2004- 2005 | Naughty Dog | Sony | PlayStation2 | Fantasy racing
The switch from the relatively smallish platformer environments of Jak3 to absolutely humongous online-enabled racetrack-levels had its own set of unique challenges, but it all turned out to be very fun and rewarding at the end.
I built and designed most of the look of several levels including Kras City, which could be considered the main hub of the game: the awesome intro takes place here, and it makes an appearance even on the box.
During the project I created a number of Maya tools as well, mostly to help the art team to populate the massive levels with obscene amounts of instanced geometry.
I also wrote the Maya portion of the “virtual motion-capture” system which we used to apply motion-data recorded from the physics-driven ingame cars back into the hand-animated cinematics to achieve more realistic car-movement.
Complete fly-through of several levels I built, plus the killer intro: