The other important thing for us was the use of the Cell processor and how it enabled our animation system to work. Everybody who is working on the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360 gets this increase in the number of polygons they can use, they get an increase in the fact that now we've got these really cool pixel shaders and we can do these really cool materials like water and leather and put bark on trees. So you're going to get an immediate upgrade for free and you just get it with the hardware. But, what's not going to come for free is your animation and you're animation if you've got these really detailed environments it's not going to mesh. We wanted to put a lot of our engineering effort into making sure that we had an animation system that would allow, what I think are some of the most talented animators in the industry to really create and have their vision come through and be supported by the technology.
Basically, in Jak I we had somewhere in the vicinity of 300-350 animations for Jak and everyone was really happy with the fluidity of his movement and the response. In Uncharted, Drake has got more than 3500 animations and the difference is we're now taking the cell processor and we're taking say two dozen of those animations, like we've got his running animations, flinching animations, reloading animations, rolling animations, just dozens of animations all at once being layered on top of each other and then the cell processor recreates on the fly the single frame of animation that you need to be able to play the game at that moment and the fact we can just dump more and more work on that processor and its SPUs just means we can free up our CPU to do more general purpose tasks.
PALGN: So this was the first time that Naughty Dog has used motion capture?
EW: Yes, and that was a big change in direction for us. It was of course a big learning process too. We always like to pretend it was easy but it was definitely hard. We went through a lot of ordeals with that like animators being concerned because they do cartoony animation, they thought it was going to be dry. Once they saw what was capable, everyone thought wow this is a brand new challenge. That's one of the reasons we did Uncharted to begin with, we wanted to challenge ourselves and wanted to teach ourselves new techniques and different parts of game development or even cinematic development that we have never had to use before. The animators really got into it, we worked with some really great actors and we made sure that we focused heavily on being able to do some really cool stuff with the faces and making sure that we get the expression that the actors were expressing on the stage. We wanted to make sure that came across in the 3D models. So, we focused on the mouth a lot, make sure that they could speak the words and that you could really believe that they were speaking aligned. Then we realised that the mouth wasn't nearly as important as the eyes. I mean the eyes express so much in a person, humans are programmed just to look into a person's eye and you can read so much expression just through really really subtle changes and differences. I just had to check myself a few times when I was talking to our character modelists and our animators and comment on the eyelashes. It really is important if they look long then you're breaking the illusion. You pop out of it really quickly if you're not focusing on these details. We spent a lot of time on that, I can say this because I wasn't that involved in it but the story and the writing was really top notch I think and something really exceptional for a video game.
" shows that even you were fooled due to its very well done animations.
