We are very lucky at Ripten to be joined by Naughty Dog’s Lead Character Artist, Richard Diamant, for an exclusive interview about his work on Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

Richard also divulges on the game’s art style, animation, and technical details never revealed before. After his views on improvements for Naughty Dog’s next game, we wander onto the advantages of Blu-ray and their relationship with Insomniac. Enjoy this preview of our three part interview.

Patrick: The characters in Uncharted are some of the most impressive video game models to date. They look even more impressive up close in the cutscenes. Are the in-game models any different from the cutscene models?

Richard: Thanks! Nope, the in game models are the exact same models that are used in the cutscenes. They also use the exact same textures. There really is no difference between them at all.

The only difference between the cutscenes and in game is a little higher quality lighting and shadowing. Hopefully not too noticeably different. We really wanted to keep the players immersed as much as possible. This meant using the same assets across the board.

Patrick: What sets the character models apart from many other games is that it’s very hard to see a polygon edge. How did you achieve such smooth models?

Richard: That was actually one of the trickier things to nail down. It’s also one of the things that we really wanted to focus on.

If you watch the first E3 trailer that was released a couple years ago, you can actually see some polygon stepping in the head of Nathan Drake. That was the first iteration of Nate’s head where I really tried to keep the polys to a minimum for performance sake.

Unfortunately this did not hold up as nicely as we wanted. We all felt seeing any kind of stepping took us out of the experience. So we decided that the characters needed more polygons to get rid of, or at least to minimize, the amount of hard edges seen.

So really to answer the question, its all about the polygons. Nathan Drake and the other main characters are in the upwards of 25k to 30k polygons. Probably one of the highest for a next gen game. It really wouldn’t have been possible without our amazing programmers and engine as well as the sheer power of the PS3. I know that term goes around a lot but really, the machine is a beast!

That’s the end of our preview, but make sure to join us tomorrow for the first extract from our three part interview with Richard Diamant. In the mean time why not read our review of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, or have a look at Richard’s impressive work.

Tags: animation, character_artist, diamant, gameplay_mechanics, game_models, interview, Naughty-Dog, richard-diamant, Uncharted:-Drakes-Fortune

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