Tools

Moving to Naughty Dog, I needed to switch modeling packages as well as the texturing programs that I was previously using. I had used 3ds Max and done most of my texturing work in Quixel Suite, which lent itself well to our mostly metallic, tiling trim based surfaces on Star Citizen. At Naughty Dog, the primary modeling package is Maya. Substance Designer and Substance Painter also work very well with the type of assets and textures we work with and so many artists like to use these programs too. Substance Designer is something that I have used for a while however; previously using it to make a variety of organic textures in my personal time, however Substance Painter is something that I had not previously had any experience with, always having used Quixel suite previously. Thankfully both programs are very similar and with a quick lesson from Christophe Desse, our resident Painter expert I was able to get to grips with the software quite quickly. The main changes in my workflow that I have experienced actually relate more to the way we use textures in the shader editor, our shader editor can support many more layers per shader than the CryEngine and these layers blend over one and other using a variety of controls. Within the Cryengine, I was used to using two blends per shader and so mostly this would simply be a clean version of metal, blending with a dirty version using vertex alpha. However at Naughty dog, I am able to blend using multiple vertex colour channels, multiple textures, as well as other awesome world space techniques, like an objects height within the world, or its orientation, etc…the shaders are far less limiting in this sense and this also affects how I approach the creation of textures. Rather than packing all details into one texture for example, limiting its use elsewhere in the game, using the layering system we can create more generic, reusable textures, but stack and combine them together to create incredibly diverse and interesting results. It’s a very liberating way to work and I really enjoy it!