The art and design of Uncharted 2

When I joined the SketchUp team a few months back, I did what most people do when they want to learn about something new: I plugged “SketchUp” into my favorite search engine. It wasn’t long before I found my way to this wonderful interview of concept artist Robh Ruppel done by our friends at SketchUpArtists.org.

Robh was the Art Director on the massive PS3 hit Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. In this interview, he discusses how he used SketchUp to help conceptualize and design the video game’s look and feel. For those of you who aren’t gamers, Uncharted 2 was big—really big. Think Avatar.

Concept Art: From SketchUp models to tonal drawings to production

Driven by cutting edge graphics, dimensional characters and a gripping story, Uncharted 2 was a runaway critical and commercial success. To date, the game has sold over 3.5 million copies worldwide. It’s the fastest selling first-party title for PlayStation and was named by Metacritic as the most critically acclaimed game of 2009. Uncharted 2 won over 100 awards, including Game of the Year accolades from publications like IGN, Eurogamer, Game Informer, Joystiq, Kotaku, AIAS, Game Developers Choice Awards, and the Spike Video Game Awards.

Robh uses SketchUp to determine the size and major shapes of the game’s environments.

Needless to say, Uncharted 2 was an instant classic; having spent more Saturday nights playing this game than I care to admit, it was pretty exciting to read about how Robh used SketchUp to work out the game’s aesthetic, and so I thought I’d reached out to Robh to see if he’d be willing to talk to us on camera about how he used SketchUp on Uncharted 2. He agreed, and with the help of the good folks over at Naughty Dog Studios, we put together this case study:

One of the hardest parts about this project was distilling Robh’s many pearls of wisdom about concept art, designing in 3D and SketchUp into a YouTube video, so we’ll follow up with another post in the coming days that has a transcription of our entire interview.

One more thing: If you found this video compelling, check out the trailer for the upcoming Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. I’ve already pre-pre-ordered my copy.

An update to Google Social Search

Today we’re doing a little bit more to bring you all the goodness of Google, plus the opinions of the people you care about. As always, we want to help you find the most relevant answers among the billions of interconnected pages on the web. But relevance isn’t just about pages—it’s also about relationships. That’s why we introduced Google Social Search in 2009, and why we’ve made a number of improvements since then. Today we’re taking another step forward—enabling you to get even more information from the people that matter to you, whether they’re publishing on YouTube, Flickr or their own blog or website.

First, social search results will now be mixed throughout your results based on their relevance (in the past they only appeared at the bottom). This means you’ll start seeing more from people like co-workers and friends, with annotations below the results they’ve shared or created. So if you’re thinking about climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and your colleague Matt has written a blog post about his own experience, then we’ll bump up that post with a note and a picture:

Social search results can rank anywhere on the page, and you’ll see who shared the result in the annotation underneath

Second, we’ve made Social Search more comprehensive by adding notes for links people have shared on Twitter and other sites. In the past, we’d show you results people created and linked through their Google profiles. Now, if someone you’re connected to has publicly shared a link, we may show that link in your results with a clear annotation (which is visible only to you, and only when you’re signed in). For example, if you’re looking for a video of President Obama on “The Daily Show” and your friend Nundu tweeted the video, that result might show up higher in your results and you’ll see a note with a picture of Nundu:

Now Social Search includes links people share on Twitter and other services

Third, we’ve given you more control over how you connect accounts, and made connecting accounts more convenient. You can still connect accounts publicly on your Google profile, but now we’ve added a new option to connect accounts privately in your Google Account. (After all, you may not want everyone to know you’re @spongebobsuperfan on Twitter.) In addition, if our algorithms find a public account that might be yours (for example, because the usernames are the same), we may invite you to connect your accounts right on the search results page and in your Google Account settings:

The new setting enables you to choose whether or not to show your connected accounts publicly on your Google profile

For an overview of Google Social Search and our new features, check out the explanatory video:

As always, you’ll only get social search results when you choose to log in to your Google Account. We’re starting to roll out the updates today on Google.com in English only and you’ll see them appear in the coming week. With these changes, we want to help you find the most relevant information possible, personalized to your interests and the people you care about. To learn more, check out our help center.

5 tips for using Blogger on your Android phone

Earlier this month, we announced the first version of the Blogger app for Android on the Blogger Buzz blog. Today, we’d like to share some tips on how you can use the Blogger app to quickly publish posts when you’re on the go.

1. Attach photos as you compose
Take photos using your phone’s camera and instantly add them to your post while you draft. You can also insert photos from your phone’s gallery, all within the Blogger app.

2. Include your current location
With your phone’s GPS, you can let your readers know where you’re blogging from by selecting your current location, no additional typing needed.

3. Share to Blogger
Share videos, products, photos, links and other interesting things you would like to include in your blog via the share button that’s available in many apps, including Google Maps for mobile, YouTube, and your web browser. After you share an item to your Blogger, it will be inserted into new post that’s automatically created for you so that start can composing right away.

4. Switch across multiple Blogger accounts
If you’re an author of more than one blog, you can easily switch between your different accounts by tapping on the orange arrow next to the title of your blog. That way, you can publish articles for each of your blogs to keep your all of your readers up to date.
5. Keep track of published posts and saved drafts
See what you’ve composed in an easy to read list by tapping the list icon located on the top right-hand corner.

We hope that you enjoyed these blogging tips. If you haven’t done so already, you can download the free Blogger app for Android 2.1+ devices from Android Market or scan the QR code below. As always, we would love to hear what you think so please feel free to share your thoughts with us through our feedback form.

Happy blogging!