Richard Diamant, Naughty Dog’s Lead Character Artist, has told Gamezine exclusively that “yes, the trailer was all rendered real-time in our engine.” Real time. If you don’t know what that means then go and read ThreeSpeech.
Oh, alright, I’ll tell you. it means that the character models, textures and lighting were all done dynamically on the scene as it played, not rendered on a supercomputer and then dumped to a video file that your DS could play. The PS3 did the hard work.
Now, some amongst you will complain that real time rendering for cutscenes is always much better than gameplay footage. To those people I say this: Go and play the original Uncharted again. See the way the cutscenes weren’t really much better (hardly noticable) than the gameplay aspects? That’s because Naughty Dog use the same models and textures for both, only the lighting is slightly improved.
If this doesn’t impress you then you’re an idiot.
