Uncharted 3

[Brad Grenz]

It's often fun to observe how a character looks very much like it's creator, for example Ratchet in Ratchet & Clank games looks a lot like Ted Price

Nathan Drake's original design seemed to consciously be based on Naughty Dog founder Jason Rubin.

Since then they've consciously modified the characters to resemble the actors playing them more closely.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Very, very high quality stuff there...

The lack of realistic eyelashes is starting to get disturbing. And unfortunately it's not enough to use a strip of polygons with alpha textures, they'll need to model individual lashes...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The lack of realistic eyelashes is starting to get disturbing. And unfortunately it's not enough to use a strip of polygons with alpha textures, they'll need to model individual lashes...

That's the sort of specialist case I'd suggest using a completely different renderer. Use a line-drawing algorithm capable for rendering very fine lines tracing curves and compositing. Each lash would be two or three points in 3D space. Should be an excellent fit for SPUs too.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

It's actually a bit more complicated, because the hair strands aren't straight, they're tapering off towards the end. They might also require some sort of shading, preferably with an anisotropic highlight; particularly on male characters, otherwise they can look like they're wearing some sort of make-up or eyeliner.

So it's a complex issue, in fact we always render eyelashes in a separate layer so that the compositors can finetune their color, transparency and other attributes to get the right look. Even slight changes in conditions like lighting or the distance from the camera can mess up the results, so tweaking in comp is a lot faster than trying to find a shader that works well in all cases.

 

[Nesh]

Found some direct feed shots at Gaf, shows how good the character models look

Those cant be real time though right?
If they arent it doesnt say anything. We always get high quality models in CGI. In game models cant look that good this generation.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's actually a bit more complicated, because the hair strands aren't straight, they're tapering off towards the end. They might also require some sort of shading, preferably with an anisotropic highlight; particularly on male characters, otherwise they can look like they're wearing some sort of make-up or eyeliner.

Yeah, it'd need tuning. But it suits a line-drawing process much better than a triangle process. Lash thickness, curve, and shading can all be computed with a 2D line drawing method without worrying about AA, whereas modelled and shaded polygons are going to be a devil of a job to get right in a conventional triangle rasteriser on consoles.

 

[Sigfried1977]

If they arent it doesnt say anything.

It just says they are a bunch of phenomenal looking character models. (and if you manage to get the in-game Nathan Drake close enought to the camera it's not very far off. Lighting is nowhere near as complex but the model looks pretty much just like that)

 

[Nesh]

It just says they are a bunch of phenomenal looking character models. (and if you manage to get the in-game Nathan Drake close enought to the camera it's not very far off. Lighting is nowhere near as complex but the model looks pretty much just like that)

It does? Can we have any close up captures? I am interested to see. The facial geometry looks astoundingly detailed to think that the in game is at least close

 

[nightshade]

Its known that the cutscene model in Uncharted games are the same as the ingame models as far as geometry/polycount is concerned, the difference comes with improved skin shading and texturing which is of higher quality in cutscenes. And its also known that in Uncharted 2 Drake's model never receives LOD at all, regardless of how far away he is from the camera he is always the same cutscene model in the single player.

 

[Nesh]

Its known that the cutscene model in Uncharted games are the same as the ingame models as far as geometry/polycount is concerned, the difference comes with improved skin shading and texturing which is of higher quality in cutscenes. And its also known that in Uncharted 2 Drake's model never receives LOD at all, regardless of how far away he is from the camera he is always the same cutscene model in the single player.

It is known for Uncharted 2.
Is it confirmed for 3?
its been some time since I played 2 so I may remember wrong, but these models look much better I believe? The facial geometry is very very smooth. The ears are some of the most complex shapes to get them to look anatomically "right". They look very curvy inside out.
Almost not a single polygon edge is visible overall. And it is not just the face. Drake's scurf looks very smooth and its like its completely made out of polygons. The scurf's anomalous surface and wrinkles arent made by normal maps.
Clothing material depict the correct thickness too!
If this is the exact same model polygon and texture wise during gameplay then those guys are simply amazing
They have done an outstanding job surpassing what I have seen from other games on the console with the closest model being Kratos from God of War 3

 

[patsu]

It's actually a bit more complicated, because the hair strands aren't straight, they're tapering off towards the end. They might also require some sort of shading, preferably with an anisotropic highlight; particularly on male characters, otherwise they can look like they're wearing some sort of make-up or eyeliner.

So it's a complex issue, in fact we always render eyelashes in a separate layer so that the compositors can finetune their color, transparency and other attributes to get the right look. Even slight changes in conditions like lighting or the distance from the camera can mess up the results, so tweaking in comp is a lot faster than trying to find a shader that works well in all cases.

How does the 98 bone claim tie in with the models in the above images ? Do they enable more flexibility in facial animation, or more accuracy or what ? ^_^

 

[bystander]

I wish I had something to cature screens with or I'd have a thousand of them.

Things I'd like to see though:

One of my fav things to do was hang off stuff to get a 360 view of everything
After the ship capsizes, you go back into the ballroom with the huge skylight under water
The water caverns near the chateau
Yemen skyline
Yemen street scene
Drake getting sucked out the back of the plane
Chateau textures

I'm probably forgetting alot too.

upnorthsox did you mean this section?


As soon as I saw that I did wonder when they were going to break the skylight.

 

[upnorthsox]

upnorthsox did you mean this section?


As soon as I saw that I did wonder when they were going to break the skylight.

yep that's it. Two things though, first these walkthroughs (more like run throughs) never stop to admire anything, when I got off the chandelier I just stood there staring at it like whoa. And second, it's alot more impressive on my 55" Sammy.

 

[patsu]

Whelp, I was stumped up there. Took me a good 3-5 minutes to figure out how to climb down. ^_^

 

[RenegadeRocks]

Whelp, I was stumped up there. Took me a good 3-5 minutes to figure out how to climb down. ^_^

The Chandelier? Yep, me too was jumping around dying till I figured it out :smile: ! The wayt this chapter plays backwards when the water starts filling is beyond amazing. hats off to the guys who sat down and planned it, it is really tough job to pin down a sequence this good and show you all the thngs u just went through in a completely different perspective !

 

[Turok]

Those cant be real time though right?
If they arent it doesnt say anything. We always get high quality models in CGI. In game models cant look that good this generation.

I'm pretty sure that the poly count is the same, but the textures and shaders aren't as detailed. I don't have any captures, but in my playthrough, I spent a lot of it looking at Drake's face as close as I could get the camera to it. The in-game model still looks fantastic, but definitely not as detailed as those pictures.

 

[AbbA]

In Game model
http://i.imgur.com/Eyg6a.jpg

cut scene
http://i.imgur.com/DxVrh.jpg

 

[Laa-Yosh]

How does the 98 bone claim tie in with the models in the above images ? Do they enable more flexibility in facial animation, or more accuracy or what ? ^_^

They allow much finer facial deformations. The human face isn't really based on joints (you only have the jaw and even that is far more complex than a "simple" ball joint) but muscles and skin deformation. So what you want is an ability to move small clusters of vertices with soft falloffs around the surface of the face, and in certain regions you want to make skin folds and wrinkles (many of which can be faked with blending between different normal maps).

The most precise way to recreate these deformations would be to use blendshapes (morph the face into various different states) where each vertex can be controlled individually. This also means that each vertex has to be stored for every blendshape so a dense mesh would take up a lot of memory (relative to what we have on consoles).

Using a lot of bones instead is a more memory efficient solution, because you only need to store a few bone weights per vertex and every 'shape' will only require XYZ translation and rotation values for just the bones.

So, say, instead of 50-150 shapes (XYZ translations) per 3-5000 vertices (for the entire head), you can use 50-150 pairs of translation/rotation vector data per 98 bones, and 3-4 bone weights per 3-5000 vertices. And you'd need to store some bone weights for those vertices anyway, because you want to skin them to the neck and head bones.

Painting the proper weights for all these bones is a long and tedious process, however it can be significantly optimized by re-using the same geometry for all faces, because that allows a 1:1 transfer of the weights. It does introduce some other limitations, but since the facial wrinkles are only present in the normal maps it's not a problem that the geometry isn't aligned to the facial features. So it's basically a trade-off for lower runtime memory requirements.

I could go on about it but I guess this should be enough for most people

 

[patsu]

Besides wrinkles, the eyeballs may also need special treatment ? Do they really use ray cast to manipulate head and eye direction ?

The facial bone technique sounds reasonable. I take it that other games also use similar approaches ?

 

[RDK]

In Game model
http://i.imgur.com/Eyg6a.jpg

cut scene
http://i.imgur.com/DxVrh.jpg

the first one is from MP mode not SP mode