The Last of Us: Part I...The Firefly Lab Part III
The Last of Us: Part I is a particularly special project for me, my enjoyment of the original game inspired me to pursue a career at Naughty Dog and this was the first project for which I was promoted to the position of Principal Artist. I fulfilled this role for the duration of the project and it was an incredible learning experience.
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As Principal, I was tasked with expanding upon, and developing new art pipelines that would help empower the environment team to create a visual experience that could truly harness the full potential of the PS5. I also took ownership of some very technically challenging sequences and was responsible for creating many of the modular assets and shaders that would be shared across the project.
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I continued my roles as the Vehicle Specialist (asset creation, art/technical pipeline, management of library) and as a level artist (textures, shaders, modeling etc).
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This has been my third Naughty Dog title and it 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. Please do check out all of the posts from the other incredible Naughty Dog artists!
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For 'The Lab' I worked alongside Todd Foster (modeling and layout) and Bethany Lo (lighting) as well as many other people across all departments, as always. I always enjoy the mass collaboration involved to bring a level like this to life, it's not only enjoyable, but essential to the development of such engaging experiences for the player.
Please enjoy this small gallery and stay tuned for more very soon!
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After narrowly escaping the fire flies, Joel heads to the upper floors of St Mary's Hospital in search Ellie
The stairwell was a challenge, I remodeled and organized it so that it was mostly modular instances. This made the uv/texture/shader painting a lot quicker for me and then further variation was added using decals and small props
The tent shaders were a lot of fun, as well as transparent and refractive tent 'windows', I wanted to suggest that the main green plastic was thin enough to allow light to pass through it a little, which gave this nice effect around the doorway here
Prior to the main combat space, there were lots of small rooms, emptied and abandoned. The detailing and set dressing in these rooms helped to build a more complete picture of a once functioning hospital, re-purposed by the fireflies...
This area was the main combat space, it was intentionally cluttered with elements to provide cover obstacles and with each enemy having a runtime light attached to their weapon, we had a difficult battle on our own hands trying to keep high framerates
We had around 8 or so enemy characters in here, all with dynamic runtime lights on their weapons, as well as the spotlights mounted on the environment. Runtime lights are really expensive for us so optimizations in the shaders and assets are essential
The refractive window shader I created was expensive, blurring the low detail exterior. In order to hit frame-rate I then made these fabric tarps to hide the windows a little. This made rendering these scenes more optimal for us
Here's a little look at the render passes. It gives a good impression of how much detail is added in the brdf passes and how many materials we use to make our relatively simple geo look as detailed as we can
In this video I go through the texture/shader passes I created in order to sell the plastic fabric look that we'd use throughout the level. I liked this approach a lot as it meant I didn't need to bake high to low poly meshes but could still good detail
This was a fun little room to work on, I loved the tiled walls and shiny flooring and even though it's grimy those materials provide great opportunity for interesting specular responses. Ellie's brain Xray's are also on the xray reader for eagle-eyed fans
Throughout this space there were 'combat friendly' rooms that had to feel natural in their set dressing but that were full of 'designer cover blocks'. Todd Foster and I tried to be creative in how we built these, using physically reactive props a lot too
Wet carpets around leaky water dispensers was a fun detail to add, for wetness I darken the diffuse, increase the specular, reduce the detail normals and also introduce a 'warp' effect to suggest the carpet has misshapen over long periods of remaining wet
I have worked on many iterations of this corridor across both TLOU I and II and across the games various timelines. In TLOU II Ellie returned to this place years after these events, you can see that gallery here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/WKdBRJ
I always enjoy adding the small details in my work at ND. Wherever the handrails were fixed to the walls for example, I removed the paint and added this peeling effect, as if to suggest that the walls were repainted around the handrails
Here you can see i achieved this with decals. You'll also see that I added a decal strip to separate the different colours of linoleum. I used a little normal map trim to suggest the material 'lifts' a little at the joins, a very subtle detail.
You can see some further shader breakdowns of this wall in my previous gallery. Abby enters this space moments after Joel in TLOU II: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/NxaD0z
I recreated a shot that I took previously of Abby entering the surgery here from my work on TLOU II...in the games, Joel, Abby and Ellie all pass through this red door at some point in history
Fans of the game will know what happens beyond this door. In my next gallery I'll show the work involved with the final 'chase' sequence through the hospital...more soon
Here's a play/flythrough I made to show how the player might experience the level first hand. I captured this on a devkit rather than the release edition which allows me to activate free cam mode easily and also explains occasional any framerate loss