During a livestreamed event hosted by the Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End Texture Artists Ana Cho and Alice Gionchetta, Concept Artist Aaron Limonick and Environment Modeler Adam Littledale gave more information on their work at Naughty Dog.

Interestingly, Limonick explained that the tools and technology used nowadays help a lot in making the final result look like the concepts, Previously a lot of the concept work simply didn't translate into the game because it wasn't feasible.

Littledale mentioned that according to him the most important things to help players feel immersed in an environment is the composition and the wear and tear effects.

Cho made a few interesting points about texturing:

  • What she really likes about working at Naughty Dog is that she can take even two days on a texture that's going to be a small part of a scene, taking her time to get the best result.
  • Compared to The Last of Us, with PS4 there can be more texture layers and "a lot of fancy stuff." Those layers include different parts like dirt, grass and so forth, and then they can be blended for a realistic effect.
  • Until the PS3 era, textures were done mostly with Photoshop. Now Naughty Dog uses Substance Designer a lot.
  • With the PS3, textures included a lot of lighting information, like baked shadows. Now most of that is done by the actual lighting, and textures are kept as neutral as possible.

Gionchetta also had something extremely interesting to show, in the form of some environment screenshots of a passport office from the level used in the E3 demo. According to her, creating it was great, because it includes a lot of materials, like wood, marble, glass and more. She could play with a lot of different textures and shader responses.  She mentioned that to took her two to three weeks to do the texture work.

You can check them out below:

Limonick also showcased a lovely piece of concept artwork, which he incidentally just uploaded to his Artstation page.

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