The Last of Us: Part II...The Ratking's Nest
This gallery is part of my on-going series showcasing my work on The Last of Us: Part II.
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As well as being the vehicle specialist for the duration of the game, I also continued my role as a texture and shader artist with my usual level responsibilities.
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For this particular area, I worked in partnership with Edgar Martinez (modelling and layout) and Bethany Lowe (Lighting) as well as the rest of the fantastic Naughty Dog team, without whose contributions none of these levels would be possible.
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My main responsibilities included the creation and adaptation of textures and shaders for application to the environments and contained assets. The levels ended up being so huge that I also did quite a bit of modelling and additional set dressing, working back and forth with Edgar, to continually push and improve each other's work. I also spent a lot of time in researching a new asset pipeline for which these levels became our testing ground.
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Working on The Last of Us: Part II has been an incredible experience and as always, it takes a monumental team effort in order to make such amazing games. Without the hard work and dedication of the entire team, across all departments, none of this would be possible.
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I would also like to take time to thank our incredible outsource studios who time and time again prove to be so vital to our development of these worlds, their contributions are incredible and I am incredibly grateful to have worked with them.
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Edgar Martinez portfolio, please check him out! https://www.artstation.com/edgar_a_martinez
(Sound on to hear our audio teams atmospheric sound fx) Inside the ER Abby finds these doors locked, but an ominous sound behind them foreshadows terrifying events yet to come...
Continuing from the last gallery, Abby has enabled the power in this area, which disturbs and awakens something living behind those previously, locked doors...
What she finds is a grotesque wall of fungus and the remains of those trapped inside this area, the bloody mass shows a recent disturbance, as if something large forced it's way through to make it's escape
Seeing these infected bodies, buried in the walls is particularly grotesque (and was pretty gruesome to work on too!)
The 'Nest' as we came to call it, was based on an amazing concept by Aaron Limonick and came to be over a relatively short period, working between myself, our OS team and our good friends at VASG...
It was hard to render, I had to strip down and rework the shaders entirely at zero hour, heavily optimising them. Removing layers and certain BRDF inputs, re-set dressing & vertex painting to ensure we could remain in frame and meet the intended look
Rather than use full texture sets, i made use of some of the cool normal maps provided by VASG artists to build new shaders. Removing BRDF inputs and relying on stacking optimised layers allowed me to create an interesting yet cheap-to -render look
Aaron's concept directed me to add and pose these bodies (models & base textures provided by our in-house team and VASG artists). I then made new shaders to coat them with the blood and infection and integrate them with the 'gore pile' as best i could
This example shows the relatively simple approach to the shaders I built for the nest walls, using baked ao and curvature vertex colours to drive different layers, as well as manually hand painting certain parts, like the blood and wetness
(Maya viewport) The modelled 'veins' I created using an incredible houdini script made by Kaleb Goulding (real life tech wizard), I could drag a locator around the walls and the veins 'grew' naturally into place, I then applied my shading passes to them