The Last of Us: Part II...Ellie infiltrates the Hospital
This gallery is the second of a series that I shall be posting to showcase 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 Scott Greenway (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
Overview of the area, a lot of paths and a lot of guards
(please enable sound to hear the subtle ambient effects our sound team crafts for these environments)
Ellie's goal
The look I created for wet glass for the vehicles, went on to influence a lot of glass shaders in the game, including this one
The tent high poly sculpt was provided by our amazing vendors, I then took the bakes and used them in custom shader setup that allowed for wetness effects, elevation based soil/grass staining as well as detail wrinkles, fabric texture and fraying edges
I went to great lengths to ensure that all of my shaders would respond to a 'wetness blend' value that we could control on the fly in game, testing wetter or dryer looks for the entire environment was then as easy as adjusting a slider
I built the military trucks themselves in their entirety (more galleries soon) and Scott's excellent cubemap placement helped their wetness shaders really pop
I also modelled this guard tower and all of it's parts in a modular fashion, so that other areas could benefit from it. I borrowed design elements from military vehicles for the armour panels, to help ground them with my other FEDRA vehicle designs
Using fabrics to help soften hard structures was something we did a lot of, our outsource vendors provided the sculpts while I handled their shader treatment, I love these big draping shapes
Edgar picked some great reference for these crates, I then redesigned them slightly with a paint-over & passed them onto our vendors to do the high-poly models and bakes....I had an idea for a slightly more advanced effect to achieve the small details
My paintover instructed the vendors to recess the high detail 'grid' and surround it with a 'frame'. This grid area then used a parallax occlusion shader that allowed me to simulate depth and the 'frame' stopped the effect warping around the corners