From Neil Druckmann:
Think about it this way: how long does it take to develop a character model? I mean, it took around 8 hours / frame to render the least complex frames in the movie Toy Story 3. If the quality is even remotely comparable in The Last of Us on PS4, then we'll think incredibly optimistically and say it took 1 hour / frame. At 60 frames per second, that's 60 hours for a second in The Last of Us. It potentially took more than someone's workweek to render a second within a scene.
With that having been said: how long did it take to remodel all of those characters and environments for use within the game outside of cutscenes once the PS3 version was being remastered for the PS4?
This is why I would have rather looked for a sequel coming to PS4 rather than a remaster. Sure, they said that the PS4 remaster was a way to familiarize themselves with PS4 development, but I think it was an excuse for a cash grab.We brought in all the hi-res models, and then it’s on par with what you saw in the cutscenes. There’s an improved lighting model. After that, we started looking across the board; enemies look a little blurry up close, so that was pretty easy. We ramped those up and saw a pretty significant difference.
Our cinematics are now running at 1080p and 60fps, and that involved rendering them all from scratch. It’s interesting that now [instead of a technical bottleneck], the bottleneck is: Can we fit all this on the disc?
Think about it this way: how long does it take to develop a character model? I mean, it took around 8 hours / frame to render the least complex frames in the movie Toy Story 3. If the quality is even remotely comparable in The Last of Us on PS4, then we'll think incredibly optimistically and say it took 1 hour / frame. At 60 frames per second, that's 60 hours for a second in The Last of Us. It potentially took more than someone's workweek to render a second within a scene.
With that having been said: how long did it take to remodel all of those characters and environments for use within the game outside of cutscenes once the PS3 version was being remastered for the PS4?