Star Citizen Live Gamedev: Fun With Props

1 October 202100:55:301,543 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hi everybody welcome to star citizen live game dev fun with props uh i'm your host jared huckabee and if you've never seen star citizen live before well go back watch all the other ones we'll wait sergeant live is where we take about an hour out of our friday at the end of the week and we hang out with some of our developers we goof off sometimes we answer questions sometimes we we we we we make stuff uh very occasionally i force jeremiah to sing this week it's one of those shows where we make stuff uh so let's get to meet our our our our people this is lewis this is dan say hi lewis hi dan yo hey everyone how are you doing
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a bit panicky but it's going to be it's going to be great i think i'm i'm pretty sure is this your i can't remember i i i know this is dan's first scl lewis have you done one of these before no that's my first one as well this is your first one well we have two first-timers here from the props team uh let's start because every show is somebody's first show and uh yes we do have some signature phrases here thank you chat uh louis uh tell people who you are what you do for the props team so um i'm lewis i'm a prop artist um and basically i make boxes i've been about a cloud for about a year now i think it's going to be a year like in four days so uh yeah and i managed to uh not do a star citizen live for all this time but yeah no it's time to time to
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get rip off the band-aid and and crack on so yeah make boxes all you props people are so humble like yeah i just make boxes for livi just makes boxes dan who are you what do you do for star citizen i too i'm uh i'm a box artist no uh i've been here for about six months i'm in the same teams this we do like the same stuff we work on a really cool team making all sorts of fun stuff to be pushed pulled thrown shot around the verse it's a lot of fun now uh louis uh tell them the terrible thing you told me when you came on the call this morning oh i'm not getting out with everyone oh i was just saying like so since i've been in college like i've always kind of followed the development
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of this game and i've this is a bit of a fun girl moment for me joining and meeting jared for the first time because yeah he's like dude i've been watching you since uni it's so cool yeah to be here and i was just like like i aged like 40 years all right so what are we doing today lewis okay so um pretty much what we're going to be doing today is um taking something that really exists in the universe and kind of bringing it up to the modern standards that we have so um there's a lot of stuff that's been developed over time of course um so there's some props that are maybe created uh before certain tech came online um it's basically just going to take an existing asset uh try and reimagine it a bit and and
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create it with some of the new stuff in mind really so that's pretty much what we're going to be doing we lost your audio there for a bit which bit do we use on but basically uh folks who follow the development of star citizen know that uh it's very common they see it a lot with our spaceships you know things developed in early days as the game continues to progress as the game continues to evolve the tech continues to evolve the metrics continue to evolve uh just our overall art standards continue to evolve uh part of the a normal and continuing part of the process is going back and revising some of our our older assets and bringing them up to modern standards and that applies to everything from our big giant uh spacecraft down to our teeny tiny uh props that populate the verse louis dan it's your show
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take it away awesome so we thought we'd try and spice it up a bit and give this a kind of bit of a narrative so here we have uh the ship showdown winner uh everyone's favorite ship the mpuv uh it's illegally parked unfortunately and criminals these all these workers are tilted so what we're gonna do is we're going to actually uh take some of these cones and we're going to cone it off but isn't it yeah so i think there's a there's some stuff we could do to this cone uh to bring it kind of up to standard um obviously there's nothing wrong with cone um but there's a lot of new stuff that we've got that we can take advantage of uh that other teams can
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also use so if for example like if you look at the floor see where the light's hitting it on the left like look at all that really nice information environment arts put in and stuff and even the ship itself whereas we're getting none of that with the cone we just want to bring it up to that you know that triple a standard because since this cone was made triple a's moved on and yeah so we're going to start as we always do with a queue well i feel like go back to the cone real quick yeah i feel like is it a cone no it's not first and foremost like i don't know who made this back in the day uh you know we're not well i do like we're just not gonna name names but come on we can be a little more cone shape i think we know exactly who we're gonna email them i'm gonna find them sometimes to start start process so right does this start with uh reshaping
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the original or are you going to start from fresh so there's like two ways we can approach it really um we can either take the original and you know update the materials and and do some stuff to it or um you know sometimes if we've got a bit more time permitting we can actually go in and basically completely reimagine it so that's kind of what i'm going to do today because then you can see kind of more of the process so also it needs to be like fit for purpose as well right you see obviously we were just looking at in the level and it was like flat but the one in the max scene here on the left is is all folded up and stuff so you know we nee we're gonna try and re-imagine a little bit of everything on this like i mean looking at that it kind of doesn't make sense it would just fall over if it was like that so we kind of want to keep that folding and
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stuff also making it look more cone-like so it's more identifiable because you know a big thing about 3d art is silhouette right and just while lewis's model in this cube here you'll see as we flash past the old asset and from one side it looks like a cone but from the other side it looks like just you know like a thin box right and it you want it to have a read from every angle so that's something that you know if we tackle it in this way we're going to be able to achieve and that old one had the animation had the little deploy animation uh yeah you know traffic obviously a a safety cone or travico doesn't need to deploy animation but star citizen is a bit extra and so i don't think that's a secret this is a this is the cool thing actually um this one does we've got two variants of it but it hasn't actually been animated
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this one oh so that's something we can definitely like you know um just to add a bit more interactivity to it um and obviously set it up so that you know maybe i don't know level design maybe you want to make it into part of the level where they want to deploy maybe not a traffic cone but like in general with a lot of the props we like to do as much as we can to make it so that you know we're kind of fit for what's going to be happening in the future so maybe it could be wired up to a button or you know but i just having that option there is something we can definitely have in mind as we we go forward on it i think it's something that we've we've learned in a lot of ways you know there's a reason we're coming back to this asset and it's maybe because when it was first made there wasn't a lot of forethought into you know what it was going to get used for in the future so you know coming back and giving it a bit of love is always going
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to go down well and we can also take the opportunity while we're here to spend a little bit of extra time to make it more fun right so that current kona just would be just static whereas this one will be able to make it so like if you shot it it would like fall over and stuff like that and you can pick it up and things folks in the chat are asking if this cone will actually be going in the game uh yeah that's actually why we're doing this work it's it's we're trying to piggyback on work that they were already doing so yeah exactly so um we have like um like a few different stages to win my model in here so at the moment obviously you can kind of see the the rough shape of the cone we've put these horizontal edges across they're like kind of lined you're seeing see you'll see like these extra edges the chamfer pop in and out over the course of the
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thing as well it's just lewis making sure it's shading correctly oh craig the space bomb has a much better name for the show hold on i gotta change the name i gotta change the name of the show hold on you guys keep working all right i got this he said what's he saying i can't see twitch i want to see this new name it's now citizencone 2021. oh my god good job craig the spaceman thank you craig this one's for you mate there's yeah this one's you it's funny craig's name on this asset like a serial number it could be craig brand a space cone uh somebody earlier was remarking about how uh uh how anybody that's ever played halo knows how deadly a
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a traffic cone can be that's right it's the newest weapon we all seen the um the bomb video you guys like at the beginning of the video yesterday that was put out we can just sit on the back and just throw these up i mean technically you know once this is fully physicalized once this is fully physicalized uh it can be it can be lethal look me the lethal oh i'm sure it will be proper physics are applied no it's not sitcom 2022 it's not sitcom it's branding as important people citizen citizen cone this is citizen cone there we go uh can we have the cone as a hat not with your attitude ehawk
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is there no please pleasing thank you you know what you did you just sit there and think about it good idea though you gotta give him that i'm not gonna give him the idea of using a safety cone as a hat that was devo it's not his idea just throw it at your friends when we get in uh do cig modelers work in maya as well or just 3dx cig modelers work in all manner of software we got we got folks who work in macs we have folks who work in maya we have folks who work in blender we we stretch over into like ancillary programs like substance designer and all kinds of stuff houdini uh basically it's you know use the right tool for the
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right job yeah we're very fortunate here to have access to almost any tool that we'd ever need to like get the job done so it's always and a fantastic tools team that makes all the converters and exporters and importers necessary so that our developers can work in their preferred software you'll see here throughout the video once lewis says he's about to place the asset now he has a hot key on his keyboard which most of us do where we just press a button and then in 3ds max it will just push it straight into game for us now anyone who's worked in like other engines or worked in 3d software before knows that that is not something that we we should take for granted you know sometimes file export then refresh it in the engine it's like takes like 10 seconds which when you're
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trying to change that one tiny thing like 10 times like just get it right it gets so frustrating so yeah the tools guys here are just wizards we worship them no big big shout out to everybody on the tools team who is too shy to ever appear on video but i got you this is the unsung heroes so we got like we've got a base so we got a basic cone shape right so um and yeah that's the end of the stream thanks for tuning in everyone um now um so yeah this is like more cone shape sorta um but we can go further with this so this is like probably the minimum you'll do if you start putting in the scene and going okay right so how how does this compare to
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the character sound nearly extra enough we'll sci-fi we've had our first crush we need like a crash counter in the top well no we between 3ds max we we push that software in all the wrong ways yep we have um very bad stuff so yeah but when you have um like a cone at that stage we would usually call that white box which is even though it was colored in right sometimes it wouldn't be it's just pretty simple to chuck orange on on a color no we call that a 30 cone people it's a thirty cone everybody
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that's what he was thinking of the whole time he was sipping that coke you just sifting through every joke he could make and he was like that's the one that's in london right so i'm thinking about how we can kind of take this from a bog standard traffic cone uh into something a bit more interesting um obviously in the future things have been developed more and become more convenient so maybe we can create some sort of system where this cone can actually fold up like the other one um but maybe in a bit more of an interesting way so what we're going to do is we're actually going to separate these these segments don't don't don't kv-3d is answering the wembley bumble
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you see this this is a show about props jared will probably not answer it well i didn't see it what was the question wundley bumbly what was your question was it about props i missed it it went by better have been trafficking related i would hope we only do traffic cones here and boxes yeah this is a big this is a big jump for us yeah today weeks of preparation for the you ain't going to make a box about one but honestly as long as we put like anti-grav or something on it then this can enter ship showdown 2022. oh damn it's using the argo color scheme in it new ship confirmed
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argo cone so when we were looking at it before an editor we had like just that simple shape but even just in these last like minute or so when you see lewis detach every sort of section and then put the chamfers back on which is kind of the things creating that almost bevel in that makes them look like separate pieces that is starting to branch more closer towards grey box so we have like we have white box gray box mod zero and then final art right and what we're gonna try and do today is we will show you like the final art version of this if we you know if we don't get that far but you know we do expect to get pretty close to lod zero which is basically like what you'd expect to see in game so the thing the pretty thing that you guys are all used to looking at that's lod zero and then all the back end tech like making sure the dirt and where um are
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all correct and the lods are all correct that's all the the final art stuff i found one blue bummies question and the other guy was right i'm not gonna answer that because it's not about it's a different show will the a2 be able to deploy cone-based carpet bombs in the future uh yes normally i would avoid answering that uh but you know i feel really really comfortable confirming that right now uh giant enormous cones uh deployed by the a2 at least uh six months before lunch before a2 launch so you can actually do it now you're just not trying hard enough
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we've been waiting on the uh on the props team for someone to take the gurney from the hospital and then push their friend off the back of a star lifter or something but we get to see it on reddit so someone get on that please we've been really excited to see that it's homework from today's stream that's right yeah your homework assignment we did it in testing you should uh you know we should we should we should do that we should have that as a this is our last uh scl for a little bit we next week is citizencon and then we you know the come back the week after but we should start having a troll contest every single week on seo just just give the community a mission something very trolly and dumb to do every single week and see what they come
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up and see how they come up with doing it there you go find a trolley get it in the back of a star lifter and launch yourself into orbit well not just probably do that your mates too star citizen is a community game yeah we yeah your friend's not attached to it it doesn't doesn't count yeah don't want no single-player shenanigans that i'd be pretty impressed if you someone managed to to work a gurney onto a ship and then throw themselves out on the gurney just by themselves that's a stretch goal we can get that done even better i know when we were making the trolleys and the stuff for the hospitals and for last patch like i remember um what was the
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just seeing everyone messing around with like the walkers and the gurneys and stuff it was just so funny like yeah it's really cool to see what you guys get up to you're all crazy right cool so we got this i remember how i made it earlier uh for the folks asking about the picoball uh go to twitter and and find ian leland uh he's he's on social media now and just ask him over and over and over again if he'll tell you where they are i have questions about that stuff people are still having trouble finding go go go go buggy in tell them just go send you right so
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let's see what other detail we can add to this so i'm going to split this into three are we adding polymers because we i mean we've got yeah we will be um i mean we've got this shape but yeah still we can go a bit more interesting on it try and add some some more detail so uh there's a good example there though if you go back so in editor you see that the at the moment the two second top segments kind of two and three are all fully colored but lewis inside his max at the moment hasn't he hasn't explored it yet but you see that he's he's inserted it slightly and left an edge in there he's going to put palm on those lines later and you'll see the difference that it makes and that's something that with that with the tools jared was mentioning earlier on our crazy palm stuff
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like allows us this one i'm going to throw a wobbler and i'm not going to put the palm in there now because you said it well don't know so much as you think danny if he doesn't do it it'll look rubbish so [Laughter] before you have me there unit reverse maybe do the top one with palm in the bottom one without and then you can actually see the difference pond makes it's kind of insane because everybody shows somebody's first show then dan why don't you explain uh what palm is for both for folks so palm stands for either pixel offset mapping or parallax exclusion mapping depending on how small you want to try and stand stand it's the same yeah if you want to try and sound really smart you say the second one apparently it's just too cool
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it sounds too cool to not say you have the option of saying parallax and you choose not to you yeah exactly so if you want to be humble say pixel offset map and if you want to be like cool like a cool kid say parallax occlusion essentially what it is is we have a height map and and it's like a gradient of black to white and white representing high black representing low and what we do on there you can see in the bottom left at the moment it's purple because that's normal map that's something else but we would have like the depth shown in this like kind of scale so like all the crevices would be like dark and then all the high points be white and then what the game engine does is it looks at where your camera is in perspective to what it's looking at and then it will actually physically move the texture like it will offset the pixels or based on the parallax of what you're
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looking at and then you end up with this cool illusion of depth that isn't actually there but it i mean it looks like it's there i believe it it's magic that's what it is clever people came up with it and we just use it that's pump you'll see it it's easier when you see it yeah i'm just gonna set the i'm gonna set up a new material quickly so i can build it as we go along it's very powerful so like typically anyone who's got any familiarity with modeling and modeling something like a bolt or you know even just putting in like lines on something can be really destructive like let's say we're working with ian who just mentioned and the art director and he's like oh let's move that line like i don't like that panel line being there or maybe we should remove a couple
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of these bolts it's looking a bit heavy like if we were modeling that traditionally it would take up way more memory it would take way more time to adjust and it would take way more time to do in the first place so the fact that we have we use this extra texture space in this really fancy shader it just speeds up so much and it's one of the reasons why you'll see in our game there's so much detail in areas that other games like just don't because it's like our engines kind of built around this really cool shader and workflow that we would kind of use this sounds like a replay video no response from these guys i would just say you haven't been paying attention but yes we're definitely pre-recorded people
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uh don't let the name of the show fool you uh citizen cone 2021 uh absolutely pre-recorded this year this is what we do by i mean you can't pre-record people like me and dan it's not it's not possible we're just too dangerous we can't be captured on film some say like bigfoot except we're really small you delete the mesh oh dude right um so you see now on the left-hand side how he just clicked that purple thing in the middle what was really cool is he had an edge selection and he just went i want it to go in now and then he just clicks that and then the magic tool puts it in for
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him again here we go ready oh so we select what we want so we can have if we wanted to we can have um but but we don't in this scenario so we went to the small one and we can customize these sizes depending on the asset as well so like you know something that's much bigger um you'd go for a bigger one usually um but in this case we'll go we'll go for this size uh and you so what i've actually done i'm going to quickly um yeah where's the materials going from i've made a new material that's why because i want to build i want to build the new material out i don't know why it's got a reflective material by default it's a bit annoying
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yeah you're um the american viewers the american viewers at home have realized that this is pre-recorded and we filmed it on january 10th we've had this in the can for about you know nine months yeah i actually did this month one of uh oh yeah he hadn't even started working here they just called me in so you can see on the top section there show them that line difference there there's the break and you can see where the white transitions there on the top section how nice it like bevels in before bottled thing whereas on the one below we don't have anything it's just a flat
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transition that's pondering magic we we don't like that we don't stand that that's not that's not what we're after so what we got here we got uh let me i just need to reorganize my ids now that um yeah yeah so what i'm doing just uh just so you know i'm i'm creating a new material because basically the material i was using before was the old cone material but we want to kind of bring this up to a to a better standard so i've created a new material which we're gonna we're gonna build as we go along so that's now in inside uh 3ds max and we're just going to select this id actually one thing that obviously the cone is not orange at the moment but a lot of the time when we model things we actually model them like white and then we have something called the tint
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palette system so so you see all the little cubes at the top of this screen there within those things we have like options so you see the there's like a drop down below that folder the tint palette and at the moment it says none kind of hard to see this point just be nice so yeah yeah so we can change that to primary secondary or tertiary and basically the environment guys can they have like um a system that allows them to select our prop and then they can like choose what what preset they want right and that will change the primary color so if they were like i want a purple cone they click the button and then we've told our material using that drop down okay well if the environment artist wants it to be purple this is the thing you need to change because obviously we've got tons of different things that can be changed so having like we we kind of point point at the right
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direction and we can do that for like anything right it can be like lights on something to say they wanted like to change the like the little diodes or something or like the rubber it could be anything in our case it's the orange on the on the traffic cam uh yes otwen this is the first step in our new cones of lowerville uh board game who determines polycount or a polygon count of each asset like like do you have a max guide like how details can you get with a cone so we go and you ask this i was just going to say like we kind of so what we do is we will take a look at the asset and we'll just essentially work to get it as low as we possibly can and and the more you do it
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the more you kind of know where you can get away with like um reducing the poly count so there's certain techniques you can use like one of the ones i learned like ages ago was like the squint test so you basically go into max and you you know if you look at this model here and you kind of squint wherever you can see like the most kind of density so for example on this it would be around these parts here um that's where you can kind of reduce and it depends on the distance as well so like the smaller a lot of artists get caught up with um you know the detail and they'll have their face like this close uh to the model when they're modeling it but let's be honest when you load up star citizen you're not going to be next to this code i don't know actually
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some people do i remember like i'll be looking at the textures but um yeah you tend to he's not here to defend himself he probably is in the chat he'll start he'll start what what cory will always say to us so for those that don't know cory's our lead essentially so obviously lewis said like basically we're sensible with our try counts we try not to we we get as low as possible but we don't sacrifice detail because like we're trying to make the prettiest game we can um but you know if something's a bit spicy as we would describe it on the team you know we'll sometimes go right we probably need to calm down a bit here it's a traffic game but like it's contextual as well right like if if you have something that you can pick up and the player can like look at and stuff we need to make sure a lot zero so that's the version of the model
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you see from close up is you know you're not gonna look at it and be like what the hell that looks rubbish but then when you walk away it's obviously gonna change to a lower lod which you know will allow us to like save that memory okay so we've got like a like a it's going to be distorted because i haven't used unwrapped it yet but um we've got a kind of preview of this material which is going to be a bit more interesting to look at um i was just going to show off um so what what i can do now is you can see here i've made the material tintable so i've selected tertiary and what this means for um like environment artists and anyone building levels is depending on where they are they can change uh the color palette of the item pretty much this is the thing i was mentioning
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before right so this is the menu they go in so you see that tertiary thing there it says diffuse color red that means if he applies this one it'll be red so yeah you can essentially go through once you've set up an asset fully um you can basically like mix and match your color palettes and it'll always have like i don't know so uh i'm using really bad examples here but for for example the tertiary colors usually like the quite vibrant version so for a cone you'd want that as most of the body because then you're getting so you know they could come in and use this and this could be like a construction site cone or something or uh you know you can have a medical one like a medic like a sectioning a medical area off or something you know that kind of thing i mean one of the good examples
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you'll see um the use of the hospital beds um so depending on what location uh hospital you're in um the color palette changes in some of the space clinics i think the entire bed is just white um and then in stuff like uh orizon it's got the blue the blue kind of tint to it and basically what we want to do as a prop artist is we want to make our assets as versatile as possible right so essentially we just set um every prop we can up with tint palettes just so that there's that extra variety and you don't get fed up or seeing the same sort of it's um it's a very powerful way of of being able to to mix things up which is really good it saves memory as well right so if like if
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you were to let's say texture this in a software like substance paint and like you just alter the texture for the specific purpose like i'm making an orange cone and then you pump the orange cone in like that's it that's that's your texture whereas if we make it white and then we allow this tint system to go in it means we're not having to export like 100 textures of all the different colors of the rainbow just in case we want to swap out and do a material override heavy bob asks what's the recommended cig spotify playlist i should be listening to that would be run the jewels for deluxe be sure you get the remixes in there uh and then another question says who made the buster bars i owe that individual a drink and probably a bar of candy who wants to take credit for the
00:33:10
buster bars the buster bars are they are they the chocolate bars yeah oh i think that might be um that might be tom that might be tom yeah tk we'll just give it to tom tom can of it i'm pretty sure he did because he i think yeah yeah shout out to our boy tom og tom so you're about to you're at about the midway point on the show at this point danger well we're about to do like a blueprint right this one we prepared time to speed up right um yeah i was trying to find a texture basically for that pattern so i'm just going to rob uh
00:34:00
rob it from there we go so now we've got that hexagonal pattern and you can see it's very distorted sometimes but we're gonna we're gonna fix that we'll fix it in post hexagons are very futuristic everybody knows hexagon is the shape of the future yeah we don't mess around with no boxes anymore no circles everything has to have angular angular stuff right yes so um we've gone over pond we've gone over tint pallets and we're creating the new material now so you can see already um compared to the original one um they just had a kind of flat texture on it which is fine but we can make it look a bit more interesting so
00:34:48
what we've done is kind of gone for a more kind of durable plastic um because obviously these cones are probably going to get battered about and reused and used everywhere so you kind of want something a bit a bit rougher gonna add that there like roughness is the term we give to like the way light plays on the surface right if anyone if you ever see like in a game or even in real life right if you the way when light goes it hits the surface and it like scatters and it looks really nice there's a variation like that's just so appealing to our eyes so you know we try and we have something called a roughness map where we have we can tell the texture hey i want you to be really shiny if the light hits you here and i want you to be really dull if it
00:35:35
hits you here and then you end up with these really nice variances your eyes and the texture really shines that's reflective i'm very tired last may have a nap we'll take over no don't worry it's citizencon season pain season it's worth it when the day comes i'm excited this will be like my first citizencon i'm gonna get a cake and everything oh what we're doing i can't click help why is that not
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so i've just looked up on our server a bit about the buster bars and a lot of people have helped make that asset i don't know how new it is but i can't i couldn't pinpoint it so we will just give tom the credit but yeah email me after this claim credit um that's fine just go to tom it was all him uh right so at the moment we've got we've got some different materials in the editor and it's different in in max at the moment it's all white so what we're going to do is we're going to quickly uh sink the material and that's just going to make sure we got a better representation of how the materials kind of split up in max so it just makes it that much easier for us to kind of work with
00:37:12
also at this stage i'm kind of just happy with where you know how the chamfers are um we usually don't collapse stuff this early on because you know maybe uh it needs to be reviewed or usually stuff that's being designed without a concept needs to be reviewed as it goes along just to make sure that we're not um going too far ahead and then having to backtrack if if something isn't you know quite quite right um but in this case um in this case we've got 20 minutes left so approved yeah yeah yeah exactly collapsing refers to like when we have so in the top right you see we've got like all those buttons like symmetry uv unwrap shell push i don't know there's all those and there's way more that are hidden but we can apply those on top so we can work non-destructively so we can
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like model and then press a button and then it'll be like it'll almost procedurally do the rest of it for us like based on the parameters we have set in those things but it does limit you in what you can do because after a certain point it starts breaking so when lewis says he's collapsing he's basically going right i'm setting that to be my default now means this is going to be very hard to to go back on and fix yeah so yeah i'll explain it to ian i'll i'll clear it up so basically um here's your audience you know just be like i i got this one ian you get you got the whole rest of the game to art direct i i took the cone it's cool we'll fix it in day one day one patch the most iconic asset ever really
00:38:48
there it is look at that there's pondering its magic so we just floated a plane there it doesn't look like a plane does it it looks like a little indent and that's that's parallel exclusion mapping doing its thing so you see in the bottom left look at all those different things lewis can like click to add obviously we we're running low on time but you can kind of see i think a really good showcase of that as well if people who are like into this kind of stuff and want to like learn more and jake did a weapons thing a while ago in maya and he did a really good showcase of how to use palm in there as well so if you're interested in that there's another a little bit more over there but we all use palm show off palm every chance i get yeah we love it as long as they use the fancy explanation and not the
00:39:36
yeah that's not the weak one yeah exactly don't have time for that so there you go you can see it gets bigger now that was the magic button by the way so let's press the button on his keyboard and then all that box appeared with the text and stuff and that was this one yeah that's just doing its thing and then boom it's in game for us and it's just honestly it's part the big part of the workflow is like basically like being able to iterate fast so you saw how fast we got from from max to to this and there it is like you could already look you could straight away compare you can get in really get in the scene and you know just remove your helmet but you know you can really you can really get in there and and sniff the cone and and if you walked off you can really get
00:40:24
in there and sniff the cone yeah that's when we get that question all right we got 20 minutes it's time to extra this thing up right cool well um let me i'm gonna go in and i'm gonna insert this are we adding glowy boys so in game engines we have something called emissive maps or a mission depends who you are basically what that is is like make me glow and the game engine renders that surface as a light and then we can make things like so whenever you see like a blinking light that's essentially one of these little planes or something
00:41:12
that's like being told to like flicker so lewis is going to have he's just setting one up here and then we'll be able to see a little light going should be pretty cool that's the plan anyway you know that is the plan we have uh we have come up with a way we can even if we we run out of time i mean if you if you can warn me when we're at about the 10 minute mark yeah we covered all bases like those we covered our ass on this one we did it depends if i can actually work out how to model or not uh during the time okay so um i've changed this id to be a glow and then what i'm actually gonna do is i'm gonna do something really cool so i mean on the original one we've got um
00:42:01
this is actually a glow bit this is actually loaded but usually you wouldn't have something like that you wouldn't have like a a light source uh just unprotected on its own it would be a you know a light source but you'd have like glass over the top or something right recover um especially on something that's like you know quite industrial or something what we're gonna do like a thin layer of acrylic or something like that see that id where he's putting the numbering on the right that's where we choose which material we want to apply uh what i'm actually gonna do because you see you see we've got some a bit of weird the chamfer modifier can carry us to a certain point where we can preview what the kind what it's going to look like but it you know the shading becomes a bit naught so what we're actually going to do
00:42:49
is we're going to apply some custom normals to this which is basically going to save our life really um and make that look a bit nicer so this is what it looks like before we'll add it to our our custom normal save sets we're gonna make sure it's all set to one smoothing group and then we're going to apply it boom there we go wow so normals when we when we describe a normal inside of game development we're usually referring to the direction something's facing so in that case lewis had like done some stuff which meant 3ds max had kind of got confused which way things were facing so that script there another bit of witchcraft from our tools guys allows
00:43:36
us to basically go or sort yourselves out guys and then that's exactly what it did you know you press b you press the magic button and then we're in business yeah we're doing them so we're we're very fastly mapping this just because of time constraints but just um the whole way along the asset doesn't need to look perfect as long as you can kind of see it developing where you need to and get the rough idea of what it's going to look like um that's kind of way where you can go with it and you can see [Music] we're gonna make we've got a bit we've we've got the glass and then in here we've got a glowy texture so we've got a glow and we've got a normal app over it which is giving it that that detail it's currently facing the wrong orientation
00:44:23
um but that's that is fixable but if i turn the glow on now magic you know we can crank it to max or we can like we can lower it and then we can do stuff like you know take the glass for example if it was mapped properly and we'd be able to turn around tile it more to give it more of a you know a different effect so we could just get rid of it or we could go to the same spot or we can go higher so about there so and this is another thing we do for you know for environment stuff or lighting team um we can you know we can set it up so that there's parts that
00:45:10
glow um but you know maybe you want it in a dark room and you you can't um you know we don't know where this is going to be used so we can't we can't think of all the scenarios but we can set it up in a way that makes it friendly for all the teams so for example the lighting team uh because they've got a glow we can set the material to be light uh light linkable we could drag in a light very bright light very bright light indeed uh and what we'll do is we'll essentially well we're going to tell the cones a missive map so that id that decal glow that's highlighted in red in the top right at the moment which is our material that says hey this is the bit that glows
00:45:59
we can now go can you please look at the nearest light adopt the same color as that so that's what lewis has just said there's he's just told the um the asset to look for the light and now he's going to change the color of the light which will change the color of the emissive so you can see it's now linked to that we're gonna turn uh effect where is it it's this one maybe that one you turn effect objects off and it's not going to work it's all right we've only got a little bit of time left why don't we move to the animation let's move to the thing at the end yeah let's talk about that so what we're going to do um so this is the stage we got to here obviously assets take a lot more time usually um so i'm going to show you one that we actually made earlier if we jump to the finished version
00:46:53
we've got a like a light on top we've got lights all around like we were saying there um and we've all also set it up to collapse so this is a really awesome awesome little thing and because of how how powerful some of our tools are we can set it up to the point where um someone could go in and set up an entity um so the player could interact with this um and basically you know fold it away deploy it so imagine you're i don't know imagine you're trucking around in your uh in your nomad you break down oh no i need to change my tire and you could just whip this out the back and and you know deploy it around
00:47:41
your ship but this is the kind of interaction you can kind of make and set up and you know it's kind of stuff we do for um you know little props will animate um and then you can go a step further and actually uh create a oh it's not gonna work is it now you're right don't mess with it so essentially normally what you'd be able to do is you'd be able to pick this up and throw out a wall which is pretty fun well yeah today so i uh i did warn him i said if you messed with the asset i said it's gonna break and it did so it
00:48:29
is what it is but you guys have picked up things in the game before you know what that looks like and actually we want one yes we're having one last stop i'm gonna re-export it so yeah essentially we have um two different types of see on the right hand side there we have it's kind of hard to see but in that wall of text we have brush and entity so what we've been dealing with so far have been brushes which are just static meshes that don't do anything and then entities we can start to have a bit more fun with them then so that's how we so like lewis has basically broken the entity but the brush is fine which is why it can animate and stuff but it can't um do that i mean it's a little bit more complicated than that but he's just deleted the level this is a this is game dev in a nutshell
00:49:20
it never goes right he panic deleted i mean now it's dead look look at look at look at the sun coming in through the window i thought you were ringing oh my god can they see that what is that this happens like for 10 minutes a day because of the way our house is positioned it's called it's called 10 minutes a year pull the shade oh no just in time to see the crash disaster okay we'll get we'll make it in time to um to do the final thing but yeah i don't think we're gonna be able to pick it up and stuff but yeah like when we have like entities and stuff so whenever you guys pick up like your chocolate bar what was it before you were talking about your buster's chocolate bar like that would have been so we'd have made that first and then we take it into a software called data forge and then we
00:50:08
kind of explained to the game like oh this is how you pick it up this and after that that's when you can go up and hold f and then you have the nice blue text and then you can like do what you want you know uh folks our folks are making the uh the 30k chat it's we're just sitting here trying to make a safety code and we've had two crashes within an hour making a safety cone so so when when we say we understand when we say we feel you we do we get it we get if anything we've just we've only gamified your crash at least you get to play the game this is my this is my life day in day out where is the screen okay so back we're back oh you need to um it might work
00:50:59
don't test it nah yeah no lifestyle isn't it continue on with you can't do demonstration okay right so you know we've got this this is what we have now so we've got our cone we'll turn the glow on no way where is it we're going to set dress we're going to create a little diorama for you guys to show what i don't know we need like a screenshot contest with who can use this cone the most effectively i'd be so impressed look at that lens style this is like oh we're going to place a load of these cones around this thing there we go it's glowing look very nice cool
00:51:48
we have just enough time to like create a little diorama where chuck a little coins around we're on the workers there we are for this illegally parked thing what would happen in the real world is by the time we'd finished manufacturing one cone the person who illegally parked this vehicle would have left we'd just be sat there with a cone they would have left in this hour and so for the final uh our final hurrah we're gonna give him a parking fine yeah pico's gonna give him a parking lot because as we know pico is the law we don't mess with pico and there we go that's how that's how the props team
00:52:37
deals with illegally parked uh argo vehicles and yeah the workers can now go about about their lives off you go be happy the law by their overlords watched by the overlords there they are you guys have too much time you'd be amazed how quick he did it i was amazed i swear i was amazed the tools they're just affected man i'll be spamming cory this this will show up in your yearly review oh god that's probably in like four days right bad timing all right gentlemen well thank you so much for taking time out of your friday and then of course you know
00:53:26
throughout the week to set this up uh that's it for star citizen live this week uh remember that isc is on hiatus now we are on our typical three-week hiatus at the end of every quarter uh star citizen live is also going on its typical yearly hiatus around citizencon time so the next time you'll see and hear uh from from me or our developers will be october 9th which is a saturday for digital citizencon i don't know what time it starts yet uh check the schedule uh see when that's updated uh to know runtime and all that stuff and we got all kinds of uh we got all kinds of panels we got our life in the verse panel uh kicking things off we got ship talk we got persistence and server meshing we've got
00:54:14
the uh the sounds of space our audio panel uh we've got um gen 12 and the vulcan renderer we got our planet tech tools and then of course we've got tony zurebek bringing us home with another update about systemic tools and stuff like that so it is a big big day uh get yourself a pizza get yourself a i was gonna say a six-pack but that's not going to cover it uh set yourself up for a whole day effects festivities october 9th again check out citizencon.com to find out when it starts uh as soon as we know it'll it'll update there so yeah i'm jared that's uh that's lewis that's dan and uh
00:55:01
see you on october 9th everybody take care take care guys see you later everyone

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.