Star Citizen Live Gamedev: In-Fiction Ship Commercials

30 July 202101:01:551,757 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Star Citizen Live game dev in fiction ship commercials super happy fun time hour. I'm your host Jared Huckaby and if you've never seen Star Citizen Live before did I did I mess I almost mess up the word seen. Good day. This where we take about an hour out of the end of our week and we hang out with some of our developers and talk business. Talk about their work, explore the process. Today on this week's show we have two people who have never ever ever appeared on Star Citizen media whatsoever. You've never seen them before. So let's meet them now. That's the wrong screen. There's the screen. This is Jesse
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and Alex. Say hi Jesse and Alex. Hi. Now Jesse let's get started here to just real quick tell everybody who you are and what you do for Star Citizen. Um my name is Jesse. I am the associate director of marketing cinematics for CIG. Primarily we work on ship commercials kind of video content kind of all the cool video stuff you guys get to see all the time. Um Uh I've only been here about a year now. So actually I think this week is actually my year anniversary. Uh and prior to this I was in the visual effects industry for about 12 years working on quite a few things. A lot more space projects very similar vein of things that we do here.
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Space. It's all space stuff. And then it's yeah. Space stuff. And Alex who are you and what do you do for Star Citizen? I'm Alex. I'm one of the senior marketing cinematics artists here in the UK and I work on a lot of the um a lot of the uh infection trailers and stuff that you guys see uh that we put out there and I've been here for uh about 3 and 1/2 years now. And uh before that um I was actually making short films in CryEngine in the community. Um one of the ones I worked on was called Letters from Vega and uh yeah. Yeah. Joined CIG after that. Alex came from the community. So it's uh like uh somebody else you might know. Yeah, act- actually he's um
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he was the inspiration for me actually doing what I did. So I owe that guy a beer. He's a really good guy. Yeah, he's a good friend of mine. He used to be. He's kind of a He's kind of an [ __ ] now. All right. no, no, we're on about different We're on about different people. Are we? Yes. We're not talking about me? Oh oh no no, we're um no, I was talking about one of the guys in the city team. He made um the guy I don't want to name drop him cuz obviously but um yeah, he's a guy I know Combined Arms. So you thought that you were talking about me. You can be my inspiration, Jared. Thank you. Sorry. All I've ever wanted to do is be somebody's inspiration. I uh so before we get into it because this is the first time that that that folks have seen you a little bit. Uh I do want to push you a little bit, Jesse. You were You were very modest in that in
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that you came from another sci-fi universe. I want to push push this a little far. Uh what other sci-fi universe did you come from before you joined uh our team Um I've spent the bulk of my time over at uh Industrial Light & Magic, uh Lucas Film. Um did quite a few Star Wars projects, Clone Wars Rogue One, Last Jedi, Rise of Skywalker, season 1 and season 2 of Mandalorian. Um worked on things like The Martian, here's another good space one. Uh Avengers: Infinity War, Endgame uh Guardians of the Galaxy stuff small stuff. I don't know if anyone's watching those. Just small stuff. Small stuff. So, you come from the you come from a from from from a world of like of Lucasfilm or Industrial Light & Magic, and you come
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from you come from there to Star Citizen. What kind of transition is that? Are do we operate I I can't imagine making a video game is the same as making you know you know special effects and stuff or you know for for Clone Wars and stuff. What's that transition like? Um surprisingly similar. how we I mean because we do kind of cinematic work and it's like you know linear content going to the web video kind of thing. Creating shots, creating edits, stringing it all together is very similar process. Uh the main difference here is just we got a nice real-time engine to do things out of, which is fantastic and real-time is taking over the industry slowly. Um especially on Mandalorian it was used kind of behind the scenes kind of thing. So, the real-time stuff is kind of
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coming our way. Um but making shots is the same way. You still compose them the same way. You still light the same way. You still build environments. And you you still build the environments. So, of course, what you see through the camera, everything outside the camera is a giant mess just like in visual effects. Um I mean you see Smart Hulk in Avengers, you know, torso up at the bottom like his legs are floating off in different directions that no one gets to see. So, it's the same kind of in both ways just for us to see. you only work on what the camera gets to see. Just what the camera sees. A little more forgiving on our end. Yeah, we're going to exploit some of that here in a little bit. Alex, you you at to the other end of the spectrum, uh you came from from the community. Uh CIG is known for bringing in quite a few people from the community.
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Uh how is that transition? Cuz we don't usually get to explore that either. Uh when you came behind the curtain was was CIG uh everything you hoped it was or were you in for a big sticker shock? Um, it it to be honest, it it was a shock but in a good way. Um, so when I started, um, our department, so you can kind of you can kind of, um, you know, everything's about cinematics, you'll think about the guys who work on uh, Squadron 42 and uh, some of the PU stuff that you see for like, um, uh, some of the stuff we've seen previously and things in game and stuff. but when it came to the stuff we do, that was almost brand new when I started. So, it was kind of a a little bit of a trial by
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fire whereas like, I I remember joining and then it was like, "Okay, we're going to make it we're going to make a trailer for PC Gaming Show." And I was like, "Okay." That and what we ended up with was really cool. And uh, but it was yeah, it was really good fun. There was a lot of, um, there was a lot of freedom in that in how we were doing it. And we got to and we still do it now, we touch so many different parts of the game. Um, it's just yeah, it's just awesome. yeah. No. We're going to jump into the process here in just a minute and and look behind the scenes at how you make some of our, you know, in fiction ship commercials or our cinematics that we
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release to promote the the project. Uh, but one of the things I want to I I want to remind folks about when they're when they're seeing this stuff, uh, we're going to go back a little bit. I think we're we're we're going to go back in time almost a year to the to to the to the Mercury Star Runner's cinematic you might remember called The Reunion. Uh, so as but we are not using the engine and the editor of a year ago, we are using today's Dev, so as the game is updated and it progresses, many things break. Uh so, as as we're going through, you might see things that don't quite look how you remember them or or or don't represent uh as well. That is because the engine and the editor has moved on, and these are still the original files from uh about a year ago now. Um Also, uh also, when you guys are
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working, uh because we don't hold on to a lot of stuff. We we obviously hold on to a lot of stuff for Squadron 42, but for the Star Citizen and the persistent universe, when when when that when a person says, "Okay, this ship is done." And we we kick it out the door. Like, we kick it out the door in the next patch. So, so a lot of the times during that final bit, too. So, we're making the trailer while they're making the ship, and then it all comes out at the same time, which is its own unique funness. Yeah, so a lot of the times you're working with incomplete assets when you're making these things. And And so, we'll we'll see a bit of that, too. So, So, why don't we go go ahead, and you've got the editor open. Let me bring that up here. Yep. And uh what are we looking at, Alex? Yeah, so what we're looking at here is one of the shots from um the reunion. Uh I might accidentally refer to it as the
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um the Mercury trailer. That's just because what I called it when we were doing it. Um but what this shot is, it's that shot just after Maddie gets out the turret in one of the opening scenes where she's like, "Do I still got it? Or do I still got it?" And then it ends with her getting the handcuff stuck to her. So, This is one of I I didn't work on this shot personally. It was one of the guys in our in our team that worked on it and did a kickass job, as you can see. Bit of that old um old stuff is shining through a little bit there with the lower res face texture. But uh yeah, it's a cool shot to show off because I do actually have some cool assets I can show for how that's actually made. So, um So, yeah, this is the kind of what we ended up. So, we ended up having this um section of the ship that we you know dressed up and made um Alex Duggins own.
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And um yeah, it's looking pretty sick. And it's actually quite a simple shot as well. In that you've got obviously two characters with their own uh performance. Um yeah, kind of interacting with each other. Um yeah, this is kind of the final result. Which is pretty cool. No, what is this thing that we're seeing down in the lower half of the of the screen? Oh, yes. So, um this is called the track view editor. It's our cinematic tool that we use uh for pretty much everything we do. Is it when it comes to in the editor is done is done in here. So, this is where we go in and we animate our cameras for example. So, I'm just going to uh dock that there. So, there's kind of two parts to it like any animation software. You kind of got the dope sheet on the left. Which is where you see
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um all your key frames and stuff in the bottom of your timeline. And then what you've got What you've also got with that is a graph editor. And this is These two are pretty much the main tools that you would use for any kind of animation. So, this is where we'll go in and for example animate the camera. And what we'll do with the characters is we will place down the characters within the scene. And basically apply some animations that we create for them. Um and yeah, pretty much everything can be controlled in here from you know, cameras and characters and what they do to some um uh settings that we can apply in the editor which are quite similar to the graphic settings you get in game. Um Just with a few additional overrides that we can make use of and key frame on a um per instance basis. So, one shot you
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might might want one graphics feature. On another shot you might want something a little bit different so we can actually change all that. And then we've got options here for lighting as well. So, for example we've got the lights on that it's handcuffs that we can keyframe along with these light group controls which are like light switches that are within the ship. And going back to what Jesse mentioned earlier about working with in development ship assets. When this started out, this is actually a copy of what the ship team working when they creating the internal parts of the ship. I'm not going to go into that obviously because that's not what I do and I wouldn't be in the best place to talk about that. But yeah, it's pretty much a copy of it. So we actually work with the live assets that they're working on and receive updates from them as as we
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go pretty much which is really cool. until it changes things that we were working on. Oh, yes. Yeah. Um what would you like me to dive into Jared? I can probably go a million directions with this. Well, you know what? Let's let's go to the beginning. Obviously what we we do is show the sneak peek of where we're at at the end here. But let's go back to the beginning of the process. One of the folks in the chat just asked if you guys if if you guys write your own your own scripts and stuff like that. So so Yeah. Oh, sorry. No, go ahead. So so so where does where does this process start? Yes, so um it starts off with the initial So very very beginning it starts off with the initial concept for what we're going to do. So I'll be honest, I can't
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remember the exact concept we have for this, but obviously it was a concept of what we ended up with. And then that idea gets developed by we work very closely with the narrative team. And that get that idea gets developed into a full script and almost like a screenplay like what you'd have for any kind of film or TV show. And from there that's when we really start diving into the details and for example in this case and I can actually show you an example Uh when we actually go in and start storyboarding it and getting an idea for how the visuals and the pacing will look. So, in this case for this shot here, I went and grabbed some versions of it. Um what you end up with in that early phase is something like this where
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you know, we've got the same basic idea. Uh we've got Maddie coming Again, we didn't know the exact workings of the ship this previous stage was going on, which is why it looks a bit different. Um but you kind of got that phase where you got Maddie coming out of the turret and then Alex Dugan in uh coming in and then her putting the handcuffs on. And that gives us an idea of where we want to go from there. And then I want to I want to add here that when these are these the ship commercial ideas, they can come from anywhere. Uh we're we're very open to good ideas regardless of where they come from. So, when these when these when these things really get started in the very beginning, it is literally all hands on deck. It is we we we we have we have pitch meetings where where the artists themselves can pitch
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ideas, where the the folks from the community team can pitch ideas, where the you know, our our our dedicated marketing folks can pitch ideas. Uh I very occasionally, you know, if if there's ever a developer, you know, an actual developer who's like really passionate and wants to get in and you will take ideas from them and we present them in an open group and we all kind of discuss the the merits and the drawbacks of each, you know, scenario, uh whether they whether they're actually feasible, what not stuff like this. And it's it's a very collaborative process. And then when when we have a when we have an idea that that that most of us are are are are happy with that we want to pursue, uh as Alex said, we'll bring we'll rope in the narrative team and then be like, "Okay, you guys are writers. This this is this is the kind of story we want to tell. Uh where where
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can you what can you do with this? And stuff like this. So so after the the writers start to work stuff out, we're back to as you can see here, the storyboard process. Now, Now, these are storyboards. These are animatics. Can I jump in there real quick? Absolutely. Um like this it's a very unique process here. I mean again, you kind of do that because we are such a small team overall. Um and but this is something like you would never see in like the visual effects industry at all. By time anything comes our way, it's been in production for a year or two, and everything's kind of locked down. So like giving the ability to give artists input on something as early as the ideation, you know, even scripting phase is pretty unheard of in a lot of places. So it's a fantastic place to be if you have a lot of good ideas. Absolutely. It's it's one of my uh one of my absolutely favorite aspects of
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of this place is that we're always open to the better idea, and it doesn't matter where it comes from. If that idea is better than what we were doing before, it's like it's not dismissed that of hand because it comes from a QA person, or because it comes from somebody on the you know, the community team, or it comes from you know, a props artist, or what I there's no there's no there's no limit to where good ideas can come from, so. All right, so we're here. We're now we're making our animatics. Uh So um typically what this will guys that will handle this will be the um uh Jesse and the project director and an editor will generally go through and basically build these animatics that we're going to cut they're almost like the
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creative foundation of what we're going to do. This is the template that more obviously can change as pacing and stuff changes the project develops develops, but this is kind of the template that we're going to follow from this point. And when we really start to you know, really nail down what we're doing. And typically once that's in really good spot, what we will do is actually move on to the next phase when where we'll actually take the animatics that we have and actually start to put them into a 3D scene and into the environment that we're going to use. And that's where the actual cinematics team that I'm in, that's when we actually dive in and really get started. Um so, you can see here we've got a simple blockout with some very old
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loadouts we made as a placeholder at the time uh of got Alex in the background here and Maddie getting out the turret. And this was done with a very early version of the ship. with some canned animations that we had in the library just to get an idea on what we're doing. And what we'll generally do as well is in the case of this, we will do a little bit of more crap and then we'll kind of figure out what we want to what we want to achieve from that as well. And then, once we're done that, that's when we're starting to actually get into we're really developing the characters now and developing the story within um within there. There That was a good example there of how like your initial first pass kind of matches the board no matter what the board looks like. And
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right off the bat we cuz you could see that down the length of the ship and right off the bat we could tell it that the composition-wise it was not a great shot. So, from there you just start deviating and compose it better. Find some prettier angles. Um And you know, kind of help yourself in some way cuz if you're going to look down the front, you're going to see the cockpit, you're going to have to have a whole space environment outside. So, if you just nudge the camera over, you can save yourself a ton of work. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's worth noting that the lead time going go back to the animatic when the pencil drawing. The lead time on these things are such that we often don't have the interior of the ship or the interior of the area yet to look at. So, it's it's it's if you if you think these these these trailers are something they're is thrown together in a week or two before they're released, there's there's quite a bit of lead time on these. Yeah. It's it's pretty crazy actually when you put it that way. Like
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what you guys see in inside Star Citizen is what we have. Um There there is very little if any lag, if you like, on the development stuff, which is actually actually really cool. Um cuz it does let you guys see the development of everything. And there have been times where I've looked where I've looked at an ISC and think, "That's cool. I'm going to message so-and-so and see if I can get my hands on it." Oh yeah, yeah. We'll get our updates from ISC as well. That part of the ship is done. Oh, let's go nudge them and go update. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's ISC is basically ISC is generally showing you the game as it was less than a week before you're watching it. Mhm. Yeah, it's It's very different from what you guys work on where you guys start your you guys start your lead time
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uh you months and months and months. And yeah. So. Yeah. Yeah, sometimes we'll find the ship's not even available at all. It doesn't even exist. Mhm. All right. So, we've got these animatics. These animatics become early What what do you call this? Like block out? What do you refer to this as? Yeah. Yeah, it'll be it'll be it'll be nearly block out. So, it's um Yeah, you can almost call it like an animated storyboard. Um it's Yeah, we boardamatic blocking phase kind of. Um yes, this is just figuring out, you know, like like Jesse said, matching the boards as best we can. Um and then using that as as a base to for the scenery team to actually build from. And um begin that process of iteration cuz it's a creative process and we'll try new
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things and see what happens. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And we'll really start to refine what we're what we're trying to do and how to tell a story. Now, there's a question from the chat here. It says, "Why did you move away from the car commercial style advertising?" And I don't think we've moved away. We've just expanded beyond that so that we don't have to do the same thing. this this one trailer I think is the more specific example. I think this is our first kind of attempt of doing like a really story-driven narrative, which we haven't really done before. Um just to kind of see where it goes, what we can do with it, how far we could push it, how well it would get received. So, if everyone likes it, maybe we do more of them. Um in general, it is still all very car commercially um for everything else, but this was kind of our first attempt at
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something new and bigger and bolder. Mhm. To an extent. I The The The Land Rover Defender one was it was I think stretched its legs, you know, quite a bit. It's It's just that Rover Yeah, the 890 was another one that was pretty close. Yeah. So, it's it's It's you don't want to just keep doing the same thing and change all the adjectives, change all the you know, and change all the graphics. You know, an Origin, you know, a ship from Origin commercial looks like a ship for a Drake commercial looks like a ship. A commercial for a Mist ship. Uh so, yeah. So, it it really it it depends on how we're feeling at the time when we start, you know, what what kind of mood we're in. Like, oh, we've done We have We've done three or four, you know, standard ship commercials. Now, let's let's break out and do something different. Let's keep things fresh, not just for the viewers, but for us. That's when we turn around with this and be like, "Let's make a movie." Okay.
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Yes. And this one was like, "Let's make a little movie." And it's like, "All right." We'll do that. Yeah, it's about put It's about pushing ourselves too and seeing what we can we can accomplish. Exactly. I I don't think it's been any other The reason we picked this one is I don't think it's been any other project just cuz of the size of it where I've learned nearly as much in such a short span of time. Um Same Same with Same of all the guys just cuz of what we were doing with it. Um Yeah, challenges are fun. Okay. Um So, we've got our boardomatic. What happens now? So, we've got our boardomatic. So, this is um what's called back weave it. So, our block out is done. We know what we're doing, and then we'll like I mentioned before, we'll start to
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figure out uh what we need to do to get that performance cuz um we So, this one we did shoot some motion capture for it. And then what we need to figure out is how are we going to get the performance in that space? So, we actually ended up taking taping down little bits of uh the Mercury set here on the floor so we had little pathways and that's what we could walk through and actually act to it. So, we actually had two people acting towards each other like you would on TV or where you look at behind the scenes footage of people on a on a on a sound stage. And um it's it's the same kind of thing with all the markers attached to them. It's pretty much the same stuff. Right. Folks have seen that we have in our Austin studio, uh we have a a mo- one of the office areas is also, you know, rigged up with motion capture
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cameras, and they they they can slide the desks over and and tape out the floor and work there. We also have our Derby or Darby, I can never get the pronunciation right, studio. Darby. Darby. Darby studio that has its own, you know, built-in mo-cap stuff. So, it's So, it's real easy and cost-effective uh for for just a developer to to set some stuff up and then stand there and and calibrate and give us some rough stuff that we can use for stuff like that. Exactly. So, uh what we what we did for this It's a bit more complicated than that, but we literally just, you know, ring up ring up the mo-cap guys. Hey, can we pop down for a quick shoot? Um so, it's a bit more to it than that, but um it's all it's all internal and it's really really cool. So, uh yes, we do that and you know, identify the props that we need. So, for example, we had a chair here with um
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the toilet on it and uh you know, chairs in the carpet and things of that and we'll just get an apple box and we'll sit on that. the whole point of it is to get a performance out of it. Um, so having it exactly don't you don't need to build the whole spaceship, basically. which is awesome and then I can actually show you something a bit different than a bit different than premiere here. Uh, I can actually show you the next stage of that and exactly how that looks. So, this is a basically a copy of the interior of a Mercury that I um, chopped the top off to uh, remove the ceiling. And this is a this is basically what we would use for the animation of
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it. So, we can actually bring the characters together and start that uh, process of properly cleaning up and really defining that uh, performance we get out of it. So, I can kind of show you here that this is exactly like the shot that we had in the edit that I showed you at the beginning. Um, so similar to what Jesse mentioned earlier about um, you know, characters if you only see the waist up and the feet are all all over the place. Exactly the same with us. So, we'll provide some um, camera exports for some animators we work with and they'll do the same thing. So, if it's in shot, we'll clean it up and make it look great. And then but if it's out of shot, we don't have to worry about it too much. And uh, for facial performance we also
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work with the animation teams on that as well and they do a pretty awesome job every single time. Um, after that, uh, to be honest, it's all about refining and lighting and making everything look fantastic. It's really straightforward from that point as far as process is concerned. Ooh. And these are the kind of stages that you get through refinement and as the ships are developed and uh finished. So this is what this was scene six? Scene one? Uh this is this is scene one. So this is right still right at the very beginning where we're seeing, you know, Maddy going, "Do I still got it? Or do I still got it?" And she just kind of um yeah, it's just kind of showing the progression of it really uh as it would go through and um you know, we'll take what's there and
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we'll add a bit to it to make the characters um really really shine. Which is kind of what we ended up here. Uh it's a good example of how the lighting changes as well cuz like lighting's one of the last things usually goes into a ship production. So we kind of don't know what the interior ship lighting looks like until long after almost the end of the project sometimes. Uh so Yeah. And and we'll generally we'll try to roll it in but sometimes we'll kind of deviate a little bit just to make it more cinematically or more interesting. Um we try and stay true to the ships as best we can when we can. But uh again it's it's we're we're working on it as they're working on it. Mhm. Is there uh is there another scene that we can jump to and and take a look at? Yes. Can I start that with an apology? Sure. Hold on, let me make it big screen. There I'm on big screen. Okay. There's a certain shot that's 90 seconds
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long or something like that where people can't aim. I based that on my own skills of being able to play Star Citizen. Turns out it's not representative. I do apologize. I I just I just suck. You you you're talking about the the stormtrooper aim the the sequence here. Yeah. Uh you guys can see my screen. This is it. Uh I'm just going to turn shadows back on. Everyone notices the stormtrooper aim but not the fact that it's a 90-second long shot which is insane. And the button was on the wrong side. Ship was still in development. That's that's my excuse. Um but yes, so this said that we don't read the comments. We do. We agonize over them in our beds at night.
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Um yes, so this is it here. So, um you can kind of see Alex and Maddie here. So, if I switch to my sequence camera, I'll bring the trappy on to the screen as well. Um I was worried there. So, if I actually play through, it's a little bit laggy cuz I've got a lot going on. And I turned all my optimizations off, but you can kind of see here that we've got Alex and Maddie running forward in real time in in the editor. And this is the cool thing about doing all this in engine like this is I can look at this and see what I see here is what is going to be rendered and exactly what is there, which is super super cool. Uh so, yeah, that's kind of it here. So, if I were to look at it from the top down, you can also see and this was a really, speaking of challenges, this was a cool challenge. Is how do you get a seamless performance from two actors
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running obviously we cannot actually build all of this. That would be ridiculous. But how do you get that? So, that was a really fun thing to work on. So, you can actually see here it's all seamless, all there. And they actually get in here. They get into the vehicle and it's about And also this camera was hand animated So, it's actually going through and getting that. And they're actually seamlessly moving up here. You can see I cut some corners there. A little bit cuz you didn't see it. And the crazy thing about this is well, because it's not a game engine, I'm not going to do it cuz I know for a fact I'll fall through the floor just cuz of how I set it up, but normally when I set it up properly, we'll um we can actually hop in a game mode and actually shoot these people, which is really cool. It's exactly the same toolkit. That's a little bit broken, so
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I do apologize for that. But yes, so this is kind of a little view into how that's made and there's some cheeky little camera cuts here as well just to make life a bit easier for myself when I was animating it. but yeah, it's pretty it's pretty cool. I'm not Oh, I've I hope I haven't crashed there. I think I might have crashed. I did. Oh, no. We've got that to contend with as well. Chips are in development but so are the tools. That's the truth. No, we have an we have an entire tools team dedicated to creating new new tools and new tool sets for our developers to use for our marketing cinematics team to use and stuff like that. So, we very much appreciate them. Thank you.
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Oh, they're fantastic. I've had many a beer with some of them. Shout out. Shout out to Martin senior and his team. Yes. Many a beer. All right. So, what is what is this you have up here now? Yeah, so this is pretty much what I had on here with the shot. So, it's um I put a I've just you can see I put a bit more effort into this one and put them side by side just in Premiere real quick. So, you can kind of see if I hit play No, I don't want that open at the moment. Come on. Yeah, if I hit play here, you can see on the top left we've got the initial anima storyboard animatic we had and on the bottom right is the final shot. And so, it's going 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. Um so, left to right then down left to right in order.
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And you can kind of see the visual progression of it where we started off with the storyboard there. And then this was the initial block out which was actually before this edit. Um just kind of merely to get an idea of the timing. So, this was actually something that had to be really choreographed and figured out uh really early on. So, the first thing I did was create a timing reference. And then um you guys have kind of mentioned before on other um on other streams and inside star citizen that um the white box and gray box design process a bit. So, that's exactly what I did here as well. So, I'm just going to go full screen on one of these and I'm just going to turn off a bunch of views. See if I can turn that off there cuz I want to make one of these full screen
00:33:01
cuz it'll really look cool. Um so, for example, here it is pretty much the It's not exactly the same, obviously, cuz we're not design We weren't designing this for gameplay. We're designing it for a pre-rendered cinematic. But um what you can kind of see here is a similar idea where we start to block out everything we're doing with primitive shapes and then start to really bring in the animation. This one's a little bit further along than the actual white box just cuz they've got some terrain and stuff. But you can start to see elements of that here where it's just kind of flat primitive planes and things like that and some early ideas for playing with the environment as well. uh after that cuz that gives us basically everything is a template for a template for a template and then you just kind of build and build and build on top of that uh if you like and um
00:33:51
really start to refine different bits of it. So, for example, Oh. Yeah. No, pause. So, pausing yes. So, for example, here we'd have nothing and then you start to bring in some set dressing in there. And you can also see some of the timing start to change a little bit as we're basically just starting to refine our timing slightly and refining what we want to do. Uh and then you can see at the bottom as things have really started to get nailed down, everything's more or less lined up and it's all about polish and more polish. So, it's about So, basically, all your big changes would happen in these first handful of iterations and then after that you really know you really know what you're trying to do, and then you can really get into the details and figuring
00:34:38
it and basically making those details shine. Well, if everything is working the way that it should, all those big changes should happen in the first in the first five. You try to avoid having the big changes happen in the back half. Can always avoid it though. Yeah, sometimes it happens. You get quite a bit of the way through it and you're just like this ain't going to work. And then you have to change it. It It happens. Um but it's all about minimizing that. And um we're we're generally really good at doing that. Uh just basically cutting the stuff we don't need really early on. Yeah. E- Either something Either something you realize that something isn't going to work and you you originally just can't realize it until you know you you get so far along, or like is often happens, you have the better idea and you're like, "Oh, why didn't I have this idea Yeah. 3 months ago?" Yeah. And sometimes
00:35:27
you get to the very end and you realize you something and then you just there's just no time to fix it. Well, especially on this side, I think it took you a good day or two just to get it rendered out and uploaded. Oh, it was it was it was crazy. Um cuz obviously we're rendering high-res fast and to be honest, my internet isn't that great. I was just waiting there like this. Upload. I want to go home. I'm already at home, but I want to want to finish. I'm tired. All right, I'll load that I'll load this back up now. I actually have in here I can show you uh just go into a bit more detail on what that white box looks like is you can kind of see it here underneath everything. So, if I turn all that off Wait, did I turn the wrong thing off? I turned off the wrong thing. There we go. You can see that everything is kind of built on a
00:36:14
the this is part of like another set we did. We kind of um this little area here we split into two. Mhm. And uh the scene here where we had um we call him boss. I I don't think we actually gave him a name. We just called him Bossman. Um Yeah, um another artist was actually working on that. It was kind of its own self-contained thing and uh kind of using the setup that we have with like object containers and things, which are basically uh what you guys have talked about a lot. It's like a self-contained level or prefab you can bring in, um but with more to it. Um Yeah, so another artist Another artist was actually developing this bit and then I could reference that in seamlessly. Yeah, you mentioned this guy is called Bossman very regularly. Uh names for these things don't sometimes don't come up until much later in the process. Uh
00:37:03
like the reunion for instance, you you're used to referring to it as the the Mercury commercial or whatever. We didn't It didn't It wasn't called the reunion until about 30 hours before it was published. It was about 30 hours before David and myself David, myself, Jesse, a bunch of folks were sitting there just spitballing, you know, throwing things out. We had a thesaurus open. Just looking for something before I think I was about at the color session when that came up, too. So, like everything All the shots had been delivered and we were just doing kind of final color on it. And then we're trying to come up with the name. Uh XSF uh 561 says running out of time to answer questions here. This is a game dev show, XSF. If you've seen them before, this is more about showcasing process than doing a giant Q&A. We'll do questions as they're
00:37:53
appropriate. No, that is. Yeah, this is just kind of the end of it. That there There's the button. See, it's modified. I took the panel off. That's That's my That's my excuse. We We did We did know about it. Um Yeah, if if anyone's got any questions, I'm happy to answer them. Uh Jared, if you like. Well, questions that are appropriate for the marketing side of things. Some of a lot of the questions that have come in are not necessarily for your team. Like like one of the one of the biggest questions that we've had since uh this trailer was first debuted was what planet is this and this trailer was first Uh, fair. And that's not a question for the marketing cinematics team folks. It's a It's a when it comes time for this system to be in development and and and that won't be anytime soon.
00:38:40
Uh, it'll be up to Ian Lee Linden members of the environment team to determine whether they want to go back and look at this for reference or whether they want to create something uh, brand new and wholly original. So, which is there is no answer that question at this time. Totally fair. yeah, that's all I That's all I really had for this scene. Uh, so I just wanted to Would you like to move on to anything else or dive into anything? Well, we we got about 20 minutes. Jesse was bragging about your ability to set up a scene from scratch super super quick. Mhm. So, so why don't we do this? Why don't we take some suggestions from the community? Uh, I will be the one to pick but community let's let's design a scene to set up very quickly. Uh,
00:39:28
let's set it on like a on like a platform out in space like like you know like a one of Port Olisar's type platforms or something. Uh, what kind of action would you like to see happening on one of uh, Port Olisar's landing platforms? There you go. If I've actually got it on I actually did prepare a little something uh, for something like this just in case. So, here's your Here's your scene. Tell me what you'd like to see. Uh, let's see. What's the What do you want the character to do? You know, how do you want to frame it up? Yeah, and you can't ask for the cracker or anything. It's got to be stuff that actually exists and is ready to go in our engine. Cat ramming? Yeah, you haven't seen that enough? You haven't seen that enough? You need a cinematic of that? A nice little slow coming down right at A dance battle, let's see. Dance battle,
00:40:19
PTV demolition derby. Uh you let me know which one of these jumps out at you, Alex. Um so, what we got? Down soft pad ramming or a PTV demolition derby? Uh ship hijacking. Yeah, could do a pad ramming. or evacuation, evacuation from the world outside. Okay, tell you what, I'll do I'll do pad ramming. Okay, you'll do pad ramming. Make it like a an epic almost slow motion giant ship coming crashing at I've only got 20 minutes. You've only got 20 minutes. So, as as we Long lens, come on, you know what to do. Long lens. If you've ever seen, for those of you who have seen Game Dev before, uh remember there's very few things that can be created in this game in 1 hour, much less 20 minutes, so. Challenge accepted. I'm going to put up a Do I
00:41:09
have a timer? Can I put up a timer? What? Okay. Well, it's going to have a it's going to have a reclaimer because I love the reclaimer. It's just awesome. All right, we'll do something like that. And then, all right, what ship would you guys want rammed? What ship do you guys want rammed? Uh You've got 5 You've got 5 seconds or I'm choosing for you. Although there's there's a delay, isn't there? Oh, no, well, it was even you guys. a really bad ship. Okay, we'll do a Drake ship. Okay. Let's let's do a Drake, I'm actually looking for a list. Let's do a Buccaneer. Who loves a Buccaneer?
00:41:59
Okay, so we'll do that there, throw that in there. What I'm going to do is I'm going to switch to our lighting mode like this just because it's a when you've not lit a shot, it's a little bit easier to see what you're doing uh with this one. So, I'm going to switch to about there and I'm also going to grab our dude. there. And this is going to be the pilot. He's going to be looking at it like, "WHAT THE HELL?" Sort of thing. All right. So, I'm going to throw him there. And then what I'm going to do is like that kind of initial blockout uh we mentioned at the very beginning. So, what I'm going to do here is create a camera. And I'm going to add that camera to our track view. And then I'm going to add what's called a scene node which we use to basically cut between cameras. So, now
00:42:47
I can cut between cameras. So, I'm going to add that there. And then what I could do here is turn on just a safe frame. This gives me like a little template for a nice little 21x9 uh view. And then in the camera properties, uh I've just got it on my other screen just for the sake of space. I am just going to expand the fire Z so we can start to see that lovely gas cloud in the background. Okay. So, now we're in a position where we can block it out. So, let's do that. So, I want to do something like this. So, this is literally animation just with cool spaceships. So, do something like that. And then going to bring something like that. Maybe something like that. You can see the email I'm going to get
00:43:35
from CR. minutes to create a cinematic for Star Citizen and you created pattern ramming. I was just I'm composing my response now. Well, Jesse's flyby. Yeah. Jesse's my boss and he said do that. So, I I wasn't going to say no. That that covers you. It doesn't cover me. You're the host, dude. We'll go to you. Maybe it'll be like a near miss. It'll it'll like a five-way. No. We started We started this now. We're going to finish it. See it through. Commit. Commit. Okay. So, what I'm doing here is like, you know, like I said, I I like kind of block out, so um we're a little bit off.
00:44:24
So, what I'm going to do here is actually just shift the um the claimer over a wee bit there. Basically, the I want the arm to just kind of whack it. Like So, like doof. Uh again, I'm animating this. I'm not like turning on physics or anything like that. Um just to make it a little bit more uh predictable. Golden triangles. Relaxed and take it so seriously. Okay. I'll just wind that. I will You know what I can do though, I can actually I think I can make it explode. I'll try that. right.
00:45:14
So, what I'm doing here is I'm just going to just tweak the graph a little bit. This is just like a very rough block out, obviously. So, we'll just wind that. He grab it with the arm with the with the grabbing hands? okay. And then what I might do is it for salvage? Oh, he could It could Tell you what, yeah, he could be. Let's do it. Yeah, this is a repo man here. Obviously, I'm just Obviously, I'm just animating it, so I'm just going to have it just kind of end up around there. There we go. That'll do. There we go. It's not pad ramming, it's pad gobbling. Woah. what I like to do on ships and stuff is I like to add a just a little bit of um roll cuz it just it just adds a lot
00:46:05
especially if you add a little bit of roll to a big ship, it just looks cool. So, do that. maybe Okay, cool. All right, so obviously I've not really done much with the camera yet. So, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to give our our dude a little bit of an animation. Uh I'm just going to do it on my other screen just cuz it's a bit lower res and it's a bit easier to read. Um I think what I'm going to do You know what? Going to make him dance. Cuz why not? So, he's like maybe maybe maybe if it's instead of it being his ship, he's just like Yeah, yeah, Reclaimer. There we go.
00:46:56
So, we'll do that. And then what I'm going to do now is we'll start off on like kind of a a neutral lens. So, if anyone knows cameras and stuff more than me, which is a lot of people I'll tell you that, this is like a 35 mm lens. So, we'll kind of Actually, no, let's make it So, he's well what Always always. Always a long way. What I'll do as well as I'll bring this I'll bring these two around here. Oh, yeah, that's going to be cool. That way you can get um more of the ship more of the Buccaneer that we're interested in and the Reclaimer together. So, I'll do something like that. And this these blue bars here are like the edge of the camera um entity so, I
00:47:45
can actually see what I'm doing. So, I might might start off there a little bit off frame. What I can do as well I'll make this a bit wider and it will just give me a better idea on what the frame looks like. Even though actually nah, it gives us less realism. Let's just let's make it wide. Just like that. Uh and then what we'll do is just have it track with our dude like that. All I'm doing here is I'm just making the animation linear just so it does a constant speed the entire time. And then just going to pull that back and create a bit of an arc and just keep the Reclaimer in in frame like that. Maybe I'll rise up a bit cuz we don't
00:48:39
actually we don't actually get much of the Buccaneer in there. Yeah, your dude's covering him. This is ridiculous. I love it. Yeah, all right. Let's try that. And then what I'm going to do here is just select my position of rotation key and just set a bit of a auto tangent on that. Right. So that actually disappears from frame there. So what I'm going to do is bring that back. Like that. It's actually quite interesting. So this turned from pad ramming into pad gobbling. With a dance off. With a dance off. That's what happens when you don't have a script. We just go off the rails.
00:49:29
Okay, cool. And what we'll do now cuz we've got 10 minutes is we'll light it. Even though yeah, it's not it's not incredible. Could be better. But we've got 10 minutes. We can always refine it a bit. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to come out of this mode. And to be honest the sun's actually already in a pretty cool spot. Backlight it. Backlight it? Oh, backlight everything. Oh, backlight it. I'm Tell me you work for Lucas Film without telling me you work for Lucas Film. That was That's a secret every all the lighting is backlight everything. It's going to be interesting red hue.
00:50:18
It's like I think it thinks it's on a planet. I think I broke it. Oh, well. It's fine. Roll with it. Roll with it. It can be red. I'll make it red. It's a red sun. It's dying. Let's make it brighter. So, it's on my other screen. I'm just like I don't Wow, it's really red. This is interesting. It's very Okay. What I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in what's called an environment probe, which is a It basically bakes down some ambient lighting. So, I'm going to set that to something Uh it's like 5 or 50,000 or something nuts. Okay. And I'm going to set priority I'm just Sorry, I'm just doing this all on
00:51:04
my other screen. Just cuz that's where my roller bar is. And I generate. And this Yeah, this basically used to bake down some ambient lighting. So, that's interesting that it's red. It'll be a graphics feature that I don't actually know how to use. See, we're always learning. Always learning new things. Oh, wait. It's not red that way. In that case, that'll do. We'll do We'll do sunset uh the ground point. And then just going to set that to be white. And then I'm going to bring the intensity down. just a wee bit. And what it's missing
00:51:53
is some big old lights on the front. Oh, So, we'll do that, too. So, what I'm going to do here is I'm just basically Long means. Oh, yeah. What I'm All I'm doing here is I'm just bringing in a tag point, which is basically a an a null object. And um it just gives me an easy way just to parent something uh to a ship. You remember that You remember the original George Hull uh concept for the Reclaimer that had the big floodlights on the front. I I think so. It was a long time ago when I watched it. Did I accidentally freeze it? I think I did. Oh, no. I I did it. Hull. Friend of the show. All right, let's bring that one there.
00:52:46
again, emphasis on doing this very quickly. So, this is not representative a final product. Could be a super quick. Uh All I'm doing here is I've got windows galore at the moment. Uh let's make it five. So, now we've got a super big light, and I'm just going to set it to something redonkulous. Yes. I'll fix it in a moment. So, we're going to set the bulb radius to be about the size we're interested in. There's no pilot there, but we're not going to worry about that right now. In fact, one of the first thing I things I did when I joined the company is about the time when the Reclaimer was in development. And the first thing I did
00:53:33
was dive in and make like a little um little internal shot on it, which I've since lost forever. But, it involved It actually involved um hijacking it. We had like a little firefight on site and um inside it and stuff, which was cool. But uh ancient history now. Okay, so that's going to be 800. Uh I think what I can do as well is see if I can increase the shadow distance. Oh, I think it's already casting shadows. Maybe. Let's find out. shadow distance, where are you? Let's put that to 80. Yeah, so it's casting There's a few little CVars I can dig into if I were to refine this. Uh but what we're also missing are of
00:54:20
course lens flares. So, what I'm doing here uh unfortunately is just on another screen just because of where it is and for time and stuff, is I am actually a lens flare. let's see. I'll turn lens flares on. Oh, Jesus. I'm going to turn lens flares off. Going to apply lens flares there. I'm basically going to modify these two lights at the same time. and then we'll do uh where's the lens flare button gone? There it is. Okay, obviously we're not going to do that. Oh, it's deselected them and I can't see. Uh let's try
00:55:08
this one. It's I have an actually, you know what? I have an idea. Let's uh take both of those off. Four and a half minutes. I have four and a half minutes to add a lens flare. Okay, I got this. you got to do depth of field, you got to do camera shake. Come on. What? All the things. Lens flare is most important. Everyone loves It's lens flare. Debatable. I love a lens flare. I'm the one with the editor. Um you know what, screw it. It's not There's too many options. Let's do depth of field. So, or camera shake. We can do camera shake. So, our camera shake properties here, we
00:55:56
can basically define how much or how little we want. So, what I like to do is start off with kind of similar values each time. So, let's start with five. So, it's 5° amplitude on three axes. 2.25 second frequency. Little much, so. Uh let's bring the amplitude down. Yeah. Oh. Yeah, that'll work. And then what I like to do on these guys is just going to have like a little high frequency rumble. So, what I'll do is this amplitude B, I will bring that right down. This is like
00:56:44
kind of our high frequency uh rumbler. So, we want it kind of a max rumble about there. And then we're going to have it fade back to zero towards the end of the shot. do just kind of have it peak around there. You see as we as the camera is getting closer, that rumble increases. And then it goes oh. And then disappears. What I'll see if I can do in the last 3 minutes or 2 minutes um is I'm just going to add a track. Uh see if I can add an event. That won't work. Wrong one. basically I'm looking for a kill trigger.
00:57:34
Is dead. There we go. There's another one here which I'll just hit death as well, just in case. So, have it blow up around there. And what I can also do, uh because we're using the actual ship as well, is I can grab it. Uh in my other window, I'm turning it on. Like that. Uh buccaneer, I'm turning on. And if I did this right, which I probably didn't because of how fast I did this, the frost is all fire. pad ram. See here the lights are on. The lights are on.
00:58:22
Frosts are reacting to the speed it's going. They're all on, so um now when I play it, and I can only do this once cuz the ship should die, it should blow up. Oh, never mind. It didn't blow up. I didn't do it right. But there you go. That's um getting frosts on. And then any other things I do there is tweak the camera shake, add some cool lens flares to it. Do um in the last minute, do like soft uh depth of field a little bit. Yes, do it. Uh so, what I can do here is just bring the F stop way down. Bring it down to something very crazy. And then let's bring the focal distance up. So, I'll do here is just select this guy
00:59:11
here. So, this is how it would look at the moment with depth of field on. I did can probably do with moving, but it is what it is. Star focus picker. Yes, depth of field adds so much to a shot as well for just drawing focus. Which is super cool. Did I click a wrong thing? I clicked the wrong thing. There we go. You can kind of see here that this dude's out of focus, looks really good. He's just oblivious to what's going on. Yeah, there's a shot in 20 minutes.
01:00:01
Very cool. Last little while, I'll see if I can get a lens flare working cuz it isn't working. You have no time remaining. I will keep going till you boot me off. All right, we got to wrap up here. No worries. All right. Just do the giant There you go. You got your lens flare? All right, I'm I'm happy now. Okay, we can finish now. Good. It's ridiculous. Boom. It's not aligned. It's not in the right place, but we have our lens flare. I'll fix it in post. Fix it in post. All right, gentlemen. Thank you so much for for taking the time out of the end of your week to be here on the show with us.
01:00:50
You know me, my my my my favorite kind of shows are the ones that know what they're company or whatever thing to do. So, it's been a pleasure for me to have uh uh you Jesse and you Alex here on the show this week. Uh show off a little bit of of your workflow and and what you do. Um the if you have not seen uh the reunion uh Mercury StarRunner short film, it's available on our YouTube channel. Uh check that out. Uh there was a first half and then there's a complete full length one. You can just watch the full length one cuz it includes the first half. Yeah, for Jessie, for Alex, uh Jared, and we'll see you next week, everybody. Take care. Thanks a lot. Thanks. Bye.

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