Matthew Trevelyan Johns
Principal Environment Artist - Naughty Dog
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The Last of Us: Part I...hometown vehicles

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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Environment Artists for the incredible opening 'hometown' level were the amazingly talented, Jonny Chen and Khanh Nguyen and Scott Greenway was our brilliant Lighting Artist

Tommy's SUV was rebuilt from the ground up for The Last of Us: Part I. I had a blast working closely with Technical Artist, Alex Rivera. We relied on our excellent outsource partners for most of the modeling and I handled the full texture and shader pass

Tommy's SUV was rebuilt from the ground up for The Last of Us: Part I. I had a blast working closely with Technical Artist, Alex Rivera. We relied on our excellent outsource partners for most of the modeling and I handled the full texture and shader pass

I love this opening sequence, for this project I also worked on a new setup for more realistic, illuminating head, tail and interior lights on the vehicles. When used in combination with the right lens flares the effect could feel quite natural

The texturing and shading of the vehicles that were not aged and rusted was challenging. I worked with Barry Evans on a new clear-coat and car paint shader feature to give us a more realistic material response on the metal surfaces

The texturing and shading of the vehicles that were not aged and rusted was challenging. I worked with Barry Evans on a new clear-coat and car paint shader feature to give us a more realistic material response on the metal surfaces

The shinier response of the clear-coat shaders could sometimes appear too reflective in areas of shadow. To counteract this, I created masks in substance painter that drove a mud layer in my shader to dampen the reflectivity around the base of the vehicle

The shinier response of the clear-coat shaders could sometimes appear too reflective in areas of shadow. To counteract this, I created masks in substance painter that drove a mud layer in my shader to dampen the reflectivity around the base of the vehicle

For the interiors of hero vehicles, I refined a new shading pipeline I'd began developing on The Last of Us: Part II. It combined baked components, with detail mapping, tiling textures, face-weighted normals and masks to give us much higher fidelity

For the interiors of hero vehicles, I refined a new shading pipeline I'd began developing on The Last of Us: Part II. It combined baked components, with detail mapping, tiling textures, face-weighted normals and masks to give us much higher fidelity

During the ride, the player has complete 360 control of the view. I was determined to get cubemap reflections to work on both the interior and exterior of the glass, it's very subtle...but took a big effort across many departments to implement

Here we can see the reflectivity and surface breakup on the outer glass materials...

Here we can see the reflectivity and surface breakup on the outer glass materials...

Myself and Charlotte Francis of the technical art team painted various masks that I would use in my layered shaders to create subtle surface variation on the outer glass. It's rarely seen in game, but hopefully some people noticed

Myself and Charlotte Francis of the technical art team painted various masks that I would use in my layered shaders to create subtle surface variation on the outer glass. It's rarely seen in game, but hopefully some people noticed

The central mask from the last image was used to drive a glowing red layer in my shader. During this sequence the layer was scripted to turn on slowly as the car pulled up to the tail lights. A hack, but it worked for the brief moment we see the effect

The central mask from the last image was used to drive a glowing red layer in my shader. During this sequence the layer was scripted to turn on slowly as the car pulled up to the tail lights. A hack, but it worked for the brief moment we see the effect

Here is the shader layer fading up and down as seen in maya. It's quite over the top here, but when scripted in game, the result is subtle and just adds that little extra something to integrate the glass shaders with the dynamic lighting environment

And the final effect. I could have used a refraction based shader here and created the effect in a physically correct way, but it proved to be very expensive at runtime unfortunately. More information and bts from this opening level coming soon...

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