Cinematic Environment Production for Uncharted 4

[Music] so hello everyone my name is uh eric pangilinan and i'm christian nakata hey everybody and we're here to talk about our experience with making cinematic environments for uncharted 4. first we'll we'll share some basic principles that we use when we design these environments then we'll talk about how cinematics were made back in the last generation and how it compares to how it's done now then we'll go over a general workflow of what we use at naughty dog to create these environments based on an environment artist perspective christian will show two case studies on two related environments one in the beginning and the other one in the end of the game hopefully by the end of this presentation you can see how we apply these principles to our environment to help tell a better story in a cinematic the environment is one of the components that can tell the story

the other component is the character the character usually gets most of the focus it gets most most of the screen time the most polygons the finer shaders and the best lighting well the environment that usually takes a back seat like in this slide the environment is all blurred out and completely in shadow but that doesn't mean it's not important nor is it an afterthought a lot of things need to be considered when making cinematic environments when we try to tell a visual story the environment and characters go hand in hand it's all a matter of composition lighting camera angles and motion like the character but without dialogue the environment can tell a lot of stories can tell layers of stories in a single shot far more efficient than explaining it in dialogue so it's very important so it's a very important medium and we need to understand and use it effectively every prop graphic design every polygon and texture that you make

has to have a meeting or a function in the screen to help push the story forward let's examine some of the cinematics we made for uncharted 4. in this scene nate just got caught red-handed lying to elena nate told her that he was out in a salvaging job in malaysia but instead she finds him in a dingy motel in madagascar planning a dangerous treasure hunt with sully and a man she never met she is really pissed off drake and his gang are in an awkward position and drake is trying to talk his way out of it the camera swings back and forth between the emotional exchange of elaine and drake we want to show the contrast between these two shots you want to show who's getting his ass kicked and who's doing the ass kicking so there's so there's dialogue here and there's body language but through the environment you can help this out by enhancing the meaning of the scene

where you put the characters into space can affect the way you perceive their emotional state in the story here we see elena being closer to the wall showing more stability drake further from the wall and further from his companion showing separation and distance their this stability reinforces elena's dominant position and makes drake's position feel alone and unsupported so this is just spacing shapes and lines are powerful tools that can enhance the shot too notice behind elena there's a lot of straight and angular lines the maps on the wall the map on the table the sharp edges on the picture frame straight lines are usually meant to relate to direct being direct aggressive and strong curvy lines usually mean soft passive and organic and behind drake you'll see round baskets in the wall we continue this scene theme as the scene plays off all the way in the end

elena closer to the wall bold straight lines in the back and drake is contrasted with a deep background with rounder shapes not only is it interesting and dynamic to contrast the two opposing shots but the shapes and lines will add to the intensity or the passivity of the mood so why are there square shapes behind sam these two supporting characters sam and sully are symbolical of the conflict within nate sam represents the selfish side of drake the side that misses adventure and adrenaline of treasure hunting and sully represents drake's conscience the side that makes him stay with elena and give up danger but like how we use lines and shape on the previous slide to show mood we want to use that here to show the contrast between these two characters like sully for example we frame round basket shapes uh behind him to really emphasize his

mood sully is like a father figure to nate and should know better to advise him he also knows elena very well so he's in a very embarrassing situation for his involvement again with a bit of dialogue combined with sully's expression and body language a focused camera the round shapes help soften the scene the audience get the message another thing we want to point out is how we use lines and shape to show the relational groupings of the characters we add an inset in the wall at first we did this to break up the space and push it further to accentuate the feeling of depth but in this framing the incense conveniently groups sully and nate together representing their closeness and affinity together but the framing in the inset also pushes sam outside and the cabinet door is used as a frame to to separate sam to represent that he's an outsider in the group and the different shape represents him as having different motives and goals

and the rest so within this one picture using the visual tools of simple lines and shape you can tell an unspoken story of drake's personal struggle between his conscience and desires so here's another scene sam rescues nate from the orphanage and they're both barely escaped escape the man dimension another very emotional night for nate eventually they ride down to the docks and nate is feeling sad and confused but sam feels very confident and very optimistic for their future here we want to contrast the two spaces the docks where nate and sam are standing in the bright city skyline symbolically we want to make the skyline represent their dreams and their and the docs represent their abandoned situation since they are orphans to emphasize this division we use the moonlight to light the docks and make it

look more desolate abandoned and cold then use the warmer city lights to make the skylight look more lively bright and warm we use shape to contrast the skyline and the docks the skyline has a lot of vertical and horizontal lines representing stability and when you turn around you see the docks is more made up of slanted roofs and awnings that create more angular shapes and shadows and deeper insets in the beginning of the scene nate is still disturbed about what happened he's not sure about a lot of things including his brother sam again we want to show the separation between the two brothers it's like the previous example we want to use lines to divide the scene so in this picture the bridge is the element that divides the space we use a lot of vertical lines in the scene in this picture with the lines of the bridge support are used as a barrier between them they act like barrier between the brothers in other shots as well

for example the pillars behind sam represent those bears and as you will see sam trying to walk towards nate's trying to convince him each time sam walks towards nate's he's breaking through those barriers in the final shot nate is convinced and sam offers him a sand using lines to contrast values can help represent two characters that are having opposing goals mood and personalities lines and shape and scale all help direct the eye to create a flow in the composition earlier nate and sam starts out on the left side of the screen together because nate was bothered by what happened and didn't want didn't share sam's excitement he wanted to show we want to show a divide between these two brothers to do this we had nate walk away from the frame he shared with sam and walk to the right side of the screen in his own space we use motion to use your eye to track nate to the opposite side of the screen

we use several lines in the shape in the screen to direct your eye to nate as well the most obvious lines are the ones that are formed by the bridge perspective will attract your eye towards the vanishing point and other lines like the elevated freeway in the shoreline as it ramps down to mate and the other invisible one is the are the buildings that decrease in height towards nate in the previous shot we discussed directing the audience eye interestingly the human eye can only focus on one thing at a time even if it even if we have a wide field of view we can only concentrate our attention to one area of the screen this is very good for directors because that means you can use visual tools to actually control the order of what the viewer looks at similar to the last slide movement is the first thing the viewer will notice the second thing that you will notice is the brightness and contrast and that's why nate and sully are lit very well and also wearing light colored shirts

and they're also nicely silhouetted scale is the third thing that the viewer will notice so because nate and sully are closer to camera we perceive them as bigger and so we have four things working for us movement brightness contrast and scale this is enough to attract the eye of the viewer to start with nate and sully and then move on to sam and elena and for that we use the vanishing point to lead your eye to them so these are just some of the principles we use when we can construct the scene there are more but we'll have to move on and we'll just call it out as we go so before uncharted 4 we pre-rendered all of our cutscenes and that was a big pain in the butt why did we do it what was the advantage first it didn't require a lot of programming resource it just needs someone to schedule and keep track of all the renders number

two we can max out the settings of the of the shadow quality the number of lights the texture resolution to get the best image and then capture that because we couldn't afford that in real time in the playstation 3. um it's also easier to edit a pre-rendered image or a pre-rendered sequence and with post-effects and transitions but pre-rendered pipeline had major drawbacks the main thing is like a pre-rendered pipeline the transitions are not seamless it's either you're going to hit a black frame or it's going to be very abrupt also the quality between the two scenes are not going to be the same visual quality because one will have the highest settings and the other ones will have the lowest you're also going to get inconsistencies

with prop acquisition for example if you acquire a rifle in the game and you move into the cinematics this the rifle won't be there we also had issues with uh procedural effects like fog and particles uh water because it is procedural you can't just you can't just render a certain number of frames you have to re-render the whole thing but the biggest drawback with pre-rendered pipeline is that you have to render it and we have a lot of cutscenes and there would be a lot of backlog in the render farm any mistake change update you had to re-render the whole thing again and before and before you saw an update it could actually take days because iteration time was also a big problem in e4 we did two hours and 45 minutes of cinematic animation which is about 112 cutscenes

that could have been a lot of renders to to manage so that's why some people uh at naughty dogs think that switching to a real-time pipeline was the biggest technological and work workflow advancement in uncharted 4 because you only have to worry about memory frame rate and random crashes so you basically treat it as if it's a regular level so let's get into the workflow making a cinematic environment is pretty much similar to making a regular in-game environment but obviously in the in-game environment you'll be motivated it is motivated by the gameplay plus and the in-game camera will mostly be behind the character and some other limited view the cinematic cinematic camera can do anything so the environment only needs to look good where the camera is looking at it but for the most part they're all the same so the first thing we do when we get a cinematic assignment is to meet up with the creative director

to get an update on the story and backstory he gives us a general direction and insights about the scene and it's our job to pitch him something good we do this mostly with concept art or storyboards sometimes we help out the concept artist by providing him with a block measure gray box the block mesh is already vetted to follow the guidelines of the scene so it's pretty close to what we want the block mesh is very rough it represents space the space you're building and it's useful for first pass shape and size study it also helps us discuss with the director what are the important spaces in the scene it also gives us a good idea of the assets and building blocks we need for production we send this block mesh to the animation department and use it as a guide for their mocap sessions a lot of things can change during the mocap session and most of the time they never use the set so it's always good idea to not invest a lot of time figuring this out or you can build modularly so you can

change things quickly when the animation comes back we plug it into the scene the next step is to create a previous camera so we can see what's going on we also do a depth of field pass so we also know what are the things that are blurred the lead cinematic animator then pitches a camera pass to the director for the entire scene when this gets approved we can now watch and determine what are the scenes we actually see then we do another passive concept and we do this for an advanced block mesh that have more context to the camera angle we apply the visual principles of composition we discussed earlier to the block mesh using the shapes and the lines leading the eye dividing the space applying contrast and affinity throughout the layout in space but this is the point where you can do your visual problem solving and work stuff out with the lead camera guys so you can help compose the better shot since we know the camera angles we can start doing some lighting

so we give some general direction to the lighting guys either in color scripts or reference pictures or movies and we start out with a generic sky and then later on we replace it with something more custom to the scene after the initial lighting pass we sometimes do a lighting key and fine-tune the lighting for the characters at naughty dog we have a lighting light cinematic lighting team that's separate from the in-game lighting team so you'll have to watch out for lighting transitions and make sure that it matches between the two because our our cinematic schedule is also different from the gameplay schedule we might decide on lighting setup for the gameplay first or vice versa and it might not work out for the other even before the advanced block mist mesh stage the initial block mesh uh will still be enough context to start uh creating asset lists and props for and props for building blocks

since the production of this props can take a while it's smart to start with the list early and send them out for outsourcing for production prop selection is very involved and it takes a lot of time to get it right and you can't just put anything there everything has to be in contact with the scene the story and the character it has to be functional as well as aesthetically pleasing then about a month or two we continue integrating assets from outsourcing some of these props end up being going to the technical team and they make physics objects out of them like the bumpables and moving electrical wires banners flapping all that kind of stuff the sound and special effects like rain fog lens player also comes in at this point and we do weekly reviews to polish and optimizing until it's done there you go so i'm going to pass this on to christian and this is the part of the talk we're going to highlight those two environments that are involved and what's basically the difference between this and other levels other than nobody shooting it to you is that all is designed to explore

and discover the story as it unfolds one cinematic piece at a time to enjoy hey so now we're going to take a look at two different environments the townhome and the beach house in both these cases we build an actual level with gameplay around a few specific cutscenes both of these levels were meant to reflect the place that our main character is in his life and the idea is that through environmental storytelling we're trying to underline the character growth of nathan drake in uncharted so at this point in the town home nate is seemingly trapped in a normal life he works a basic job to earn a living he isn't rich but he's doing okay so by the time we reach the beach house scene we want to emphasize how much his life has changed and become much more of what he and elena want so it's easy to point out that one takes place in an older suburb of new orleans and one takes place on a dream house on

the beach the contrast alone should show enough of a difference job done but we found that there was so much more to tell to try and bring a degree of believability to each scenario aside from the animation and lighting from an art standpoint to fully tell the story here involve the purposeful use of color graphic design specific environment storytelling and a bit of chaos to make a plausible space so on the town home again this was a very cut scene driven environment meaning one or two cinematic shots and form the majority of the look and feel of the entire level it turns out to be the cinematic that involves nate and elena having conversation over dinner that's the one that drove most of this one so when we started townhome we began with a blockout of this very specific scene now ultimately that layout turned out to be one of the greater challenges here as we needed a space that would work

for the immediate story beats but eventually would work for the rest of the level as well basically it means we were locked into certain architectural and interior design choices early as that had to be applied to the rest of the home afterwards so with each room having somewhat specific story beats of their own this was a bit tough at times eventually after multiple iterations the final outside interior and exterior of the home did not really line up at all anymore but you know since you never actually leave the space and go outside this wasn't a huge problem so working on the townhome actually turned out to be quite organic and we got through the complete block out of the interior before we started considering what the outside of the space should be like now again i mentioned earlier that this was meant to be an older neighborhood in new orleans so we ended up spending a good deal of time looking for reference using google

street maps actually to help us identify like the candidate that we could draw from it's a lot like scouting a film location basically so we blocked out the entire neighborhood in the beginning but we only finalized the things that you could actually see from any one window in the home you might be pretty surprised actually at the slice of life that you can get from google maps we used some of that to our advantage in adding a bit of environment storytelling to show what kind of lives the drake's neighbors were living so backyard tools playsets a towel hanging from the balcony the idea was to give the player just enough information so that they could start to imagine what nate's townhome looked like from the outside so now this is our first interior environment we're looking at in creating a scene like this elena's office specific environment storytelling is factoring in a lot and i'm showing a little bit of an iterative block mesh process and i'm

going to end up talking about a little bit later on but the idea here was that we would take a basic block mesh and then take it to a next level before we actually started to execute much of the final art this kind of helped us manage a lot of the details that went into the environment storytelling so back to those details what we're trying to establish more here is who elena is and her work is pretty important to her so showing things like her sticky notes for current work assignments awards education background travel books and even a pension for collecting antique cameras this all adds up to a lot of detail and one of the advantages of an area like this is we were able to add all that geometry and texture since the space was pretty small the main thing working against us here though is the really just the time you need to create all of it and assemble it together and we had a lot of people in house

working on the graphics alone here involving at least the concept department some of the marketing team of course the background team too at one point in production we even hired a graphic designer to help with some of the workload so here now we're looking at the master bedroom and what i find interesting in in this area was this is where we really start to get into questions about you know what makes a living space believable so early on of course we looked at a lot of reference material online for bedrooms and it's easy to find things showing you know the latest trends in linens and etc but one of the things we started to realize was that people are really reluctant to show how messy we can be in pictures online it turns out people would much rather take pictures of their really cool stuff and it's all really clean and neat and stuff so but really though it's this clutter and small amount of chaos that helps the scene seem more like a living breathing

space so starting with a bed that's still unmade what kind of lives are nate and elena living as working professionals and they probably don't have time to always make the bed and clothes are scattered around here and there various items cluttered on top of a bathroom sink so the point really though isn't that they're dirty or completely disorganized but that they're busy people with busy lives and this was probably one of the cornerstone ideas when we designed this and other living spaces like the beach house and even nate's office and it's also one of those things that's really easy to overdo as i'm going to talk about the next slide so uh that leads us to this space this is the kitchen now one of the areas we went a bit too far with with the chaos and that definitely had to rain this back in so at one point the area was starting to look like a kitchen nightmare

at the time it seemed more realistic that when someone cooks in the kitchen right they leave a mess behind at least i tend to do that anyway when i cook so there really comes a point though when too much clutter or mess can become distracting and here the idea is just to make a believable space not how messy the kitchen can get when someone decides to prepare food so we wanted the attention to stay focused on the right things about nate and elena especially in regards to the story beats here another thing i found interesting i'm going to point out here is a this is the unique opportunity we have a certain type of environmental storytelling so the fact that there would be another kitchen later in the game that we would be able to contrast with to led to some interesting opportunities so one of which came up with the fridge not only did we come up with the idea for using the front of the fridge for literal storytelling by using the sticky

notes but i think you can often discover a lot about someone from the foods that they like to eat so all the items inside the fridge were designed with the idea that again as busy people nate and elena ate a lot of convenience foods take out boxes prepared foods sodas and more snack items again busy folks with busy lives later on this will come up when you get to go through drake's kitchen at a much different stage in their growth as people so so far we've gone through a good deal of the drake's town home and haven't really talked much about the area you start out in the attic this is nathan drake's sanctuary or man cave so this is where we get to relive many of nate's past adventures and real interests so we had the benefit of starting with concept on this one we only had the additional challenge of teasing out all the details from within that image like the malaysia job for instance

that you start off the scene with that actually had real maps notes and images that were all created from real historical research and had an actual mini story to it speaking of details we got a pretty good idea of what that composition looks like from this side of the attic but what about the other side what about all those small artifacts that we had to create this was a pretty packed space with some actual gameplay so we needed to be careful about making too many assets or not enough to fill the area out properly so we came up with this way of working more iteratively and i kind of talked about that a little bit earlier with elena's office so we ended up uh after we get the concept we move into a basic traditional block mesh to work out both the cutscene and the gameplay but then we did an additional more detailed block mesh that indicated placement color and composition on a much smaller scale so props placed on shelves

for instance would get this treatment that way we knew as much as possible earlier on what was needed in the space and we tried as much as possible to only create those items that gave us much more time to work on some of those items that people tend to take for granted the the mundane stuff like for instance cardboard boxes yes cardboard boxes we took the time to craft some very detailed boxes we cared about why they were crumpled and where and this took weeks but in the end it's funny because at a glance it's just a box but it actually ended up being one of the most reused assets in the entire game so fast forward to the end of the game the beach house now we wanted to show that the drakes were doing well and living the life that they always wanted the character arc here is mostly complete and now we're just highlighting that result

so in stark contrast to the townhome this space was meant to be more airy and vibrant and we also started with a more generous and forgiving block mesh forgiving in the sense that the story beats gave us a bit more flexibility in designing the space and two cut scenes helped dictate the flow of the layout this time this is the cassie video game sequence and the locked armoire scene now in retrospect it seemed like an easy idea to art up the drakes are successful so sure a beach house no problem right but in reality though we felt that we had to justify as much of the drake's new lifestyle as we could to make this seem as realistic as possible we had to ask ourselves how would nate and elena choose to live what kind of environment would they surround themselves in so we end up sticking to the basic theme in the end of a tropical location and comfortable living but from there we did a lot of research into different decor between spanish colonial craftsman one

with nature concepts bohemian and of course world culture themes factored in as well early on we came up with this concept that if we mixed and matched furniture styles the things would just naturally seem more grounded so here we're looking at the family room and we were able to introduce a huge a variety of influences into the scene with a decor and the idea here was based on a concept that people just don't buy whole sets of furniture for the entire house at once more often what ends up happening is a general mix of style and color as people gradually accumulate a set of furniture over time in accordance with their lifestyle so in the town home we saw a restrained version of that happening based on nate and elena's situation at that time most of their furniture was

just simple practical and necessary but by the time we get to the cabana the drakes are fully embracing the things in life that make them happy so the mix of decor is much more colorful and expressive again though there was a time when we went off the rails again and and this was when just pride trying to get just that right mix of decor so at one point the idea of having a tiki bar seemed like it would fit right in with this idea of mixing in different things you can almost picture sully visiting with a mai tai cocktail in one hand and a cigar in the other you know but with an exotic mix of furniture we thought why not of course only after we actually ended up putting in all this effort into it did we realize that it had nothing to do with the character or the central themes of the story we were telling here and what was worse that stood out and it called attention to itself and it made you wonder why they had this insane insane tiki setup in their house

in creating many of the spaces in the environment we could we could really explore a lot of different looks for furniture and decor but we couldn't have done that with as much freedom without a central color scheme so for the most part in the cabana we stuck to a very beach side color palette using the cool blue it balanced out pretty well with all the warm colored woods the interior patterns and tile colors were just extensions on that adding to that color scheme we also pushed a lot more foliage throughout the interior keeping with this basic theme helped unite all the more exotic looks from room to room we did this to a certain extent with the townhome as well just using a much more neutral color scheme coming back again to talking about environmental storytelling we can revisit the fridge here a little bit now we can complete the fridge character arc so note nate and elena's current lifestyle

and how much has changed from when they lived in new orleans to now not only has the outside of the fridge changed to a more updated and modern style but we altered the details here both the sticky notes and the contents of the fridge continue to help punctuate the changes in nate and elena's life with health with a healthier and fresher food choices as mentioned earlier cassie's room was one of a couple of key areas in the epilogue level not only did it help inform much of the layout of the rest of the house but it also set the tone for the sheer amount of detail throughout this level all this detail was vital to creating cassie's backstory you only really get to this one level to get to know the latest drake so any environmental storytelling we could do here was pretty important we started this with a basic idea of who she was and a few concept images going from there we created a basic

block in the room for the starting cut scene and we also created a first pass list of all of cassie's interests so we could immediately figure out how it was all going to fit without giving her the biggest room in the whole house with that in mind we also wanted to allow for the huge influence cassie's family's life would have on her interests the creative side from elena cassie's interest in art books music and photography and the adventurous side from cassie's high adrenaline father nate so showing all of the rock climbing and surfing imagery in the posters that all added up to one cohesive personality we hope in the end this meant we needed a lot of elements to help make that believable in one modestly sized space now not only did we have a large amount of environmental storytelling to figure out but also a less restrained amount of clutter and chaos many kids you probably know have to be

told to clean up their rooms now cassie despite her maturity and her varied interests is still a kid so we allowed for that element to come through in developing her personality this is where using another round of more detailed block mesh again came into play not only was it important for efficiency's sake but it also helped us figure out how we were going to navigate around all this stuff that described a character you are only going to get to have one chapter to know so having color and even an indication of that a final graphic design on that block mesh was also very helpful for the final result color and pattern in this room probably changed four or five times before we struck on something that worked in the second of the two primary spaces in beach house we had the family workspace this was an area that was made around the cut scene where cassie finds the key to her parents larked armoire

the focal point here was the armoire but the spacing had to allow for key points in the cinematic and also the bits of gameplay leading up to the moments between cassie and her parents so once we establish the main parts of the scene in black mesh we could go crazy from that point again with environmental storytelling the concept shown here is one of the things we looked at when we started to set the right tone and mood for what we would be going for so workshed was what we ended up calling this space it was meant to give enough of a backstory about what nate and elena have been up to over the years in crafting a successful business out of their love of adventure and exploration and we ended up combining the features from many different types of work studios to get the final result so this is part photography studio part printmaker studio part study library add in a bit of museum antique store warehouse and then let's tack on a small mud room just to

keep some equipment on hand on top of all that it still needed to feel homey so we used a lot of the warm woods and red tones from the rugs along with the lighting to maintain a sense of comfort throughout the area again like cassie's room the area required a lot of asset creation to provide environmental storytelling this is probably one of the most exacting areas in the level with regards to specific storytelling so most every newspaper article map or magazine picture had to stand on its own merits we really tried to repeat things as little as possible throughout epilogue despite the large volume of detailed assets the armoire itself is most likely the densest area between both the townhome and the beach house we were able to get concept help with that area and it still required the two stages of block mesh to get everything working well enough another particular challenge involving

the worksheet was in creating newspaper and magazine wall now deceptively simple this wall required a block in all on its own we had to get that to scale with basic color layout and even content to a mild extent before executing the finish again this was to help minimize the effort that would be needed to get what we needed for this location so combining this with all the images in cassie's room between the posters the prints and the postcards there were a lot of unique images that we had to make getting to the composite 2d images you see here required the assistance of many different departments we were able to reuse some of the images from other situations but for the most part everything here had to be unique to just this section of the game so a little bit about our process for doing that so first we had to determine the amount of space we needed to do that we had to put in the basic block and like i mentioned we had a rough layout

and and then we got some basic idea of content then we asked our animation team to do the poses with the characters that we needed in the photo along with an occasional proper backdrop then onto lighting after that the images got a final pass from the concept team if it needed more details and then we actually had one more stop with the graphic designer to add the final touches and put things together into more polished layout with type and logo treatment if-ness if necessary now occasionally we got lucky and were able to reuse a piece of concept that just fit the look and vibe of what we were going for but this seemed to be really rare and didn't happen nearly as often as i would have liked so it wasn't just enough to give the impression of what the drakes were all about in epilogue we also literally wanted to show some of that work in action so initially this was pitched as a more creative work area for cassie we had an easel set up with paint brushes and all that but again this didn't help the story

here as much as we wanted so we came up with a better idea where we could show more day-to-day operations through an actual ongoing job a bit more elaborate storytelling here to help further flesh out the adventure work for hire story beats and this had to go through several iterations initial block in outlining the space then we did a lot of refinement as we went along until we arrived at the point that you see here this is one of the few areas between the townhome and the beach home where we used a good portion of the space to just tell one story when we started the process we thought that just using the one work table would be enough but eventually it became apparent that we were going to need a lot more detail to really sell this concept so ultimately this seemed to need at least three times as much content as what we initially thought the mayan ruins job here is just one part of many elements that helped us tell the story in cabana in conclusion a great deal of story

though was told by many environmental details like this across the game successfully using those details to our best advantage all came down to how we manage them so to wrap this up i just want to bring it back to the beginning where we show the importance of using environment as part of the storytelling whether it's a small prop or lines on the wall nothing should really be random everything should have a meaning and a reason to be there so knowing your visual tools and principles it'll help you communicate better and identify opportunities to enhance the story that you're telling thank you

i think uh oh i'm sorry i think you're supposed to go to the mic so that people sorry no you wanna go first you can go first all right hi um earlier you said that you had two separate lighting teams for your cutscenes and for the in-game play i was wondering why it is that you'll have that and what the advantages and disadvantages are for that i think that's more of a legacy setup like uh before because we did pre-render it and stuff it required um the in-game team to be more technical and liked the level differently so it had they had to deal directly with the game the cinematics are more film oriented okay so that's more of a legacy setup we're moving towards unifying both of them because it's basically almost the same now okay all right thank you hi so uh quick question what would you say is your your personal

favorite examples of using an environment to tell a story whether in your own games or any games you've played wanna wow and environment examples in our game for example or uh it could be your game again i played i think for the let's let's just go back to the maya job for example i like that piece specifically because we set it up where the story actually the environment actually pushed you into the story so it funnels you into the into the cabinet so the reason why we changed the the story from the cassie's workshop into an online on ongoing job was that we needed sort of piece the puzzle to funnel you into different parts of the different parts of the cabana so that you end up in the

in the cabinet thank you thank you hi thanks for coming today uh what's some of the language like working with prop designers for uh like having a unified theme so that it fit each room mood or message i'm not sure what you mean exactly um so you mean how do we figure out like which props to use yeah almost like a almost like being an interior designer right right uh a lot of it have to do with like the story and and putting yourself on the shoes of elena or drake and trying to sort of personify what they would do the rest of it is like just curating balancing the colors and style so

yeah and that's really where the iteration the iterative block mesh really kind of helps out because it gives you context for those things so i mean you can kind of just create a list like we talked about earlier with cassie's room you just start thinking of things that might work for that personality but you don't ultimately know how well those things are all going to work until you actually start putting them together a lot of times you you put in your personal taste in there but then you're forgetting that this is not your taste this is cassie's taste or elena stays or and that's something that you always have to take away from yourself and like consult let's say other like other directors to make sure that the story and the feel because a lot of people that's the biggest problem we ran into is that everyone has an idea of who drake and elaine is what do they eat what the clothes they wear so all of us have to sort of agree and argue like nah she's not gonna shop there that's too cheap or something or or drake's not gonna get there that's too lame for him he likes like this brand better so a lot of that happened uh during

selection just selection of like toothbrush and toothpaste like oh they're all organic they have to go all organic and stuff like that so it's like back and forth of like just trying to figure out who these characters are and that's what made uncharted 4 kind of unique because in the previous games they were just like shooting and blowing things up but this time you really had to go to their house and figure out who these people are and that was probably one of the interesting things in making all of these environments is that we had to figure out like where these characters we've been working on unfortunately it's the last game we're making so it's like oh well thank you hi um i find the amazing amount of thought and detail uh that goes into your storytelling very inspiring so congratulations first of all thank you all watch big budget movies uh error movies and the costumes sometimes look like they freshly came out of the costume department or wherever they make them cars are polished don't have

any dents so how come what was the process for you guys to come to realize this is so important and how can you first afford to spend this much time and effort into developing a game like this how do you plan the timeline so that it goes hand in hand with the engineering effort somewhat not how many people work on this whole process it's like 50 questions yeah okay um how did we determine scope is that like the basic question of it all um because it's pretty much like a scope question right how do you determine how much assets need to be made how much the engineering it's made and that i actually don't know how do you guys coordinate this with engineering so that you know this is not a bottleneck in the whole process yeah no i think that like a lot of like for me anyway working on the uh this the cutscenes are

percent presented today we have to be we're very self-managed at naughty dog we really don't have any producers there so we have to do the best job we can just to keep our personal schedule you know in line so we can ship things and some stuff in there didn't come online until like literally the week we were going gold i mean like those those 2d images in the magazine while i was talking about that those things took like six weeks and so if you didn't if we didn't block it out and plan it off like in the beginning then i don't know what we would have ended up with in the end and that all kind of came down to just again just managing your level and everybody at naughty dog i mean has to become very good at managing their their level in that regard does that answer your question sort of okay i have just two aspects to my two questions the first is with the sheer magnitude of assets that you guys create are you able to reutilize any of them from say uncharted for in the next last

of us is there any kind of recycling that you can oh yeah yeah definitely we we always plan on like assets that we can recycle over and like either change the color or a little bit of style most of the time most of the assets came from previous games and what happened was because it's playstation 3 we sort of had to next gen it so a lot of our assets are are being moved forward and just like updated and brilliant segue because i haven't experienced the uncharted update release of the nathan drake collection on ps4 since you guys are always iterating up to the last second did you guys revisit things about the original games for the ps4 remaster such as like changing the cutscenes from pre-rendered to live or changing the environments in that version i think we always i think as a rule in naughty dog we always like have post-mortems in the end and we take it very seriously and we try to improve pipelines like for example like our our lighting engine we change it almost

every game our game engine we always change it every game just to keep on pushing uh to squeeze out more from the playstation so it's it's sort of natural for us to always like revisit our pipeline and how we do things our engines and our tools and just even redo it from scratch thank you kindly thank you so i'm completely amazed by the environments in uncharted 4 is is this perfect blend of art and technology um i think one of my biggest question when i play when i was playing the game is kind of it what they asked before is how do you manage all those assets how do you because i guess you have outsourcing people uh people working outside of the studio right but at what point you say okay we need to feel this it's like now we know everything we want here so all these assets come from the side

and you have like one guy putting everything there how do you we have three guys okay yeah we actually don't have a lot of people but we we do a lot of because you know we've been doing this for a while we we kind of can predict like how much is needed so like in one of the slides once it's even block mesh you can sort of imagine okay you're going to need this this this this and so that asset list is already generated early and so you can you can predict stuff we've done enough environments i guess to to know what are the basic stuff and then we can always add on to it in terms of managing i guess we have that's a totally different talk that's like we have a management software where we can track everyone's task and stuff and then so you have tools to fill these gaps right yeah yeah okay it's a task management software that's pretty much what it is awesome yeah thank you and we are

waiting for the last of us too me too yeah oh sure um the as far as in-game cinematics uh in-game environments versus your cinematic environments how did you come to balance out the footprint of the space because a lot of times like you know if it's in game you have to consider player movement and visual clutter and stuff all over the place definitely interferes with that as you mentioned so like did it matter that uh i mean is there a difference between the size of the in-game spaces yeah and the cinematics if you load it up you'll notice the environments are usually 25 percent bigger and the spacing we figure that out because the the player has like a sphere for its basically it's collision and you can test it out to see if you can go through spaces so normally we we would leave some space

in the pathways to to make sure the player won't snag or get caught in the collision but if you notice if you open the file everything is scaled 25 bigger and that that has something to do as well with the camera okay thanks hi thanks for the talk i would like to ask you guys about your pipelines and in specific how do you guys the art team connect with the design team like you showed us the block out of the hotel environment and then you said that um i mean the first question basically is uh are those blog elves made by designer or the artists it depends on on cinematics uh the artist makes the out and in design in the in-game one it's a designer who makes a blockout so the there's two kinds of block outs too it's like the design block out uh which is very primitive and only figures out uh game design some some designers are artists too so they can elevate that but what we do is we take an additional

step for the artist to go over that block mesh and art it up more where they're considering sizing and uh and visuals and aesthetics for it so there's different levels of blocking out and different people are better at doing it yeah okay and the second part about concept art because you said you got the block out sometimes overpainted by artists but they also use concept art as i know inspiration for and setting how you can sell settings like you can sell the lighting so that how how do you approach concept art basically so concept part there's two kinds or there's multiple kinds one is like a previz where they have no block out they just have a general idea from the creative director of what he wants to see it's like more of like a mood board and then after that you move into the production concept part which is more of you already have a game play and block mesh and then you give it to him to just flush out the details and the look and then you also have which is like lighting keys which is

more focused on on the relationship between the environment and the characters and how the lighting affects both okay thanks so much guys thank you uh hi um first off thank you very much for coming out um my question was mostly about how you maintain cohesion within your environments so you say that you're very self-managed is there some tricks that either you personally have or you as a team use to keep that very strict cohesion collision in visual cohesion like keeping the game yeah cohesion like within visuals and within like you know nathan and elena are very organic like you said um keeping like the cohesion of the characters and the environment storytelling uh organizationally i guess we we have a lot of meetings and reviews um we review it very like almost every week or twice a week and and that's pretty much how we maintain the look and then we spot things that

throw us off and then we say you know that's not drake that drake wouldn't do that or whatever and so yeah we keep an eye on that a lot and i guess it's just through meetings that we do uh we in the beginning we also define that in the concept like in costumes we we look at the different kinds of clothing that each of them wear and we try to match that with the environment so that it doesn't clash and it makes sense so we also do that kind of stuff where matching what they wear the hairstyle how much clothing they're going to be and depending on the environment they're going to be in so if it's like a snowy level they're going to be wearing thicker clothes and stuff yeah that's pretty much how i would do it thank you cool i think we're good thank you very much thanks guys