro-detailing and foliage, and the arrangement of that foliage, is nothing short of astonishing...
