The idea was that the camera would follow along next to, behind, or in front of the character, generally looking at him, moving on a “track” through the world. And Dave and I were convinced that extensive pre-calculation of visibility could allow the renderer to handle A LOT more polygons. So we did experiments in free roaming camera control and settled on branching rail camera + pre-calculation = gorgeous visuals. Dave, Jason, and I had done a bunch of research “post Doom” on visibility calculation. Mark’s was the best - being the best assembly programmer of us three - but also the most complicated.Ĭomplexity became the name of the game at Naughty Dog. First me (three times), then Dave (twice), then finally Mark took a crack at it.
No one else had the guts, as while this was easy to render, it required inventing some totally hardcore assembly language vertex compressors. This allowed us to use the more sophisticated 3-4 joint weighting available in PowerAnimator, which the Playstation had no hope of matching at runtime (until the PS2), instead we stored the location of every vertex, every frame at 30 frames a second. This gives a very stiff look, so we went instead with vertex animation. In those days, most people used a simple skeleton system with “1 joint” weighting, and very few bones. drum roll please… animation! We were obsessed with making ours look like that really good Disney or Looney Tunes stuff. The characters popped, like cartoons are supposed to, we had lots more polygons to work with, and it worked around the Playstation’s lack of texture correction or polygon clipping. This was a highly usual approach, but had lots of advantages.
So we went with more polys on the characters, less texture. Jason pointed out - he’s always been the master of seeing the intersection between art and tech - that since polygons on 3D characters our size were just a few pixels, shaded characters actually looked better than textured ones. In fact, just as fast in the 512 mode as 320. But it looked SHARP and we found the machine was really good at rendering shaded, but un-textured, triangles. The Playstation had this oddball 512×240 video mode that everyone else ignored, it wasn’t standard (320×240) and ate up video memory others wanted for textures. Our motto was “bite off more than we could chew, then figure out some crazy complicated way to make it work.” Since during fall of 1994 Jason was also the only artist, he frantically generated all the source material and banged on my head to make sure it would look incredible. While all this art design was going on, I, and then in January 1995, Dave, struggled to build an engine and tool pipeline that would make it possible to render these grandiose cartoon worlds we had envisioned on paper.
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