Stumbling Toward 'Awesomeness'

My friends Judd and Rich gave a talk on some of the Character Tech behind Uncharted 2. Here are the slides.

Many, many people are having weird, buggy camera issues where you rotate a view and it snaps back to the pre-tumbled state (view does not update properly). There are posts all over, and Autodesk’s official response is “Consumer gaming videocards are not supported”. Really? That’s basically saying: All consumer video cards, gaming or not, are unsupported. I have had this issue on my laptop, which is surely not a ‘gaming’ machine. Autodesk says the ‘fix’ is to upgrade to an expensive pro-level video card. But what they maybe would tell you if they weren’t partnered with nVidia is: It’s an easy fix!

Find your Maya ENV file:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\maya\2009-x64\Maya.env

And add this environment variable to it:

MAYA_GEFORCE_SKIP_OVERLAY=1

Autodesk buried this information in their Maya 2009 Late Breaking Release Notes, and it fixes the issue completely! However, even on their official forum, Autodesk employees and moderators reply to these draw errors as follows:

Maya 2009 was tested with a finite number of graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia, with drivers from each vendor that provided the best performance, with the least amount of issues. (at the time of product launch).  A list of officially qualified hardware can be found here: http://www.autodesk.com/maya-hardware. Maya is not qualified/supported on consumer gaming cards.  Geforce card users can expect to have issues.  This is clearly stated in the official qualification charts mentioned above.

I saw this presentation about a year ago, talking about the pipeline Epic uses on their games. Maybe some interesting stuff for others here. The images are larger, you can right click -> view image to see a larger version.

45 days or more to create a single character… wow.

They don’t use polycruncher to generate LODs, they do this by hand. They just use it to import the mesh into max in a usable form from mudbox/zbrush.

They don’t care so much about intersecting meshes when making the high res, as it’s just used to derive the nMap, not RP a statue or anything.

They said they only use DeepUV for it’s ‘relax’ feature. They make extensive use of the 3DS Max ‘render to texture’ as well.

Their UT07 characters are highly customizable. Individual armor parts can be added or removed, or even modded. Their UV maps are broken down into set sections that can be generated on the fly. So there are still 2×2048 maps but all the maps can be very different. This is something I have also seen in WoW and other games.

They mentioned many times how they use COLLADA heavily to go between DCC apps.

They share a lot of common components accross characters

Here are some screens of animation rigs from Kung Fu Panda:

In a shot: