The Last of Us: Part II...base vehicles
I had two roles on The Last of Us: Part II, one as the vehicle specialist (asset creation, art/technical pipeline, management of library) and the other as a level artist (textures, shaders, assets etc).
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I'll be posting a gallery for each of the vehicle 'looks' that I created, this was termed the 'base' look and was generally the default appearance for vehicles that featured in dry levels, with the exception of Santa Barbara, for which I did a 'sun-damaged' shader variation (more on that later). In most cases I would work in a test scene and then would further refine the shaders and models once background artists had placed them in their levels. While I modeled a lot of vehicles, most of the difficulty was in working with the shaders and in managing all of the layers and their interactions with one and other whilst making sure that the end result wasn't too busy with details. I spent a lot of time going back and forth with different weathered appearances to the cars, but in the end was quite happy with the final look for these 'base' variants.
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The Last of Us: Part II...background information on vehicles
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There are 500 vehicles in the Naughty Dog vehicle library, all created for The Last of Us: Part II
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Given the scale of the project and the amount of vehicles that were depicted in concepts, I knew that accepting the responsibility of being the vehicle specialist, on top of my other level art responsibilities would be a huge challenge. Without a dedicated team to work on vehicles for the duration of the project, I focused on developing a pipeline that could not only produce the highest quality assets, but that could also be done within an efficient time frame.
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While I modeled a large amount of vehicles, often saving the 'hero' vehicles or the entire military series for myself, I am also incredibly thankful to our outsource vendors for their help with many vehicle modelling/uv'ing tasks. There are many vehicles that our vendors modeled almost entirely before I would then receive them, add additional details and carry out my texturing/shading/technical setup pipeline.
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I'm also indebted to my friend Tyler Moore, in the final stages of production he was invaluable in helping to troubleshoot the thousands (!) of collision, traversal, cover and melee bugs that we ran into. Tyler also was instrumental in ensuring that background artists had the vehicle variations they needed. I had set up the template materials to define the 'looks' for each vehicle type and Tyler did a great job of propagating those looks to other vehicles when bg required them, as well as helping to optimize 'the fleet' when the time came.
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I'd also like to thank my Leads, Andres Rodriguez and Christian Nakata for trusting me with such a monumental task and for their support along the way, as well as Waylon Brinck, Florent Devillechabrol, Ke Xu, Steven Tang and Dongsub Woo (and many others) for their technical and graphics expertise that was essential in the process.
This image shows almost all of the standard vehicle models that featured in the game, most of these would then also receive multiple 'look' shader variations, like snow covered, dusty, mossy etc. Shaders are optimized to reduce in detail at this distance
In total artists had around 500 vehicles to choose from and place in their levels. I never wanted to player to start to notice repeating vehicles in game and have that break immersion
One of the earlier vehicles I made, I enjoyed adding a few of these 'novelty' vehicles at the start of production, it wasn't used often (maybe just once) but it was good fun creating the ice cream flavour menu and the novelty cone itself
Here's a breakdown of how I built a shared set of wheels that were used by the majority of vehicles. Baking a 'tire-trim' was a really great way to create tires in this case, rather than baking from a more traditional high poly tire asset
It took me a lot of iteration to find a balance in the shaders, where details would hold up to scrutiny, whilst still reading well at distance. I was particularly happy with the peeling paint effect
Some vehicles also used decals to add branding or identity, other interactive elements like this rear broken window I modeled, before co-coordinating with our foreground department who would make them fully breakable in game
Below are some examples of vehicles, excellently placed by environment artists in their levels. It took a lot of effort to have the vehicle models and materials all sit well together and feel grounded in whatever environment they were placed in
Seattle Gate was a huge challenge for us, not only with making a straight road packed with hundreds of vehicles and alpha run smoothly, but also in ensuring that vehicles were varied and interesting throughout
The 'BigDog' was a really fun vehicle to make, I built this from the ground up and it served as the test -bed for the 'hero' vehicle pipeline.
Triangle count for this vehicle was 51k. The digger blade also had three possible poses that could be used for variation
The 'heavy' trucks were also a lot of fun, on this particularly vehicle outsourcing handled around 75% of the modeling work with my feedback, before I took over and applied my texture and shader pipeline, additional modeling and the final technical setup
Tiffany, Reuben and Joakim did beautiful work in the farm area, my small contribution was to dictate the asset pipeline for the tractor and to create and refine its final shader appearance
Reuben and Tiffany also did a great job in applying the 'move-mod' system that I supported Ke Xu in implementing. It allows for vehicles to be posed for a more dynamic appearance with very little additional mesh cost
This police cruiser uses the same mesh file as our other black and white cruisers, but a different shader 'look' appropriate for the state of Jackson. One mesh file to maintain and work on that could be used in many scenarios was key to efficiency