The Last of Us: Part I...snow and ice shaders
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, which was a brand new position created at Naughty Dog. 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 etc) alongside Naughty Dog Lead Artist, Todd Foster (modelling and layout on the Firefly Lab).
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I have a lot of work to dive into and i'm excited to try and bring breakdowns and insights into some of our workflows, but it's been important to me to also take time to rest and as this is a process I love, I really want time to enjoy it.
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I'll be uploading additional galleries along with detailed information and break downs in the coming weeks (months heh) and I hope those of you that are interested will enjoy some of these galleries to come.
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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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Please enjoy this small gallery and stay tuned for more very soon!
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During development, I often jumped in to help out on more complex looks, areas or shader effects. In the 'deer hunt' section, I took on this large area of ice, as it presented a great opportunity for some special shader effects to really push the PS5
(Includes audio) Here's a view from the player's perspective, I wanted to create the illusion of real thickness and depth to the ice, with the stone river bed distorted, but still visible a meter or so beneath it
Rosy Fu (amazing technical artist) worked on our runtime shadow code to enable seamless shadows as they were cast onto the separate snow and ice shaders. The ice shader was complex and initially was not fully supported by our blurred runtime shadows
The illusion of depth was created using multiple parallax occlusion effects to simulate varying crack thicknesses. The 'broken' nature of the cracks allowed me to get away with minimal 'layers' in our parallax function, reducing render cost
The subtle cracks, chips and surface irregularities were handled by a very low intensity normal map...
And roughness values remained fairly low with slight variance here and there to add some interest to the screenspace and cubemap reflections present
Some of the textures I created using substance designer. I referenced an nice ice material from a textures resource online, before adding all of my own elements and shader specific details. I also often go into photoshop to add additional, final details
I used large scale overlays to create darker 'values' and to interrupt certain crack lines on the surface of the ice, this helped break up the repetitive nature of the shader and also helped with the illusion that the ice had varying thickness
Here's a quick breakdown of I used relatively simple layers to build the final look of the ice shader
I was also tasked with creating some library snow shaders and general 'looks'. This example shows my direction for how foliage might grow in thick snowy areas. I particularly liked the frosted tips to the grass and the ice effect where soil meets snow
And here's a little look at how this shader comes together
Here's another example of one of the more complex snow/ice/asphalt shaders I built for one of the teams working on the later, snowy levels like 'Lakeside'. I really enjoyed making these sets
And here's how the layers come together. I really like working on this sort of shader and trying to create interesting interplay between the different layers, before optimizing and trying to retain the detail without blowing our framerates
Here's a few spare shots of the ice...
Will be sharing some more level and technical work very soon...