Abby Flashback Dad - Lost in Forest - A

We had the advantage of taking this level completely undeveloped and bring it to a final polish from beginning to end. This gave us a lot of creative freedom with many things, and allowed us to take complete ownership of this whole area which is something I believe is very nice about working at NaughtyDog. This was an incredibly collaborative process, working in partnership with Young Jin Jo.
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Even though it is very subtle in-game these trees in particular have a lot of peeling bark, and there is very tiny moss everywhere to hide seams and help with transitions, which was very hard to pull off due to technical limitations. This is a very open area and we simply couldn't cull things out very easily, especially since the trees are so thin, so we had to heavily rely on making billboards and a lot of other tricks with LOD to fake the openness. We thought about cutting back on these details several times, but thankfully there is always a way! :D
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I do have to say none of this would EVER be possible without the amazing work of the environment technical artists, providing tools and constant improvements to accomplish all of this in an easy way.
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Environment Artist: Young Jin Jo
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Lighting Artist: Mark Shoaf
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Game Designer: Arnaldo Licea
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This is all a very collaborative process so, naturally there are general assets and textures borrowed and modified from a shared library.