CitizenCon 2948 - Panel: Welcome to Lorville

22 October 201800:57:431,334 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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first up mr. Ian Leyland Han Michele Cooper all right gentlemen take it away all right did you all enjoy the gameplay you saw earlier today tell us there was something right so today we want to break down a little bit further what you saw when we were flying over Hurston and walking through a Louisville so yeah let's let's kick it off okay hello everyone could see you again and what we're going to cover this year is a little bit more specific as to what we've been focusing on mainly person which is why it's called the art of Hurston the main things we'll get into is to why we can do in it like what we
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consider an entire talk just on Hurston but before we get into that obviously I'm Ian and the star citizen art director this is Michelle you'll notice there was a third member of our company that unfortunately didn't make it complications in the airport so we'll just jump straight in so what do we want to achieve so this was going to be our first planet in star citizen and did the two main things that we wanted to really push was the feeling of scale and diversity and the current play space right now in the game is obviously it's quite big but what we had the opportunity to do on Hurston was to expand that play space by many factors
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so we wanted to make sure that we wanted to push that diversity so when you guys play it it feels like an interesting experience okay so scale if our calculations are correct in game damn tour of damar is 590 thermometers Hurston is 230 2370 kilometer so much quite a lot bigger and imagine the variety that we currently have on damar scaled it up to my math is really bad to the new size of what Herson is and usually it's quite easy to see like okay with that amount of space to cover we need more variety because it's gonna
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be not worth even having that much space if we don't break it up and have more exciting stuff for you guys to explore so so jumping straight in will focus on Laval first and then we'll spread out to the rest of Hurston so established in the mood of the city so usually what we do is when we have a location it's usually got a pretty good break down from the law team and you know I'm sure you guys understand what law Louisville is right now so we wanted something that portrayed that feeling of heavy pollution we wanted that mood and tone to feel consistent with the downtrodden population so these are like early concept development sketches to just try and tie try and dial in the the mood to tone quite high level but even at this
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early stage we knew we had a good palette to work from because it's going to be an industrial city we thought that's going to be something that's quite interesting to tie into in the cityscape and then also we started doing some visual development into trying to understand what like a day in the life of a miner around Louisville might feel like so we did this exploration peered for some time and we all got interning quite excited about what we could do for Louisville ok establishing the read of the city so you'll notice if you remember back to last year Louisville got a little bit bigger than what we did the the Phenom was to portray the scale of a city we really needed to break down the core archetypes of a city so what
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that means is you can start to establish the different region so if you look in you know she got the big guy there but around him you've got the CBD regions and these are good because they'll give you relative scale next to the big guy and then that will go out across into the inner industrial areas and the outer industrial areas so even in this very this was like literally a screenshot from my monitor as we were working out that proportion of the city and if you do a side by side to what's in game to this even on that very early stage you start to get an idea of what that scale would be and I think if we put it to the one that we had last year not only the Duras and dynamics building grow significantly I think the the footprint
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just around that the building's basically all the space that we use slash so we really pushed that boundary and and made it grow way way beyond that that limit well if you remember last year you could actually fly over the city reasonably quickly and it it it it's like me flying over London in a few seconds it just didn't work so we we really did spend some time on making sure we got that scale right before we took it any further in our pipeline so once we got something that we were happy with there then we start to dial in the concepts to try and you know go a bit deeper into the shape language you know as I said before we wanted to really push these bold vertical forms because it's not like a residential city or
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something it's something that was built on industry so I really like the idea that the skyline is almost dominated to something like that so you can see how we're starting to develop ideas and it honestly felt like we was developing like a real-time strategy game for the longest period because we would see like these images on the board of these top-down three-quarter views and we're like not yes game would be kind of cool so as we progressed forward we started to really think about the DNA of their city and we thought we we quite like these large plated areas but then we thought wouldn't it be quite interesting if we have areas where you kind of take off some of those platens and you start to get a little glimpse add to the underbelly of what's inside the lower sections of Louisville
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so you this this kind of shows you like a part of the development process we were breaking breaking down the visual language at the location what makes this interesting for us as the people who are actually building the 3d models in this space it's the fact that it is layered and everything that started out at the ground layer is still there and this became these these very dark underbelly areas of the city which has a very different atmosphere and and I'm feeling to it from from what what the levels above that have so within within this layered system you get almost like a variety of styles that you can do with with how you dress it up what type of character she would have run into we had a for the longest time the joke of dangerous day would be that
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would be his corner where you could buy all just illegal stuff so that's that that starts to become a story in its own like each area would be very different and just looking at these concepts we could already start to imagine okay this is how this space would be like this is how dissipates would be like so this was a really exciting approach for us sure and whereas a previous image which is quite visual more of a matte painting that's really good for getting the team inspired about the location this sort of image that you see in right here it it solves all the problems you know it it's not big and glamorous but you start to realize okay what what is this city going to be made of for the longest time was thinking house house this city actually going to bleed out onto the
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landscape how is that going to be because Todd was always told to me like well the players are going to get lost right they're going to be able to get trapped in some outer regions and they're not really going to have a good time but that was something that we would have to solve a little bit later on which I'll show you because this was going to be our first real major landing zone we knew we wanted to get so right now if you play if you if you're on a moon and you want to go inside an outpost you get out your ship you go through an airlock and you're inside right but we wanted to to to that feeling on the scale of the city we wanted the player to be able to fly in land in the city so we had to kind of really think about okay what would the stas is in space book B so this was like an early concept sketch to show what
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Lavelle space hope could be so you've got the landing areas there on the left but then something that feels visually correct for Louisville you've got these huge container yards so we all got quite excited by that and if you see like those little landing pads on the left like that's a that's an address size so we were like okay we've really got to go big on this guy okay so from there jump into pretty much what you just saw so this was like like a still frame of the build right now you can see the various reads of the city you know you can see the CBD in the in the distance you got the big guy and then you can start to see how that landscape start to transition into the different city
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archetypes and also at the bottom there you can start to see these transit systems being introduced into the city one of the things that was very important there's like an early image I made of Louisville creeping around on the internet and it's it's like an angle like this from a long time ago and and it was very very very important for me to when we bring the camera down and when when you're looking up at this big building it should always feel like he's just towering over you at all times compositionally that that it just felt really right for the location I felt the sky was quite empty considering this was going to be like a like a super city so I wanted to put in these almost the like boys in the city
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in in the air so you'll see like the tier Tisa spaceport this actually became quite useful so when you guys start to play this we have like this no-fly zone because we don't want to get you guys too deep into the city so these actually became quite good markers even for Glenn you know as we were doing demo play through it was like hey buddy you got to keep above those markers so that's something how something visually started to push useful design wide shot of this spaceport and again you can see that transit route from from an aerial view so in in the middle left at the screen that's that's the landing zone and you can see it fall around so when we started to introduce transit routes law will start it became this almost like
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this train set as we started to connect it all together there's quite a lot of landing pads and hangars around Louisville for two reasons we wanted lots of obviously locations for the planes to London but also we wanted these ambient landing pads for the ship I a ship AIT use and it's a shame you didn't see in the demo because when you stood over look in the spaceport and seeing traffic come and go you start to even in an early form you start to get that oh yeah this is gonna be really good I can see this working yeah yeah because obviously the city of Louisville ends and it starts to go into the wilderness you can see because we spent a lot of time trying to figure out the visual design of the city when you
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get like these wide shots you can see how like these balls silhouette forms that we spent time developing starts becoming quite nice and unreadable and when you want to traverse around the city you can almost it almost looks different from every angle so I'm really looking forward to you guys doing your twitterings because I'll be watching them and seeing what shots you can get and then we we deliberately pushed to have the biomes around Louisville we tried to break them up not to the point where it became like a theme park but the outer region of Louisville is split up into six gates and depending on which way you're coming in from we wanted you to start to recognize the like oh I
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remember this is what gate 3 feels like this is what gate 2 feels like very subtly we're just doing composition composition tricks so after you've been doing a few missions around Louisville you'll start to get a read of the city it's quite interesting because you know we can just let you grab the Sun and move it around and the city itself starts to have different moods and tones throughout the different times of day and I think we all like it when it's it's sunset because you start to see the city lights a little bit more vibrant and this is kind of like a snapshot of where we are right now we have a lot of tech planned for our cities in the future to do with placement and light in to get that final cinematic frame okay let's break it down let's break it down apologies we've
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we've got a lot of slides to get through and I think we had about 50 slides last year we've got 180 to get through so I try and speed it up as as we was pushing towards the demo we were saying we need way less slides but there's so much complexity to what went into the demo you just saw and I want to try and show you all the hard work we put in so breaking down landing zone so we started right here l19 we called it it was the workers district for the longest time but we started calling in l19 because it felt right and it felt like Louisville was split up into various different zones that you don't necessarily get to see right now so this was the this was a
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piece of concept which was distilled into so we did visual development for the lander zone but this was the one which pretty much ticked all the boxes so from this one image it hit every DNA point for what makes the Louisville and zone itself so if I start to break it down right at the top there you've got these large plates and overhangs so when you look out you feel like you're in a basin you've got these large vertical flat faces which is quite interesting because the sunlight barely ever reaches where you go and it feels right because you know you see like these these AI walking around downtrodden the the literally getting starved to sunlight and then about halfway down the frame you'll see these
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guardrails these platforms so we split it up so that almost at all times you're being overlooked there's an opportunity for the for these God AIS to overlook the population and the system designers of work started to get quite excited about those possibilities so we started to put in doors and then if they see trouble they'll be able to come down and sort it out and then when we get down to the workers level it's kind of as we've seen we can see a lot of cameras a lot of listening devices and then throughout Louisville you'll get like deeper areas that where you can actually look down and see these layers going down okay because this was going to be quite a quite a sprawling landing zone we kind of realized early on we was
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going to need every last sure so we wanted to combine big bold graphic panels with good kind of city navigation so you'll see these guys throughout the London zone and we also repurposed them later on to do some nice propaganda message and I don't if you saw any of them in the demo but the law team came up with some quite good messaging and you'll have have a good time reading those as we was problem as we used there's there's a good story behind this as we was doing the the kind of like the dressing part of the other landing zone I thought it'd be really interesting to have like these vending machines so when you're there I wanted the first thing to see is like someone's wearing like a
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single-use mask or something you know to really try and give that feeling like definitely not in Airy 18 any more visitors weather warnings here so this in combination with you know some of the head where you saw in the demo feels quite cool okay so this is a example of what we do is once we've started white box in my happying we start a gray box in we start to do the IDS very early looked in engine look development so here were basically trying to dial in the composition so you'll see these large of oppressive shape starting to be established and then also straight up I wanted the domain security towel so what we did was wherever you go within l19
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you can you can always see the security tarin and it's it's basically it works automatically but it also aids navigation because no matter where you are you can always check back and you're like okay I know if I get on the other side of there that's what I'll be also it helps on dialing in like like the delight in the atmosphere the effects this was the toned down version the one I showed to Chris first was it was like a nuclear winter and he's like that's just a little I love too much and some final shots of the different areas around Louisville this being Leafs in square being a more like final version of the the wide boxed version you guys just saw in the video so final lighting came in final dressing came in particle
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effects in AI all doing their thing different from a different angle you can see that we pretty much stuck with the same architecture but everything is way more defined so the final models came in but it's still very close to that the initial feeling that we prototypes the other side's sure um people off stage or giving me the motion so yeah we've got a hundred flights to go so we'll speed up and again these are just in in engine shots so you can start to see this is the leaves in square you can start to see those deeper areas of inside the city we thought it'd be really cool to have like these mister points we can start to see the city being alive around you
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moving on to leave some station so the whole motif of this theme was to give that read of a train arrives you get these workers coming off the train they've been in the mine all day and they can go up the stairs they can either buy some gear they can get some cheap food or they can just go and hit the bar so the whole reason for this area was to sell that narrative and when you see the trends come and go it feels quite cool and then you've got these underbelly sections so you'll have like these outer areas and then to get into link them together you have to go back under the city so we change the composition we change the lighting and then we start to see if bit more of these adverts come through and then and then you got back head there okay so real quick on the shops we knew we
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wanted very shops within the city we thought it'd be interesting if they almost rent the same unit and a theme and brand themselves so apologies if I'm blasting through these slides because we will get through them so we got Tammany and Sons this was the inside of administration that we didn't get to see in the demo we did see this guy this is a reclamation disposal and obviously you saw Donnie Lee Donnie these exterior so we didn't want it to feel feel like Disneyland were you know we wanted at least like the facade and the area around that facade to feel cohesive so you know in the future this could you know I could see a lot of activity in here in the future and then we got the bar it's a shame we didn't see that the trains go
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through the bar because from the first any ideation stage for the bar the the the the thing I wanted to do is I wanted a a bar lower than the main area and I wanted windows and I wanted to train to compasso you know in that train comes past and the everyone's glasses start to rattle and the light comes through we just didn't see it there demo unfortunately okay pushing faster through so common elements you heard Todd and Chris talked about common elements what are common ailments they are basically connecting they're basically units which helped connect spaces together so rather than doing everything for spoke and unique every single time these these help connect spaces together so the first one we saw was obviously habitation again we did some visual design but we thought it'd be quite
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interesting to take some of these industrial structures that you see in the city like this straddle frame and what would happen if they they repurpose repurposed those to be actual housing units so we thought hey we're going to be high up wouldn't be great to have some big windows so we can see out over the over the city so these are like communal areas and then each hab kind of goes off from that I'm sure you saw this on a TV but we we did a sprint on module habitation units so you know we wanted to get that feeling that it was mass produced a long time ago you know for for these workout areas and because we because the architecture was going to feel quite utilitarian we wanted that personality to come from the dress and
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elements inside so what we did was we broke down each module and we did visual designs for each module and we did variant so you know we we did like various kitchens various you know bed units of things like that and then we all got quite excited like I wanted I wanted to see that personality so we did quite a few sheets of like ideas for dressings from some concepts and you know it would be kind of cool to see you guys place these in your units in the future this was the white box and you know very important at this early stage we keep proportions so even from white box things tends to expand quite easily but we try to keep it tight and then
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this was the final frame I'm getting messages there saying you're out of time please wrap it up so I'm I'm gonna keep going and we're gonna like thank you we'll go okay and then this is a final frame of the this kind of like the the area around the hub's you know at the lobby area and we wanted that we wanted that city shot so soon as you come out the hub and you're like you see that space book and then as an idea as we go to other landing zones and you're like hey my hats on area t-norm ihab's on arson you can start to see how we could theme them quite differently I think that's going to be quite cold okay pushing forward next common ailment transit we knew we needed a way to
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connect players throughout the city so we push forward on these transit systems visually its references modern designed quite a lot like like a London Underground just with a slight visual twist and then this was in game and that ticker tape of the your trains going to be arriving that that that came in this morning so that was quite cool to see you know but we were for the longest and we were like we'll put a map on you know we'll we'll do all of these things to to imply the trains come in you know we it says there you know train approaching in theory the train is always approaching but we wanted obviously suffered a bit a bit more accurate and then also to to aid navigation as well we put we we did
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everything we could so you've got science and these signs are accurate there we go and the colour coded so you'll get an idea of him on the spaceport line or among the the outer district line and then on top of that we knew we needed to connect them all together and as Todd said it was painful for the team it was very painful the team because we literally had to connect all the dots together physically so this was a shot inside one of the transit tunnels and as you can see it's quite detailed so if one day your train breaks down and you get up be kind of interesting alright so that was the transit route that took you into the spaceport next one was security so this one is maybe a little bit like right now in terms of functionality but that will come through in the future so this was a very early concept design for what we
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wanted to do you can see the right part of that image we kept but the left part we wanted we went through a few iterations so this was an early VT and looking at I'm like that that system was taken off your back and put on some friends that's just going to cause all kinds of headaches so then we thought wouldn't be really cool if you to spread and skinned and spread them and scan him yeah you'll find these scattered throughout the city as well for random searches just in case there's some contraband I think a lot of the team really latched on to this idea so we'll get them in at some point so then we're okay we can't do that so the what we ended up with was something that both the player and the AI couldn't get through and then what we the final frame was this so when you look at this now
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it's a functionality will start to come through and yeah what design have planned for it it's going to be really cool okay next one so he was at security and then we're like right okay we're inside the space book what does a space book look like and it can't look like l19 so after talking with Lord this is where Herson dynamics would spend a bit more money this is the more commercial side it's not the the kind of downtrodden area of the workers district so we came up with a visual design which felt quite cool you know nice lighting nice materials and shaders things like that and then this is how it came through and our idea of what we wanted to do for the spaceport started quite simple and then it got bigger and got bigger and bigger and then before too long those panoramic views out onto the
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spaceport there was a ship dealership ship shops in there as well so it got quite big but necessary on its own but the team did quite well so these are going to be like like hubs in the future for the for you guys to traverse around and then we got that and 15 and if you've ever gone through was it London Airport or somebody know Manchester Airport there's always this Jaguars on sale it's always on sale we wanted that idea of like you know this there's a ship on show that kind of helps lead you into the shop okay spaceport done and then we were like right onto hangers so hangs is something that we wanted to dig into for quite a long time and now we finally got the opportunity to stop
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looking into this so this is our first set of utilitarian hangars so we broke down the modularity and for the would go I didn't want a box I didn't want mine we knew they were going to be big The Blackout we got from design was a box so we tried to think of any way we could to add complexity to that space so we broke it down and I thought wouldn't be really cool to have like these little alcoves where if you look you see a little bit of activity where there's NPCs maybe fixing some part or loading some cargo something oh maybe this light some Transit cranes going through so when you land I wanted that idea that these spaces start to become alive around you so when you land your ship the AI start getting to it and things start to move we we
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didn't have any associated gameplay with these modules but I thought it'd be cool to imply like this is maybe the refueling part this is maybe the cargo drones things like that so what we ended up with you know this was the final shot of the drone repair Bay cargo refueling and and this was more of like a generic Bay and then this is where we went into the hangar so I think we was all quite happy with how these guys turned out yeah and we have a little panty shot cool and then also as we will run in through this I was thinking to myself right these things need to as a common element we need to be able to take these themed them brand them then we got a location that's the whole ethos of what a common element is so one day I was
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like what would what would the one on Hawk or what would one on area team feel like so we quickly did a light in class quickly did a dress impasse and then changed some shadows like okay this could feel quite interesting I think we if we wrap up the stats we might get to the planet stuff yeah so we're gonna we're gonna push because we are halfway through and this was the transit line to the outer gate as you can see it goes on quite far then we start to get onto the outer districts so remember that problem we talked about before house house that city actually going to end so this was one of my VTS where I'm thinking what that outer wall could feel like because I wanted some print that was readable what wasn't necessarily low resum boring
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so from this the guys started to do a white box and as soon as we saw this we we knew we had some friend that picked that scale read because it felt like we was on a boogie ride on the outside of the city it felt really quite interesting when you see that big guy in the distance it just felt right so we knew is from an early stage in white box we we had something that felt quite special and all that skill obviously needs to be translated in anything that you interact with closer up as well so when we go to the next one we this is the work in progress on the hjerson wall and what we were very keen on was to not have a flat wall for you guys to run into everything is layers to it so this is also translate it into the wall pieces themselves and then we have some final shots so yeah this is pretty much you
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saw in the demo kind of holds up and then we have these gates at these these as I said these are the six gates around lovel so these are what you need to look out for because these are the main ways into the city so we made it tall and we put a big flower on it and hopefully that's gonna read and then at night obviously they'll be lit quite nicely and then Chris obviously told you that this guy got quite big four thousand three hundred twenty meters in length and obviously Louisville itself got quite big but overall it helped us push towards scale so in when I like to do screenshots I'll put my my guy my guy of scale in there and that kind of gives
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you that feeling so even on the outer wall looking at the big guy it feels quite quite large and as you start to go out into the landscape you you still can see this the city in the distance and that feels quite interesting okay so that wraps up the Louisville pot and now we can start to move on to the western part of the presentation the planet itself obviously like we said that starts me so far we've been doing moons moving on to a full planet with biodiversity more a lot more square kilometers to it we really were revaluated our tech worked it's worked because what we done up till now it held up with once you start introducing more complex systems it became quite clear to
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us that we need it more and needed to go back to the drawing board so let's just first quickly gland jump through the biomes that we have so this is the one that already was shown last year it's just the wastelands like forty to fifty percent of the the surface of first and it's basically what's left after all the heavy industry and we have wherever the the coast hits hits land we have the polluted coast obviously the coast has had similar treatments it's it's very nasty polluted and it had this effects on on the yeah the beach and the shores then there's obviously a lot of industry going on the mining pits are one of the unique features that you would find on
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Hurston both old and new or more active ones then we had the trash Mesa lemma this guy from last year yeah there's basically the dumping grounds for anything that's not considered worth scrapping or even keeping it's just they put it in a big ship fly it out and just dump it there because they don't really care about the planet the planet is all about getting the resources out and then just being getting the process in the most convenient way and we have a few sparks of hope left on Hurston the Savona which is the new new feature that we that we added and put a lot of effort in so hopefully we try to get a bit more in depth on that one but it's it's what Hurston used to look like before the industry came in and destroyed a lot of
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it and then as a little collar accident we added a acidic biome obviously a planet rich in minerals and resources often has some volatile spots I think that's what these acidic fields represented more than 5% of the planet that you could find these areas we want we wanted some for an extra in there that felt like the planet was starting to fight its way back so these are very minimal on on Hurston but when you find them it completely shifts that palette alright then we're gonna jump in on what we changed in the text and it's an attack side so before you might have if you saw last year's panel you might have seen this breakdown talking about the ecosystem textures this system is still
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valid but the top texture is what turned out to be our limiting factor because we tried to do the mining system and this is some early shots at the mining pits and if you look at this one it's very clear that this is three colored top texture it was basically driving everything we did so each color had a unique set of textures assigned to it a unique set of assets assigned to it and having just three channels to mask these areas out was not enough so we wanted to dive a bit deeper into the system and see what we can improve obviously we start digging into the ground you see all these different layers of sediment and different colors and especially when you want to do more diverse biomes you need more of that that variety so here's
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another shot and you can clearly see how this three channel system well it worked fine for the moon's was clearly holding us back getting this nice rich color breakup so this is what we ended up adding we added a new texture with like a full full color RGB that gives a gave us the full range of colors and then 16 unique gray ski greyscale channels in the Alpha Channel so those 16 unique grayscale values allowed us to apply 16 unique material types and it was no longer bound to that initial three color mask because that was initially driving everything so in order to make that new color map blend with our ground
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materials we went actually back to a bit older trick where terrain tech terrain was done in games with by excluding the colors from the textures and then applying a larger skill caller map so we having a bit newer algorithm to get the most dominant color out so it's slightly improved over a traditional method but sometimes what works works and in this case it helped us scale up drastically so here's some examples of the color map being applied and with a bit more tweaking and getting the hang of the best balance we started to see this way smoother color transitions no more sharp patches of break up and way richer palette of color so when we got to this
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point we started to fill up gay finally ready to tackle the savanna which we'll talk about in a bit top-down view obviously people fly a fly over our planets quite a bit and I'm sure everybody enjoys a nice view so it's really cool to see all these colors come in and see how how far we can actually push this now one thing that ties into this coloring is our acid scattering we talked about about this last year where we had different color variations for each type of rock and that was tied to where it was scattered now that we have a way more fluids transition of different colors it was really hard to get that color to match up so we improved our acid integration by allowing it to pick up this color from the ground and actually allow us like
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say okay we'll pick up a little bit from the color or take all of the color and get a complete match so we get away nicer integration of our assets in the terrain another thing that we unfortunately lost initially was the soft blending because we had 16 unique layers but blending 16 unique layers in the traditional way was way too expensive so what we figured out was we could use littering by to actually get the illusion of soft blending so there's a dinner pattern that's basically heart cutting between A&B and because it's such a fine grain dinner padding it better and you actually don't see that it's it's it's doing that so it it smooth out the terrain under the blending while making it still affordable and then here's a quick look around the mining pit that's
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a few right callers all the stuff is there thank you it's uh this was this was one of hostels efforts and yeah it's unfortunate that he couldn't be here to hear that applause but I'm sure he appreciates it I think at this stage we kind of knew we we'd started developing the tech to a point where we could start tackling some more complex biome types so I think when we got to that stage was like okay let's do discipline let's do the savanna so and doing botanicals is hard to in patan occurs on the planet is very hard so we were like right we're going to have to just jump straight in so so yeah we we did this was one of our artists
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screenshots so we work in what we call botanical zoos and then this we kind of validate how the assets are working together in a very controlled environment so we can start to see if the asset looks good how the relationships between the assets look before we start distributing it across the planet so yes already within a zoo it starts to feel quite nice at an early stage so we started to push and we started to try and distribute these across the planet so these are very early savanna shots that we saw and the thing that we already were familiar with was the actual creation of the Bottineau classes in in that regards the pipeline was fairly familiar and you could just get
00:41:50
on with good building yeses but when you start putting this stuff on a planet and you want more dynamic stuff it became clear there was some stuff missing so when we talk about the object scattering there's a certain pattern that nature follows in a certain way it spreads out in a certain way as its clustered together the seeds fall from the tree new bushes sprout out from there and we really pushed hard to make sure that we can actually apply these these this this natural logic to to how our assets is spread one thing that you'll you'll start to see a trend in is to try and overcome art obstacles you can look at it on a planet like oh this is great
00:42:37
some prints missing the one thing we always had to do is go back to a controlled kind of art scene to validate that all work and and that's exactly what you see in here you're seeing a controlled scene and you're literally assessing or trying to build a rule set for what the tech needs to do and what Michelle said was right you know we can scatter assets everywhere but actually because we've all walked around in nature nature does very specific things and when you see some print that is slightly off like this you're like wait a minute there's you know naminé so it's as a as a way of developing it became the process so we would try something locally build that rule set push that
00:43:26
into the tech move on so as a process that worked quite well we found yeah so this obviously is a not a flattering screenshot but it was definitely showing us what what kind of problems we were running into and then then tying that back to this specific texture this was once again a limiting factor there's only three channels and for example the blue channel is specifically to mask out edges of the hills the green channel in this case is the bottom of the canyon and if you want to do very dense clusters open fields or very different density types you're really running out of channels rather quickly so the solution to that was to go back and think about it again and actually
00:44:15
doubling the amount of channels we have natural channels from six so that even means that on the mining pit one which is on the left we could mask out roads and give those areas a bit more space and those little red dots for example could be areas where we would scatter some man-made objects instead of sacrificing a full channel to do that and then a further addition when we're talking about scatter patterns if we have to calculate every single drop point for every single asset it's going to be super super expensive because every single drop point has to be calculated checked for if it's floating or not and if you want to increase the density not only are you are we limited to a certain grid size we're also limited to how much stuff we can
00:45:03
actually calculate so what we came up with was a scatter pattern dummy model basically it's it's one specific scatter point and then it's a few dummy points that are linked to that asset and we drop that single asset and we can then assign a specific group of trees or rocks to those dummy points so here's a few examples scatter patterns and a few very dense ones for very small objects and then each of those numbers like 1 to 30 we could assign the actual rocks so we only have to do the calculation once where to drop it and then we can actually render a whole batch of assets in one go so here's how that would look like and it's it's you already start to
00:45:53
feel like ok this is a way more natural fall off of like the bigger rocks and you have smaller rocks you have some vegetation that starts to creep up underneath and the cool thing is that these patterns are Blanco so we make a library of those patterns and then we can reuse them and apply different sets of assets so with a different set of assets applied and then when we talk about the coloring and the scatter patterns the way we added all the materials you start to see something that it feels way more natural than which you would see on damar Delamar gala even though we're really really happy with how those came out I think but all the stuff we added in the meantime we got we got to push it way further this is a little tease of Aberdeen one of her Stan's moons but
00:46:44
yeah this is definitely where we want to push it further okay so we introduced that part of it and we started getting better results but again it was like okay some prints still missing so again we take the assets and we validate it in a current control scene and the main thing we try to focus on here is lighting and and how light scatters through that object because when you start to see like a bunch of trees together and the way it actually occludes light is quite interesting and trying to simulate that on the planet scale was was quite hard and it's something that we're not there yet and canopy shading is something that we
00:47:32
really do want to push and when Chris was talking about we want to do like really dense jungles and quite thick thick areas of botanicals it's something that we need to continue to push the push to detect to get to but what you kind of see in here is the shader setup on the leaves and how much light to get through how much is too much how much isn't enough how that works with our billboards as well because the team had quite a long time or quite a hard job trying to get the the lot of the assets working because when you look at a tree in the distance obviously the light is scattered naturally and trying to recreate that on on a flat billboard was was quite challenging yeah and then another thing that would be a missing component is movement and
00:48:23
just skip through the video obviously we've seen trees move back and forth before this is not a new thing but one of the things that is important to realize is that this is based on a calculations like x and y and we push into x and y directions the issue actually kicks in when you realize that's all based on a flat playing terrain we're doing everything spherical so we had to go back and just change the math to actually make sure that x and y or our least relative to where you are on the planet so we started to get pre this is a first pass and then after a little bit of tweaking iterating we started to get some some results that we're getting really happy with the it turns out moving again was quite
00:49:13
challenging because trying to get something that works on one asset but then also would work on a distribution of those assets because you could see something that worked quite natural on one but then you and then they're all kind of doing this you know so there's lots of meetings when we're all world kind of like acting out wind bending for the longest period of time and what we want to do is we want to define wind strength per ecosystem so no matter what asset you put in as long as you calibrate that asset to work in a minimum wind strength and a maximum wind strength then in theory you can just change that wind strength ecosystem and all the asset should move so it's not just trees but it's like small stuff like bushes and then it goes down to
00:50:00
grass and all three of them kind of work in in very different ways so that took a while to put ruin and in the end like we we had to tone down the the where the wind strength quite a lot for the demo because the smoke reacts to it and for one time we had the where the relay was it was really blowing a storm quite like that I thought it felt quite cool but it was just too chaotic you know when he was trying to have a gunfight in there it was it was too much and when you look at the future of the system obviously right now we'd be determined by a by ecosystem but this would tie in or be driven by a more global influence weather system ok jumping through its object colouring so when we talk about object coloring on vegetation one of the
00:50:48
things that we run into is like if we start reusing trees we had we had a canopy that was like fairly green and it's fine but what what happens when you start to add more diversity we first started looking at okay we use the same system we make a material variation for a tree have a few variations and then apply data to the tree but managing that content and making sure that it that it was actually looking good and scattered nicely and spread out started to become a bit of a challenge also because it's it's three colors and it's going to stand out it doesn't feel natural or organic so one thing we we did as well was to make an adjustment in the shader where we could just put in a strip of colors and it's just one shader
00:51:37
for all the trees and it will just pick up the color from from its strip and just assign a random variation within that strip so here's a very subtle one but if we introduce a few more colors you can see how this starts to become a more natural thing and the cool thing is it's only we only need to manage one shader we apply it to everything and it will work and just to illustrate or emphasize what is going on behind the scenes this this one it's just frame the planet rainbow planet yeah so this is this very clearly Illustrated like you put a rainbow strip in there and it will just pick up the colors and randomly distributes them and here on the grass but obviously it works a bit better with a bit more subtle approach we're getting closer but there's still more work to be done so
00:52:29
this was a feedback sheet I gave like the bottom image is where we was at currently and then the top image is a painter I gave to try and push the team to establish the correct palette because what happens is you can work on all the assets everything that Michelle send is all credible but when you distribute it put in the scene you like it's still not gelling together so what we had to do was we had to suck out some of the greens and start to unify that palette together to something that felt a bit more consistent and after that feedback these are shots that we've started to get and I think was all internists gun yeah this feels really good one of the things we wanted to do as well is will have these regions where we can set up now we consult these regions where it's it's
00:53:18
literally the pure green botanicals it's literally no pollutions got to them so if we call people find in those and they were like right okay we're so close but there's something then the more we kind of looked at it we're so used to seeing our atmosphere in a very particular way to wait the light scatters through the atmosphere the way we see some sets is red and blue skies in the daytime and for the longest time we had the atmosphere set up on the right so then I was looking at like that some prints just not right it's just not where we want it to be so then we calibrated Hurston to look like earth and then instantly like this first this starts to feel really good so what we did would we tuned it to somewhere in
00:54:07
the middle so it still had an element that felt matically correct for Hurston but it still had that lievable and cinematic quality to it so after all of that lumped all together this is where we we finally ended up with and I think everyone was very happy we're just going to jump through the final shots here we was gonna say we'll just have one planet shot of the savanna we chose nine so we're just going to cycle through nine but you can see how every single point we covered was pushing towards making these final screen shots where we wanted it to be and obviously we had some final shots for the other ecosystems as well just tying back to where we started so the
00:54:56
what Hurston wastelands used to be savanna but thank pollution and such the coasts the mining interesting enough you hit Chris mentioned when was flying over that was that a road it's not a road told per se but we have the complexity now within our textures to define a road leading through and one thing I recommend you all to do is grab a boogie and then just follow one of those two paths along because you can literally just follow along put some headphones on and it's really good and I think we're all at that point now where we see less visual errors and we're at these point where like this is this is don t feel quite
00:55:43
good yeah final shows of the trash may sound and the acidic so for those of you follow along regularly with a TV you might know that aerial one of the other moons of Hurston is a very acidic moon so you'll be seeing way more of this on an aerial okay so to close we got there we got through all hundred eighty slides what do we want to achieve we wanted to achieve the first planet in star season pushing the feeling of scale and the feeling of diversity and that was the same for Louisville as well and I think we all pushed quite hard and we're all
00:56:33
quite happy with where we ended up with it's worth also noting that they it's a huge team effort so this is the the sauces and environment and lighting team we are relatively small in number but then you've also got the other disciplines as well so I think it's worth noting it was a huge collaboration by everyone and also we are hiring so if if any of the stuff that we talked about excites you and if yes if you're into 3d art texturing environment stuff we are looking one of samples bill the stars yet I mean that's true because we have people in our studio right now who joined us from the community or went to school because the star citizen and
00:57:22
great and so you know you're hiring so if if if you're passionate like we are you know we want to speak to you in the future and that wraps up the presentation just on the hour mark so thank you very much [Applause]

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