The Technical Art of The Last of Us Part II by Waylon Brinck and Steven Tang || SIGGRAPH 2020

Coming off of Uncharted 4, we felt we had achieved a huge milestone in rendering, but pre-production and concept work on The Last of Us Part II showed we’d have different problems to solve. Most of the game would be ambiently lit which is a hard look to achieve. The game would be full of glass, rain, and lots of other tricky surfaces with a greater variety of environments than we’ve ever attempted. Early rendering tests of our characters showed just how far we had to go. To achieve all of this, we had to not only upgrade our tech, but also how our tech art team worked. In this talk, we focus on rendering techniques we developed for The Last of Us Part II in order of implementation so you can see how they built on one another. Check out more SIGGRAPH 2020 Presentations on the Naughty Dog Research Blog: