You might have already read about a Naughty Dog job listing for a character artist responsible for “making million poly models game ready” for a “next-gen” game, and if so you probably got pretty excited. A million polygons is a lot, right? It’s certainly more than the ~30,000 poly models used in Uncharted 3. Is this evidence of Uncharted on PS4? Or a simple misunderstanding? Let’s investigate.

The responsibilities of Naughty Dog’s new character artist are as follows:

• This digital sculptor will be responsible for making million poly models game ready, and support highest-res characters for renderings

• This individual will create clean, deformable and efficient models, extract normal maps from high-res version and sculpt morph targets for use within a Maya/ZBrush pipeline

In addition, they’ll need experience with “normal map extraction of human models for next-gen games.” We’re not just doing a bit of free recruitment consultancy for Naughty Dog here – that description points to position working on a next-gen title featuring million-polygon chracter models – Uncharted 4 on PS4.

But there’s more to it than meets the eye, as we found out when we caught up with 3D World’s technical editor Rob Redman: “The PS3 almost definitely couldn’t handle [million-poly models], especially not while running lights, normal mapping, anti-aliasing and the geometry for other characters and environments.”

“It just doesn’t have the memory available. Or the graphics processing power,” Rob elaborates. But that isn’t as clear an indication of a PS4 project as is seems, as Rob explains: “almost every game character these days starts of as a high resolution model with tens of millions of polygons.”

“These are then baked into a set of texture files, either displacement or normal maps, that give the lower res model the look of the fully detailed.”

So just because someone’s working on creating million-poly models, that doesn’t neccessarily mean they’ll show up in the game in such high detail. Perhaps Naughty Dog were already in million-poly territory with Uncharted 3 before scaling it down? Let’s take a look at the development shots from a little behind-the-scenes blog Naughty Dog posted:

Those wireframe models certainly look high-detail, and you can see they’re down-scaled in-game. So are all the next-gen titles based on a simple misunderstanding of how the character design process works? Not neccessarily, says 3D expert Rob:

“The full renders look to be normal mapped rather than stupidly hi-res. The WIP images are a combination. It’s quite telling though as some show wireframes of 3D Studio Max and there are certainlyno million poly models there.”

So we’ve come full circle. That job listing isn’t absolute proof that Naughty Dog’s next game will feature million-poly character models in-game, but after examining the studio’s work for Uncharted 3 it does appear that they’ll be vastly improved on compared to Drake’s most recent adventure on PS3.

And the facilitator for that vast improvement could well be a next-gen console – the phrase ‘next gen’ is used in the job description, after all.

So let’s indulge our more optimistic side for a second – what does a million-polygon character modelactually look like? Pretty flipping impressive, as it turns out. These are renders from 3D artists working in super-high detail:

Are we staring at the near-future of in-game character models? We’ll know a few E3s down the road, but whoever gets that keenly-speculated character artist position at Naughty Dog could well be creating a multi-million polygon Nathan Drake for your PS4 – if the studio’s even working on another Uncharted, that is.