The Last of Us: Part II....Wet 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 'wet' 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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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 image shows the full set of 'wet' vehicles artist could choose to place in their levels. From this distance, many detailed, blend layers fade out for optimisation (see final video for a better example)
This gallery features technical information in some posts as well as just a selection of nice examples of my wet vehicles from the game. I really liked this little van, tucked away in Seattle under a canopy of mist and ivy
(Includes audio) All wet vehicles had the ability to enable an animated rain effect, I worked with Steven Tang and Ke Xu to ensure that artists could enable this feature at the click of a button in maya, with no new shaders or alternative models necessary
This wet, tv van was also a nice example of the move-mod system. I worked a lot with Ke Xu to implement it so wanted to feature it in this gallery. It allowed artists to pose vehicles differently, whilst still maintaining them as instances of each other
Parallax occlusion mapped decals were used for rivets and other small details, this shader was designed to inherit the wetness value of surfaces beneath it so that it would always look correct
Here's another example of those decals at work, as well as parallax occlusion mapped decals, I also used some graphic decals, the strip detail on this flatnose truck is an example
Another nice shader feature I made use of, was a 'fresnel blend' for the droplets. The water droplets I created used a 'normal map from height value' feature, which created some unsightly aliasing at harsh angles, this blend alleviated that
Another debug view that shows the rain droplets (top facing, fresnel blending at the edge) and the streaks (applied to steep angles) and how they blend together and update based on rotation/position
This image is a good example of how the droplets and streaks blended together in game, the transition was relatively invisible and these shaders were only ever applied to stationary vehicles
Slightly different rust and wear looks were needed for the white vehicles, the dark rust used was too contrasted for my liking, I laboured over created a softer, easier transition from metal to rust with these variants...obsessively so
It wasn't just the bodies that received the wetness treatment, but windows, hubcaps, tires, undercarriages, engines all had shaders that reacted to wetness and rain consistently
(Includes audio) The 'sniper fight' level was a great test for the wet shader work and vehicles I'd created, in this level we even employed a mixture of dynamic vehicle parts that would react when shot
This station wagon featured in the 2018 E3 demo, Ellie slid across the bonnet (hood for my American friends) as the windscreen was shot out, this was one of the first vehicles I really felt I'd come close to establishing the final wetness look on
(Includes audio) These short video clips hopefully show a little more of the surface response that this shader setup would exhibit in game
Another image from the E3 demo, Ellie crawled right underneath a version of this truck. The challenges that up-close interaction presented helped inform my model and shader work for the entire game, a really valuable learning experience
Finally, as vehicles got further away my shader layers would fade out and reduce, or certain effects would turn off. The transitions were gradual in game but this is an important step to making sure we aren't rendering too many expensive pixels