Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Banutiful and Habulous

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:02

   [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm Sandy Gardner and I'm Josh Herman this week we'll check back in on player hat get a first look at new moons as well as updates on props and ships but not before checking in with the Star Citizen Community on September 22nd there's a community-driven gathering in mulheim Germany called con 42 if you're in the area you'll definitely want to check it out yes you will it's always great to see fans put on their own Gatherings from impromptu bar citizens to larger

2. 00:00:50

   conventions like con 42 meanwhile the dayar rally folks are back at it again the filthiest racers in the verse put together a great C social event over the weekend players were transported to an undisclosed location on the moon where they were engaged in a multi-lap time trial all in graycat buggies very cool and they got some really impressive shots there now let's March into the development updates beginning with the modular and lighting teams who are currently working together on player Habs we've already seen the design progression of player Habs and these earliest forms of in-game housing continue to be built out and improved approved the developers are currently taking a lighting pass so here's the lead lighting artist Chris Campbell to walk us through that

3. 00:01:39

   process so the last couple of weeks I've been working on the lville Habs units the lobby and the the Habs themselves where the player has their personal items and a bed to sleep in and so the first step uh in the lobby is we usually get a a piece of concept art from the art director or the concept artist which show kind of the the basic mood of the environment and some color tones and stuff like that so the first thing I do is I block in the main kind of key lights uh so we know immediately that the player can go up these stairs uh and then once we have that then we have um the Habs units themselves need to be the kind of primary focus uh and then everything else is kind of detail lighting to support that so we have like these Al Cove uh off to the side areas which don't serve any any gameplay purpose but you know it adds a bit of flavor and a bit of contrasting colors so it's not just the same shades of of

4. 00:02:26

   yellow and orange throughout the entire environment so once we have that blocked in the next steps uh that I have is to apart from lighting the Interiors of the Habs themselves is I'm also uh adding kind of lighting variations within each layout so you know players might have a choice of what kind of style of lighting they want in their Habs that looks very cool Chris as a character designer Josh what is your relationship to Lighting in characters lighting is a little bit more it's a little different characters are going to Traverse through different types of environments an environment like a Hab you're able to set like a specific mood or tone so each player can have their own different style right but for characters it's a bit more unique because they're going to walk through each one of those environments so it's more about describing the form of the character

5. 00:03:13

   than it is creating the mood all right here we see conceptual renderings of lria and Walla two of art corpse moons it's interesting to see the earliest stages of visual development as the artists and devs dig into content that will come online further down the road the artists have to think about all the visual subtleties that give each Moon A distinct look and feel wallet is a simple Barren moon with outcrops of geod likee minerals liia surface consists of dirty ice scarred by Deep crevices and dotted with cryo volcanoes that create a constant cold but humid atmosphere on the moon while we're on the topic of concept art a few weeks ago we showed you early renderings of the new lockers they'll be used in missions both new and existing as an alternate means for players to pick up and drop off items let's let props artists Phelps and Mission designer Daniel Reynolds

6. 00:04:02

   shed some light on the design process and their in-game functionality recently I've been working on the drop off lockers these are for collecting and delivering Cargo in the game uh early on we were working on the dimensions of the whole prop and we found that the size of the screen next to the cargo hatch made it a really wide prop and this didn't really work with the original concept so we sort of re-evaluated we decided that the the screen didn't need to be this big so we scaled it down and and ended up with something that suit the concept A lot better yeah so one of the things I did was designed the door we decided to go for a shutter door rather than a swing open hatch that you can see here and this is so that when the play is interacting with the prop the door doesn't swing open and collide with them it's all self-contained this way so we're pretty much finished with this now

7. 00:04:50

   it's just up to the missions team to take it on and implement it into the game so with the addition of the delivery lockers it's added an extra element to the delivery missions alongside the admin desks and The Outpost shelves the player may now get asked to pick up or drop off a mission item at one of these delivery lockers when the player goes to interact with these lockers it'll first check to see if you have a delivery record if the player doesn't have a delivery Mission or they go to the wrong Locker it will deny them access to the locker and return back to the start screen if they do have a a mission and they are at the right Locker it will check and then succeed which point it'll open the shutter up and either display the item to pick up or ask the player to drop the item off at the Shelf we use subsumption to create the mission module which

8. 00:05:37

   controls which locker gets selected and also controls the mission broker record to detect when an item's been attached or detached from these lockers so they're currently for 3.3 uh there's still some work to be done for the UI and it's currently going through testing at the moment sticking with props the team is finishing the final hanger assets which are being placed in the environments by the design 19 they've also made progress on their major location signage for lville which will add movement and context to the city's Transit areas a few weeks ago we saw the motion warping Tech being developed and refined for both Squadron 42 and the Pu that's the system that adapts character animations to allow for realistic traversal of obstacles let's go to Mike Meen for a look at what the new tool set has to offer and how it will factor into

9. 00:06:26

   the design of both games recently uh the ACT be team's working on motion warping um we've been working on this for a little while but now we're actually working on the workflow and the tools that we use to implement this in games what you're going to see here is an asset that we've put together for vating without any motion W points so this is this is how it looks kind of as just one asset without anything put on it what we need to do is actually put um these War points onto the animation to tell the game where to transform this asset so you'll see here M um the gameplay coder who's actually creating the the system and these tools for us and you can see here is's about to demonstrate how you add those W points directly within mea these are plugins and things that he's actually built for us so you can see him adding each of these points what these do is tell us specifically at what point you warp and and it also gives us that

10. 00:07:14

    data to read once we go in game you you do this the once in in in Maya in the animation and then once you have all those points set up we can actually export that asset out and it will keep those points once we have those War points we can actually export the animation into the game as soon as we're in game you'll see that that now the the engine will actually read those War points and translate that onto the animation so it can adapting to various situations once we're there we can actually um continue to visualize scenarios that maybe we haven't encountered in the levels we can use the tools that we have at our disposal to just you know drag those same points that we created in Maya around you know just kind of the limitations of those assets the benefit of doing this is that um it allows our developers to iterate much quicker and easier it's definitely a massive quality of life Improvement especially when it's using Technologies

11. 00:08:01

    like motion whopping um which aren't always the best you know the easiest thing to visualize um how it's going to work especi this the kind of Technology the idea is that it's adaptable to a large you know variety of situations this way we can do it really quickly fun who doesn't like quality of life improvements finally let's take a look at some recent work from the ship teams the Hammerhead is nearing the end of its final art phase with lighting States recently completed for all areas of the ship the Banu Defender has been completely blocked out in y box and the interior has entered the graybox phase with designers working to establish the Ban's distinct architectural and design Styles looking good remember citizen cont tickets are back on sale head over to the website to grab yours and check

12. 00:08:49

    out all the details including the presentation schedule and if you can't make it to Austin to join in the fun firsthand you'll be able to stream all of the day's presentations live That Just About Does it for this week don't forget to tune in to reverse the verse live from the UK tomorrow on Twitch where Jared will chat with some of the folks working on object container streaming uh we want to thank all our subscribers who sponsored the shows yes we do and thanks of course to each and every backer for doing what you do until next time we will see you around around the verse thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in Star Citizen of Squadron 42

13. 00:09:37

    you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www. robertsspaceindustries.com thank you very much for watching