Inside Star Citizen: Dev Diary: Gavin Rothery

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   it's no secret that Star Citizen is an ambitious game trying to build a firstperson universe of varied experiences across multiple star systems but at its core will always be the spaceship and the process of making a spaceship always begins with the concept artist and we've had no shortage of greats contribute to our Legacy of vehicles from Star Wars Superstars like Ryan church and David hobbins to Star Trek luminaries like Jim Martin from the art Departments of Godzilla Matrix Blade Runner and dune like Emanuel shwe and George Hull to the dedicated cig Legends like Paul Jones and Alberto petronio and a whole host of folks in between two numerous Dimension the origin of our spacecraft are as numerous as their manufacturers but there's one person who's participated in the birth of more

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   Star Citizen spacecraft than any other with more than 20 vehicles to his name so far he Bridges the gaps between manufacturers and has helped to define or refine many of their Styles over the years and in this year special ship Showdown showcase we brought the prolific Gavin rothery into our office for your chance to meet the man and celebrate just a fraction of his contribution to this project and because I just think he's neat let's go got toothpast got you toothpaste FL I think working as a concept artist is great I like the way I get spend time with my dogs I really appreciate that I've got my dogs around me all day I get my SP ships my dogs you know and I get to come up to Manchester and hang out with you guys for a bit it's awesome you going to get

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   it he two pair of BLS beautiful I hold him that's right I'm an artist [Music] so a concept artist is usually a human that might change we've seen these AIS they're coming for us so a concept artist is an artist who comes in at the start of a job and works

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   to a technical brief which is often just writing there might be a few reference images in there occasionally we don't really tend to work like that we'll just get a technical breef and you got to come there and you just got to realize things usually you're working in somewhat in isolation there's base touching with like art directors and such but like a lot of my job is me just working at home in my studio just kind of getting on with things having like regular Touchin and uh that sounds weird touching Basse frequently and just uh pushing the design forward basically so I'm given a brief and a deadline and I'm expected to metamorph oriz that brief into something that can fulfill that brief and look really cool on the clock there's a few things that make a

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   good concept artist really you've got to be able to get along with people and like fit into a team that's first and foremost cuz it's more remote so it can take longer to get relationships going with people so that stuff becomes more important a game project particularly there's lots of things changing in development so you've got to be able to approach your work with a mindset of like not being too precious about it you can do a bunch of work on things and it can all be

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   beautiful and that could just completely change and you have to do something else which is beautiful and you've got to just be able to wake up every morning and kind of deliver that whenever you see a good concept artist you'll be looking at somebody that is able to do that and figured it out in their life so star isn't is a a very unique Beast I've been in the games industry for a long time I've worked in movies is I've you know I've been around the block I've done stuff Star Citizen is one of those projects that's got such definitively harsh metrics that you need to fit that I've never worked on another project like it you can look at the Millennium Falcon you know it looks pretty on the outside it looks pretty on the inside those two things don't go together so with sism everything has to fit and I remember

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   when I first started on doing some of the bigger ships like many years ago that was a new thing to me because other projects don't really consider that they'll have once you're inside a ship you're basically inside a magic little universe and you know things can be completely different scales and people generally don't worry about that stuff too much with star C is and it's all cohesive and it all has to fit and so when we're designing it we'll start with the exterior we always do options for things so the first week of a new ship design is me doing like just blasting out options as quickly as I can when I'm designing a ship I work in 3D and 2D so my actual pipeline is I do all my 3D in mayor so get the brief and I go straight into 3D and just start blocking out shapes and basically sketching in 3D I've been doing this for a long time as a concept artist and I found that

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   working in shapes and volume it's just it's just a very natural way to work it's a sculptural medium I always just get straight into 3D and I don't really work from one angle to start off with I literally work with the 3D shape and just work all around it to begin so I work my way in from blocking 3D shapes so this is all done in mayor and I like to put four or five options together so that we can all have a good sit down and choose there'll be a range of things in there try and make them all quite different quite often you'll have a favorite but that doesn't really matter because that might not be the way the ship ends up going and then ultimately whichever way it ends up going that becomes your favorite because you work on it more and it it comes to life and then once we have a that kind of feedback after the first week we'll have more of a direction and we might push forwards with a couple of designs and work a couple up a bit more then after another week or two we'll nail it down

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   to one and just keep pushing forwards with with One Direction we working four stages for the actual design and then a promo stage at the end so we'll normally go first pass exterior first pass interior second pass exterior second pass interior and through those two processes we'll establish the look of the outside establish what the inside needs to do make the inside fit the outside as best we can then we usually have to have a second pass on the outside just to change a few things because the interior has got hard hard limits on it and quite often there'll be a bit sticking out and we'll need to have a second pass over the exterior just to finish it all up and you know just put all the nice little polish and sort of Spanky bits on there and once that's done and we know that's not going to change we can get in there and like completely trick out the interior and finish it up in Star Citizen the rule of cool is a

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    term that we use when we're putting things together putting the art together it's concerned with the last 20% of the design basically so we have so much functionality we have to put in the design like when we're starting on a ship we start off with a brief it's got a whole bunch of requirements a ship would need and first and foremost when you're working as a concept artist you're there to do a job and you've got to fit in the project to make sure you can deliver so I need to make sure that my Concepts have got all of the things that the build team are going to need that the players are ultimately going to want so I got to consider things like components metrics Heights of handles Heights of steps how doors work how ramps work angles of things I got to consider things like the components the ship needs the facilities the crew need to be able to live on the ship work on the ship there's just all kinds of things to

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    consider so the rule of cool is when you've got all of that stuff done you got it in there and you got it looking cool it fits with the brand it looks nice and this is where we get to use that 20% to kind of push the brand forwards which is where the development in the ship comes from as soon as I've got something that I want to render I'll go into keyshop I'll take my May file into keyot key shot's a product presentation 3D package specializing in Beauty renders so I can just get in there with materials I've done this for such a long time and on so many ships now I've got all my material librar set for the different uh Brands and stuff so I can work really quickly and I'll get some pretty renders some nice light and just gives a better

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    indication of what the ship might look like further down the road so the fifth Milestone ms5 is promo artwork so once we've done all the design work and I I've done a ton of rendering along the way to put updates on the boards but it's all worky stuff and disposable stuff and once we get to promo that's when these ships get the proper setup and get the proper time and love and then that then those renders from keyshot become promo pieces and that's all finished in Photoshop so my favorite brand in sta is in his Crusader which would make one of my favorite ships the Aries cuz it's just it's just I love doing that it's got that classic black and white sci-fi look it's just it's the beor call is full of love music video it's that it's that classic classic

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    cool but I am very partial to Argo I do like a big orange space lump and the mall and the raft I just think those oh my got some ghost pumps talking about they my children my children um I remember when Paul Jones and I were working on when we first did the mall we knew we'd got some really good when we finished them mall it's like we got the Outlook done at the end of the job and we're just like that's a nice ship then when we got to do the raft and we got to push it forwards again that was that was a real pleasure working on the raft but I've got to say my my all-time favorite ship I got to say the Gladius it's the first one I

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    did when I first saw the Squadron videos that came out a while back and I got to see Mark ham standing in front of that Gladius and running his hand down it and being all gooey over it I'm looking at thinking that's Luke Skywalker like running his hands all over my ship like good job Life as a concept artist it can be you can be a little bit on the fringes sometimes and you can feel like you're a little bit out there but um one of the things that I really love about it the most is being able to kind of run my own time and there is an element of 9 to5 to

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    it I don't have to be at a desk at 9:00 talk every morning I don't have to commute I get to spend all day with my dogs I've got two little Westy friends and you know getting those getting my girls curled up under my desk and just blasting some music and you know rolling in at like 9:45 with a coffee and just getting going you know it's it's just nice it's just got that little bit more chill than you kind of commute to the office and 9:00 sit down here we go I mean that can translate to like late nights sometimes you know there there's a lot of grind and crunch but when you're doing I'm designing spaceships for Star cities and it's awesome it's an awesome job and I love it and it really isn't a chore you know you get your late nights your late nights at work you put your music on you put the cattle on and you just just get on with it it's awesome time flies so what do we learn this week well

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    no doubt that many of your all-time favorite spacecraft sprang forth from the efforts of Gavin rothery that from the ages Gladius to the upcoming RSI Zeus there is no doubt that he can make a beautiful spaceship and that with his ability to span the styles of every single manufacturer and Star Citizen we're always excited to see what he's going to do next if that didn't get through know that I tried for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckaby thanks for letting us share the people and process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next week it's time to get our factional fight back on in Pyro