The Last of Us: Part II...Moss 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 is the 'moss' look that was used most commonly throughout the game. 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. Once I had established the completed model/shader look, I worked with Tyler Moore to propagate this look to the rest of the library.
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The Last of Us: Part II...background information on vehicles
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Firstly, I want to give a big shout out to the environment artists responsible for the environments that these mossy vehicles feature in, Sharon Bednarek, Richard Piper, Jonathan Schmidt, Simon Craghead and so many more that worked on these beautiful worlds and made my taking nice screenshots of the vehicles within them so much fun! Thank you!
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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 shows shader layers reacting to rotation of the vehicle as well as the relationship between rust and moss - rust will only draw on areas clear of moss & never underneath it, thereby reducing texture samples and making the shader cheaper to render
This 'moss' look was intended for those situations where an artist would place vehicles amidst lots of overgrowth and foliage. Used in conjunction with my 'leaf-kit' system it was possible to integrate vehicles well with their surroundings very quickly.
This section of the Seattle forest was one of my favourite small areas, the environment and audio teams did a fantastic job in making it feel really peaceful and serene.
Mesh instancing is crucial to our process, this vehicle mesh would be the same instance as a wet version, a snow version etc...the different looks are achieved via shader remapping on top of an instance...it's a complex system, but incredibly powerful
Creating a shader variation for a vehicle wasn't a quick process, each vehicle had around 8 shaders and each shader was multi-layered (up to 8 layers). So creating a new shader variation set and having it 'feel' right in each environment was challenging
One of many truck bed kits I made. The idea was that you could choose from a selection of modular attachments to fill the truck bed, a full truck bed made player and AI traversal more functional, so it wasn't just for the added visual interest
Creating the glass shaders was challenging - reflectivity really sells a nice glass shader, but realistic moss and dirt buildup reduce this. So i tried to find a balance between realism and appealing reflectivity in the global moss glass shader
A rare shot of Ellie riding through this section solo...where's Dina?
I felt the leaf kits added a nice, autumnal hue to the moss look, something that many of the foliage filled environments also echoed in the dead leaves and dry grass. Matching hue is another aspect that helps to integrate assets into their surroundings
Another example of how the moss shaders would procedurally adapt to the world space positioning and rotation of a vehicle, always covering the top side and being influenced by areas of occlusion
The dirt/soil layer that sat underneath the moss was an important small detail, to help 'sell' the idea that moss could grow and form on metal that was perhaps already dirty and covered in years of fallen dust and moisture...