Richard Diamant Interview Part 1: Background & Uncharted Character Design

Today we begin our three part interview with Naughty Dog’s Lead Character Artist, Richard Diamant. Joining this experienced developer in January 2006, Richard is in charge of the look, pipelines, and creation of the characters in Naughty Dog games.

In the first part of our interview we discuss the character creation process and the models themselves, from their polygon and texture count, to the laborious steps taken to create their hair.

Patrick: Hello Richard. Congratulations on creating one of the best games I’ve played this year and surely a favourite among Playstation 3 gamers.

First off, what is your professional background? And what games have you worked on before making your way to Naughty Dog?

Richard: My background is primarily in video games with some cinematic work. Before Naughty Dog I was working at NCSOFT Santa Monica studios. It was a small studio focusing on conceptual art and marketing as well as some cinematic work for Guild Wars.

Prior to NCSOFT, I was employed by Genuine Games, where I worked on 50 Cent Bulletproof and Fight Club. Before that, I was at a company called Hypnotix where I worked on Outlaw Golf and Outlaw Volleyball.

I went to school at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia where I studied multimedia and animation. I always knew I wanted to do something with video games and art so I decided to focus all of my attention on 3d.

At the time there really wasn’t any place to learn the skills needed like there is today. Most of the things I really had to learn on my own. I got very lucky landing my first job at Hypnotix right out of school. The rest, as they say, is history!

Patrick: Now you’re Naughty Dog’s Lead Character Artist, can you describe the process of designing characters on paper and then moving them into the game engine, and what role you had in this process?

Richard: That is a long one! Lets see… The initial concept for the characters goes through a huge process of back and forth between designers, story writers, and concept artists. They are the ones who define the personalities of the characters and initial look and feel. I do get some input as well in this process. However, my input usually comes at the later stages on the conceptual end.

After everyone has agreed on the “final” look of the character, it then goes to my team to build the model and conceptualize the characters even more. The reason I quote “final” is because the characters never really are final when they get to us. Naughty Dog has a pretty free process with characters as well as every other stage in our production. If we feel something isn’t working at any stage, we are the ones that make the decision to change it. That also goes for improvements.

On that note, once we begin to model the characters, changes do happen. Some things end up looking better as concepts than in 3d. Its our job to take what they give us and mold it into our own.

This is especially true when it comes to the face of the character. The concepts at times for heads can just be pictures of people we want the characters to look like. There have also been cases where we like some features from one person and other features from another. We take all of these ideas and turn them into a final product that everyone is happy with.

It’s not an easy job! :)

Once the models are built we move on to texturing, shading, and rigging the characters for the animation. They can then be exported to our engine and seen in game.

It’s still not done though! We then have to create wrinkle maps for all the heads and clothes, as well as a few other technical bits that are too boring to talk about. The characters for our game were a living file that was constantly updated, improved, and tweaked probably until the last week of production.

I was working on Uncharted’s lead character Nathan Drake on and off for over a year! If we didn’t have to ship I probably still would have been working on him!

Patrick: You’ve created some really iconic characters for Uncharted, how much has their design changed before the final print?

Richard: A ton! I wish we were allowed to show the initial concepts for Nathan Drake. But, we can’t. He basically has gone from a cartoony looking Jak character to more and more realistic as time has passed on.

When I was hired at Naughty Dog, I was brought on to create the look of Nate. At that time I think he had already gone through about 3 completely different revisions and Naughty Dog still was not entirely happy with the direction.

I was able to give my take on Nathan and, thankfully, it’s what they liked. After he was made, the remaining characters followed the same blueprints for style. It’s a hard process to create a character that is supposed to launch one of PS3′s biggest franchises. I’m grateful for having had this opportunity and am very happy with the way everything turned out.

Patrick: Did the actors have any impact on the character designs? That is, did you scan their faces in a similar way to Ninja Theory for Heavenly Sword?

Richard: Nope, not at all. Every character in our game was hand sculpted and hand painted from scratch. No scans of anything. That is one thing that I think Naughty Dog really liked about what I brought to the table. I try to create my characters with an artistic touch rather then trying to mimic reality. I think it also helps avoid that harsh “uncanny valley” feel that a lot of games are falling into. That mentality really spans across our entire team.

Everybody at Naughty Dog creates all their work from scratch without any scans. That is one reason I believe our game feels somewhat like a painting in a stylized universe rather then a recreation of reality.

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!

Patrick: How many polygons are each of the characters and how many texture maps do they sport?

Richard: All of the main characters are in the 25k to 30k range. The pirates and other secondary characters max out at around 15k.

The number of texture maps is a hard question to answer. It really differs per character. They have so many maps it’s really hard to count. The head alone has I think either 6 or 7 maps. Then you have the arms, clothes, hair, eyes, teeth and tongue. Each with at least 2 to 3 maps. We didn’t really care about the number of maps as apposed to the texture memory each character was able to hold.

The number was about 10-15 megs per main character. With texture compression, that’s a lot of maps! The pirates and other secondary characters had a limit of 4 to 5 megs total. Also a fair amount of textures for secondary characters.

Patrick: The hair shading is also some of the best to be seen. How did you create such realistic hair?

Richard: Painfully! Hair is not an easy thing to do in 3d, at least not easy to make look good. We wanted to create hair that looked and felt full. Again, not an easy thing to do in games since we are always limited by the amount of polygons we can use. This was another area that we decided not to hold back on. The hair alone got into the thousands of polygons. I think Drake’s hair is about 2500 or so.

We also worked pretty hard to find a shading solution that felt like real hair. We must have gone through about 20 iterations before we landed on the one used. It was a huge back and forth between us and the programmers to find what solution held up best.

In the end, we used a custom hair shader that simulates the specular sheen on hair combined with soft alpha and painted texture maps. It’s really nothing too crazy. Hair was something we were very worried about so to hear that people are happy with it makes us all feel very good about our decision!

End of Part 1. Part 2 will see us talking about Uncharted’s art style, shadows, and water, in addition to the advantages of Blu-ray. Make sure to join us next week. In the mean time why not read our review of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, or have a look at Richard’s impressive work.

Part 2 can be found here.

Part 3 can be read here.  In this final part of the interview we explore Uncharted’s animation system, filmic inspirations, the possibility of new melee capabilities in the next project, along with Naughty Dog’s current relationship with Insomniac.