Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Bringing Characters to Life

30 March 201801:01:531,542 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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subscribers edition bringing characters to life also cameras greeting citizens and welcome to another edition of reverse the verse live subscriber edition I'm your host Content Manager Jared Huckaby now if you're unfamiliar with our subscriber editions once a month here on our TV we have a special broadcast where we invite a couple of our developers on and take questions exclusively from our development subscribers it's just one of the many perks of being a member of our subscriber program which has been a staple of star citizen's development and operation for quite a few years now in addition to the in-game perks like hangar flare the subscribers in our Centurion and imperative programs receive a variety of benefits like the subscriber vault the monthly jump point magazine discounts on merchandise and more subscribers are also what make our
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community engagement content like around the verse calling all devs bug smashers lore makers guide to the galaxy and this show reverse the verse slide possible now for information on becoming a subscriber and to see all the additional benefits I'm not listing because we're already behind schedule here go to Robert's space industries comm slash pledge slash subscriptions to find out more on today's subscriber edition reverse the verse live we have members of our character art team gage Holman and Jeremiah Lee joined by character art director Josh Herman on the show to discuss all things related to bringing the characters of star citizen to life and their work to allow backers to more fully realize their own characters in the game but before we get to that let's do the Week in Review now last week on the show we had founder and CEO Chris Roberts here to discuss
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the Alpha 3.2 feature survey we launched last week is your chance to let us know which features you want us to focus resources on most while we maintain our efforts to provide all of them for the next release of star citizen alpha if you missed it it's available now up on YouTube Monday brought with it another episode of our weekly question and answer series calling all devs this time focused on such backer voted topics as tractor beam panics whether bigger means better when it comes to equipment slots it doesn't additional concept module modules for existing ships and player opportunities to own build and own their own space stations as usual you can catch calling all devs each and every week on Mondays up on YouTube Lord a Tuesday featured part two of the cup the multi-part story that originally introduced the murray cup race to the universe of star citizen
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while wednesday featured another episode of bug smashers that addressed and resolved one of the more sticky issues in recent weeks why your ships sometimes have trouble lifting off and moving away from the landing platforms when taking off as always mark does a terrific job making programming and engineering work accessible to everyone and if you go back and watch every single episode of bugs measures from beginning to end i think you qualify for a college credit and programming maybe not at most schools but at least it DeVry do they do right why am i picking under bright they didn't do anything to me then on Thursday our monthly squadron 42 centric episode of around the verse a ride with a number of fun revelations like the Bengal having a freakin monorail to tram and site it just to get from one end of it together the revelation of additional sheen on ships featured in the game updated character visuals on mark Oldman and Hamill procedural food and more
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around the verse sure behind-the-scenes look at the making of star citizen squadron 42 each and every Thursday and you should watch it now we're gonna take a quick break and when we return it's characters with the character art team and questions from our development subscribers so stay tuned we'll be right back ponder my claims that I won the well sugar you're working now yeah girls hello I'm Christopher Smith and then we shipped artists from Austin Texas what else question that's it I don't know what Oh am i saying I
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didn't know I was supposed to keep saying ago what's up um I'm currently working on a new ship finally just exciting and that's the Lightning s78 can I talk about that ship I don't know I don't know so answer card the same things he said ready in three two action hi I'm Josh Koons I work at CAG been here for about three years we're
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gonna lend chips been here for about three years made many ships great many ships which was challenging to hear that I put a guy's phone in the ceiling about yay things nuts you show Jerry wants to do the
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behind-the-scenes something that's good stuff I honestly think we can just use all of this yeah yeah yeah sound you hear working at CA we're support you can only bet pass this is Coons from the ATX signing off oh alright and of course that was Josh Coons and Chris Smith how not to interview inside CAG the flashback from our second episode reverse the rest this year all right joining us today on the subscribers townhall no subscriber edition reverse the verse we've rebranded and changed everything and I am out of it today during the thing I
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had to run and get a different computer like I don't have this computer's ademma compare gauge Josh Jeremiah hello alright so as always before we as we do these shows it's always somebody's first show so as somebody who has no idea who any of us are so we're gonna take a couple minutes introduce yourselves tell the folks watching precisely what you do for star citizen not only is it just a nice way to introduce ourselves but it's also your way of knowing what kind of questions these guys can answer you know so if you're wondering like where's the character so let's start with gauge gauge would you tell everybody who you are what you do for star citizen so I am the tech artist for the character team in
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simplest terms I basically take all the beautiful things that the character team makes and make them move a bowl and get them in-game yes there's a lot of behind the scenes stuff a lot of R&D testing yeah okay yeah remember when you did through you helped with April Fool's gag like two years ago oh yeah you did that you did that and do the big menus the coordinator of the big Benny's dance and yeah deliveryman that was a long time ago yeah it's just on my mind getting about good memories Selma super awesome mmm yes hi I'm just decided to this like The McLaughlin group I'm gonna be like next up Jeremiah Jeremiah in character concept artist us what do you do for star citizen oh I almost had that brain for a moment again my name is Jeremiah Lee I'm the senior console for us here in Los Angeles studio and I concept out
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characters clothing alienness or anything have to do with living beings do you remember do you remember when you appeared on a citizen's and start asking questions and you forgot your name remember the first question was what's your name what are you doing you forgot your name you got it yeah but I will begin at the beginning I almost stumbled last but certainly not least character art director Josh where are you what do you do Josh my man character art director my job is basically to oversee the character team from concept to implementation so anything that you see moves around typically anything that's character related armor clothes costumes
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that's kind of my domain do you remember on that happy hour when you made a big spider quadrant of the zoomed right into it and never happen nope didn't happen I know once I started with the do you remember those I just figured I'd continue it have highly oxygenated blood today alright so subscribers edition reverse the verse we've got members our character team here to answer questions about all things related to bringing characters to life because it is a subscribers edition this is the show once a month where we take questions exclusively from our subscribers so if you want to submit your question for you know consideration here with the team go to Robert's space industries comm slash spectrum and you can drop yourself into the subscribers Channel and that's where
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you post your question please promise your question with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets it's going to help our community management team pull them out from all the other conversation and if you aren't a subscriber consider becoming one Roberts Pacers comm slash pledge slash subscriptions or just ask somebody else take your subscriber will you pop my question or whatever you however you want to get your question in there man you do you all right now we did pregame some questions we put a thread up in the subscribers SEC forum section of spectrum for the people who couldn't be here live and then that also gave people the additional ability to vote up which questions they wanted to see answered most so we're going to start right now with the most voted up question just get it right out of the way okay will we see any alien inspired human armor and cool like we like we have alien inspired hybrid ships so what they're talking
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about now here is that obviously we have in the game the the xi an scout the vent the vandal blade on the sides and in the glade the bed merchantmen have we considered doing something similar for your armors yeah we have I would say absolutely we've been kind of thinking about some more recent ideas which are a little more off the wall actually than once you've been thinking about but we're mentioning so maybe from aliens or things that you haven't encountered isn't we haven't talked about yet but yes we will definitely be doing armors based off of yes absolutely yeah I think I think would be great I think would be
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you know obviously a human who's been on tour lausanne your studio has seen the the the fashion wall in the character team the others are in sketches I mean if I don't know if maybe this is the best way to say it but when we're all said and done this is gonna be the best game version of Barbie dress-up I think I think every star so all the work that you guys are doing the customization that you're gonna give that you're giving to our characters I feel like it's one of those exciting aspects of this project for gonna feel like it's gonna be mr. potato man though mr. Potato Head I'm sorry mr. potato man mr. potato man that's that's that's yeah Oh Mike give me Jeremiah's camera no mr. potato man look at the camera I just lost my bed I'm sorry
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we yeah we're definitely thinking about that yeah that's cool it's gonna be yeah I think the part of our customers Aiden system is we're able to do a lot of different things like you know we can pretty much do anything we want there's limitations to like certain sizes and shapes but other than that like the actual content we put in be pretty much whatever we like a human dressed like a bad new like like in his skin please can make a week for the order let me concentrate Josh let me God septic yes you unleash me that's what the Titan armor is you guys have got a way off this entire time it's actually crawling inside a giant I [Applause] see you let's see if we've got a question from the live chat fellow Nolan
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first question Tyler Nolan sends me from this from the subscriber chat will we eventually be able to choose Jared spree 3.0 beard and the character customizer oh wow we hold yes that beard shall never return on it brought it back once I was never there I don't know what you're talking about huh but that does it does lead us into something we do have in the first iteration of the character customizer coming through we do have the Ricky the Ricky yeah Rick we do have the Ricky yeah we talked about the Ricky person the Ricky was basically you know like whenever we work internal versus external you can name things differently so I think I had found we were looking for hairstyles and we had found a style that was very similar to Ricky's and I was just like I'll put it up as the Ricky and you normally when you go through something it may just say like I
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don't know like some of our assets are like marine one and then when it goes into the game it's got a cool name here it was like Ricky and they just kept it as reality which is fine no no I don't think they don't want to keep it we actually don't have it so yeah you can find a picture of Ricky each other he has he has chemistry you know there's a lot of there's a lot of talk about brian chambers this hair this leg but mine Jimmy and Ronnie chambers this hair will definitely go into the game on there I'm already saying that they don't know I'm sorry Chris but but I don't think Ricky Gentiles hair gets nearly enough enough mentioned it gets bigger every time I see it it's amazing it's a sentient creature yeah it is yeah it just pretty gently is a
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simian there's Ricky and then there's gently yeah all right going back to the going back to the spectrum thread were folks submitted questions all weekend voted will close impact characters beyond cosmetic having more pockets allows us to carry more items having more dense clothing acts like some kind of armor having more or less clothes he just went on and on he actually put an ellipsis like he knew he wasn't done and he just put in opposites at the end there so we're close and packed characters beyond cosmetic yeah they will and they can even with our current like let's talk about the armor we have right now the light medium and heavy each one of those allows for different ports so I was gonna have gage speak about item force but generally what it
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means is you can put on more stuff but if you wanted to talk about that for a bit oh sure and also this goes having to design to which is kind of outside of our team a lot of what we'll do is implement what design wants to do with these clothing or armors and then we kind of make that happen so like he said with the item ports or even maybe speed variations like in this one it says speed so if you have certain armors obviously or not everyone is fast or maybe it'll be like an enhanced armor maybe you could run faster and especially with clothing I think another point in there was can you put weapons on these clothes and things like that that's all okay later but yeah absolutely clothing will affect you how drastic that will be I think is still them the debate in the work soon yeah we tested on yeah there's nothing that stops you from putting you have letting essentially having your clothes have
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stats yeah letting you put other things on top of your clothes which is currently in the game um how far we take that those still being probably capes always capes know we have capes case are his case has one of it totally good we have another baby drape you up capes on top of capes we have another key in the prepare so that's a hot topic it is not because I keep bringing it a lot of people seem to not like capes Incredibles movie there's been this easy low effort that no capes go let's be fair that was that was also pre that was in Watchmen I think it was the dollar bill gets caught it was yeah that's right so capes are dangerous Thanks I love capes afternoon eh going back to
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the live chat this is probably more a tech card thing but any place to have hair or facial hair grow over time ooh Oh God we thought about that other players get the Elder beard my lifetime subscriber make it - Jared beard we've thought about the challenge for it is actually generally across our game one of the problems it's not really a problem it is a problem that we have within the characters is fidelity so to make hair that looks good like I don't think the hair that we have in the character creator looks great yet I don't be totally honest with you but to make something that's gonna look good in multiple states is really difficult and whereas maybe you could do something where it's a gravy eating on a ramp and it slowly reveals more of what the style
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would be you can do things or maybe the cards slowly stretch over time you could do something but it gets really difficult to make it look consistently good quality troll yeah exactly so it's something we can do and it's something we might explore but right now it's not top priority now you mentioned the character customizer and we've got a feature coming in art in 8 and a TV in like three weeks on the character category so we're not gonna go into too much detail because that means because we got a whole feature that we're put together we got interviews with you guys and other people and it's all there but the character customize there's one of the bigger features that's rolling in with alpha 3.1 Alpha 3.1 which is currently available to all backers on the PTU right now so if you are a star sitting back there you you can't access 3.1 right now on the PTU as our teams around the world are working to bring it to life the character customizes in 3.1
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is the first iteration I mean it is not the end it is not the is not been too old it is it is stuck with just a little bit about why this version is what it is in the game right now sure I would treat it as you know a classic alpha you know a point zero point one kind of thing you know we've talked about many times teenage questions like that or features like that and I think the challenge is there's a lot of work that goes into that not just on the art side but also on the technical side on the optimization side how heavy is it to run something like that there's Network issues now where somebody goes across like I don't want to talk about that too much because that's just explaining some of the issues we have to work through but it speaks to do we do we as a company providing for the backers and fans and
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players wait for all that to come out so we can roll it out as one big thing or do we get some easy wins out of the way and say you know what this isn't the final that we want it to be but it's enough that we can start fulfilling and playing also learning for ourselves like if they were to roll out the final iteration maybe there would be a lot of problems we could catch early on so releasing those early is better and that this is in line with a lot of what Chris was saying last week with our alpha 3.2 reprieve for reprioritization that we're doing with the featured server nothing it's it's it's you sometimes you can get a little too tunnel focused on new features new features new features new features at the expense of the current gameplay experience so so a lot of what we're doing right now is taking kind of a kind of a step not a step back or maybe a step to the side and and doing
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some additional work on the current gameplay experience and one of those easy things I shouldn't say easy but one that one of the neat things that we can do to make the current experience more enjoyable is something like this character customizer is this be want this be zero one yet you know version just so we're not all looking at the same cue balls okay you get a chance to customize a little bit yeah and what if what advantages does that give to us is is this just something that you know a bone that we throw to the backers or is there some advantage to us we get by having this be definitely an advantage in terms of seeing some problems early that we solve now like the next scene this kind of happened when we went over this a little bit the interviews but the next scene problem while we could have solved it later finding it now allowed us to then solve problems on the female as well and then the techniques to solve that will
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be carried over and there already you know we now we know what to do so going forward when we have more assets more aliens maybe we know how to solve this problem even like also so good I was because it's a lot easier to like fix problems on the base level instead when we release the full product and stuff we're going to be like I don't know where to put things I don't know what's causing this issue but when we start off with a small package you can start focusing on those bases and then we just stack on top of it so it's like a smoother transition yeah for the final product yes building blocks it's building blocks for a lot of things everything from items to how the items interplay making sure that you're seeing other people's characters in the same way that you're seeing your own you know we're looking at things like icons looking at UI so it's building not just on like getting
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that small thing but it's a bigger size and the entitlement tech to a lot of other way which is really nice distance there's a lot of things that doing that on the small side was much much better yes so so this little B the B 0 1 you know implementation actually has a lot of advantages to our to our saw in the backend yeah so it's not just a hard thing at all yeah I had a question from the live chat the character customizer doesn't allow us to be bald yeah are we so tired of bald forever no no you have to have hair well we have will we eventually allow our play yeah yeah we will actually as an easter egg to there is a certain combination of things you can put on currently that will eventually make you old oh good luck finding it oh wow oh they're right around the corner there's your Easter going yeah
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everybody I just want a clan of people just bald all the bodies it's like in a circle it's like going back to the thread will there be the ability to wear clothing over a flight suit or light armor when carrying only a sign on basically like there were they want to do here's put a duster over like it light lightens the armor right now no because of the way that the system is set up like the way that a kind of hierarchy of where items live we could potentially build one that's specifically for armor but it would be difficult to transition at states it'd be so big yeah yeah maybe maybe in an ultra-light classification of armistice yeah it depends on what the
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base intended to fit under stuff like that yeah I think we would we could potentially find a way to make it work on certain sizes so you're saying light armor of a no medium well under suits maybe because we have to Adam super suit probably brings options you pretty easily it's just the heavy armor to shake weakened heart like like like like mithril t-shirt there you go they've got armor anything but it is something I mean I think a lot of people want that we're just trying to figure out how to do it how to do like a loyal is the rule of cool things how do we do those things without sacrificing having to make a ton of assets yeah we work to support it I mean also just like I understand a duster on top of the arm or thing it it looks cool in our heads but then when we're making an MMO we have to make sure that duster fits on all the armors and
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that category that's where that's when things start to yeah it's a little bit daunting in your class and Star Wars The Old Republic that's yes I I find that that pushed that aesthetic very far but it matches a great look I love the look imagine if we have to make a duster for every single SL MC heavy just one oh my god I don't want to talk about a general question here curious what your answer is going to be what is the most interesting concept that you're working on at the moment that you can actually tell us about the authority on that unit was interesting to you that mmm I remember that this is the
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talkie show so we're doing it so it's okay to say fun things some things I've been working on the Titan suit yeah so we I did spend time working on the Titan suit the movement of the wire months the abilities what it can do what it can't I think you've been working on some very cool stuff for our favorite adversarial alien race oh I can't I can't - so I have been working a lot about a lot about a lot on the vanduul just different variants of it with the cultures of the vanduul we all know generally what they look like but what are they kind of what the culture is fleshing it out a lot more yeah you know and with concepts you know as any subscriber if your subscriber you can go
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to your subscriber vaults and you can see a variety of concepts for a lot of things for different ships and whatnot they don't actually ever make it into the game a lot of a big part of the concept in phase is not just fine they're things you do want it's discovering the things that you don't want yeah so you know one of the things of the stuff I'll go by I'll go by Jeremiah's desk and I'll say this so that if we get in trouble it's on me okay yeah I see them working on a fat vandal you know you know again there's no guarantee it's gonna make it again it's an exploration and I always thought like wow that's a yeah it's just that you never think about it I've been living with vandal for over three years now and I never once considered a fat vandal mm-hmm sometimes when you're going through the concept and ideation process knows are way more important yeses you know because it pushes you in that direction yeah sometimes it chris is an
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incredibly visual person so sometimes you know he needs to see something before he knows he doesn't want so that's my experience on this and then this happening sometimes we have to show them the thing before he goes no we don't want that I mean for concept what I like to view it like it's not just hey make this suit and I just make one suit and I like to cast a wide net come up with I normally do like I think this is what Josh wants or this is what Chris wants and then I tweak a little bit further and then I go toward crazytown normal the third or fourth iteration of Islam like what about this crazy blog like looking thing right and then sometimes Josh and Chris like that's the ones like oh really okay but but like I like to cast a general net so that Josh and
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Chris would have like multiple options and if they like one idea of it like you know that's a really cool idea and they'll flush it out even further so I my job is percent options so that's why the if for everybody in Twitter that going sick vanduul confirmed know what about you Gage and are you don't work in concept but clearly and they just won't accept my designs no you did concept the big especially for the things that I'm working on it's sort of on the back burner but the cow creature from Hurston it's not our priority but I like I like to work on that with a branch and that's I was funny cuz it's just like jiggly and full eggs and stuff it's not it's not pleasant to look at yeah he's talking about if you if you want to go
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back and check out our citizencon presentation where we were we went down to the surface of Hurston i was show two creatures one that everybody else you know always shows the the really cool kind of floating cycle a lot because I smoke pot but there was also this giant multi Oh cow creature thing raising grazing creature that the hardest room I just remember going by yeah Shane's desk you know there were a couple days of seating or kind of seen work on it and then he put it in Skype that one day people were sad people were a little savage to him but I thought it was you you want to see that kind of variety and ultimately it made that it made the demo myself oh of course you can look forward to more of Hurston according to our
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roadmap later this year mm-hm let's see what else do we got from the thing somebody asked now this was a question from the thread it's actually not appropriate for this group but I'm gonna address I happen to know the answer one of the questions was voted up was what is the status to face over IP I can tell you that face over IP is it as a technology is done it's ready it's ready it's ready to be implemented it just has dependencies that it has to wait on there are UI dependencies there's no front-end or for actually using it if you saw any of our buns or if you were at citizencon last year and you got to see the demo it's a lot of console commands and everything to get it going so you guys got a design an entire front end for it it sits on top of the voice over IP system which still it was just still being worked on and not online so
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like that so it's got a number of dependencies but itself as a techie it's ready to go it's just it's just waiting for its time waiting for its moment to shine once again all right next question from the live chat you knew this was gonna you know this was going to come status on the female model the feel a lot of itself is done a lot of the assets and clothes for it already done we're just kind of waiting to make sure that the everything else that is dependent on it like you're saying dependencies is a big part of it so you're talking about animations and things like that and AI and all these other areas that the female is gonna have to be that's a big part of it so we're on the character general teams dive what we're trying to make sure is that when everything else
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is ready to go that we can have as much one-to-one that the male lab so yeah you know if you're buying shirts you're buying clothes you're buying armor whatever it is that you're getting that you have the same equivalent for the female so we're so I like cage was saying earlier problems that we've figured out on the customizer for the male will now we're obviously going to start addressing for the female and we already have but yeah we're just kind of gearing up and making sure that we're ready when it's released that it's got a full suite of stuff of it another question from the live chat how do you work around the single body type constraint with it when designing characters don't answer that one where some to drink hmm so single body type well I mean
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silhouettes is the biggest thing for me right so you can do a lot of crazy things with just different kinds of silhouettes but like we also have to consider movement of the anatomy of the body so we can't just go crazy right so it's a lot of research and try to stay try to stay away from generic reference like body armor right be like oh I'm just gonna do another body and like getting references from outside sources like maybe nature or just some weird pattern that you've seen as an inspiration to come up with new shapes but for me it's silhouette is the the biggest driving force for me to come up with different ideas on the human body and you can come up with some crazy crazy things and then normally when I do something crazy I walk over to gauges
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deaths and apologize it's gonna shake my head and be like I'm sorry you got it you got to rig this man you got to skin it so uh you already understanding you correctly what you're talking about is is designing armors and clothes that change the silhouette of the same static character in order in order to provide the appearance of variety right yeah all right the armors do a great job of that especially when you go from like light but actually let's just say the base male to light medium then you go to heavy like there's for some intense shape changes then still work pretty well yeah very interesting and how frustrating is that for you yes I might take some time but if it's like super simple gauges like that's alright you know and the thing I really appreciate about gauge is because you rig the heavy marine yeah that thing first make any
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sense the first one and I remember one in the acid was being passed opinions engage home but this is what this is with almost all sci-fi things like if you really think about it like yeah no way it's all metal moving around how does it happen dance yeah science future science dude yes yeah yeah yeah good thing but I'm the thing I love about gage is he's always like a go-getter type of like personality where he's like alright I'll try and it really goes at it and he's yeah he's done a lot of successful skins and and rigs for himself and they've worked well together with me on that very well so like usually I'll go back a little bit feedback and be like okay this we can kind of make this work we just need a little push right here get some overlapping in the middle and then it all comes together and honestly it's
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a great learning experience even like when you work on things that shouldn't work that's when you kind of learn the most I think it make them work and you figure out ways to me that it works and you make it look good that's great yeah going back to the thread here what is the status of the DNA blending of characters that allows infinite variations of how we look at me I don't know if it's infinite infinite so actually I wanted to own a mansion on - it's like infinite in the amount that there's only a certain amount of decimals you can break down for blending between characters so a lot but what this question is referring to is we have we have demonstrated on on a TV and I think one of our presentations we shall not the DNA blending what we want to do is we want to be able to you know
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through the sliders and really be able to take many of our face rates and kind of morph between those that is still ultimately the goal absolutely that tech is already in and we're just kind of experimenting with a lot of different ways to implement it how we want to implement it even you know for example on the one problem that we encountered with DNA or using something like DNA is all the different kind of face shapes you can make and not meaning like open and closed face shapes but like everybody has their own head shape i'm throwin skull shape so now when we're talking about things like in the creator or in your PMA like putting on different helmets different heads don't fit in different helmet sizes or if you put one hair on top of a head it might look good and other ones it will clip through a look glasses wasn't interesting one last they started the more yeah days so II actually did a
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solution to solve it yeah yeah we we have we have we have a segment on the solution coming to yeah okay you want visual spend some time trying to hide information visuals on the fixes it's really cool the thing that they have done to fix that allows the DNA all the head shaping and allows the helmets to kind of low-key adjust to the different head shapes and allows me like like snow goggles to you know not that they've done dead come to fix that you want the visuals I was putting the face jiggles when you when you swap the faces and stuff jiggle like when you change the face I've noticed if you look carefully like you make a bigger jaw and the lower jaw [Music] alright I was alright I liked it I think
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when you change the faces they should have that the Martin Short Robert Picardo effect from interspace like like that animation should go every time you change faces there's a great I can't wait for someone I'm gonna write up the blue sheet on this it's just when you see that you're come you know inner space DNA is going great it just says encountered a lot of problems and it causes you to CPU costume develop vision is the biggest thing probably a moment you don't want so people do yeah alright from the life i'm from life threat here
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for someone studying 3d animation and modeling for so much studying 3d animation and modeling okay so I got iti english-as-a-second-language here is 3d animation of modeling experience necessary for a 3d character artist to have enough Anatomy skills or just focus on clothing depending on the care basically they want to know what what kind of prerequisites to be a 3d character artists do you look gotcha I think the question I would break into two sections first if you want to be a character artist and second if you want to be a concept artist concept artist is mostly feely mostly dealing in just the visual sides I'm just gonna be doing stuff like you know potentially a 2d painting so you're not going to know need to know necessarily how it moves you're not gonna have to know as much on the 3d side obviously if you do it's really
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helpful like Jeremiah does and you can get into 3d and blocks up fat and that's great so you don't create nightmares for him yes exactly and then if you want to be a character artist you absolutely need to know you know modeling stuff you knowing anything about animation is gonna be helpful because that's basically the next one of the next teams that your work will go to so yeah I think those are depending on the job that they're shooting forward and the requests are or requirements are different cuz there is a way to model it very responsibly like adding a lot of polygons and areas where it doesn't need that much like for instance like you would need a lot of Geo right here because a lot of movement right here but then putting a lot of Geo maybe let's say for here what is not as much movement that would be very responsible so knowing where to place
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polygons is very important that's an important skill in every aspect yeah the there was a version of the freelancer not the version oh no I know we're talking about it's there but remember the one that had all the tiny little every screw yeah nine hundred polygons every single rivet in the freelancer was nine hundred follies it had a bigger resource footprint than the Idris well that freelancer did so yeah so the ships have come a long way yes we were learning those more of like an alpha ship is just a short in the process of what happened there literally the concept art was taken and put it into the game heard you know yeah I'll put alpha purposes so yeah so yeah when you wonder why you know the hangars used to allow used to just stretch and allow all these ships and we'd have people
00:40:28
with with I have six freelancers and I never just go did you know yeah you had a door that was 1 million Polly's before like well the doors a long time ago 1 million policy Russia game and there was like four doors there's four doors in the level Wow so four million Polly's actually so the break time what we're talking about - Jeremiah was mentioning with polygons and geometry I'd be called topology so clean topology is very important for a character artist when working with animators yeah but less so for a concert artist I don't give a crap I just because for me at the end of the day's make a pretty picture good just like you like it like yeah alright and make it another question live chat here any
00:41:21
plans to have a state of cleanliness visible on the character so if you're in dirty environment you'll get dirty until you you know wash that for take a shower yes we actually already have that we have two phases of that we actually have something called dirt and player so dirt is exactly what they're talking about so that means when you go into dirty environments things get dirty make sense you there will be at some point some type of game mechanic where you can go wash that off and then where is the use over time that affects the look of something it can also from a design side affect the stats so maybe if it's a weapon it might become less efficient or my jam if it's armored it might you know lose its stats or it might come not usable anymore so you have to be at both of those here's a pretty general question from
00:42:10
the thread how are you progressing in bringing alien characters into the game now I'm gonna say that this sounds a little bit like one of those 80s sitcom questions where you worry you rephrase the question a certain way so that somebody will accidentally confirm something try to get its arms that wouldn't woody eight playable aliens in the game you're not ready to sit here and confirm but as far as squadron 42 when those brings us how are you progressing just it's a very general question but good we have been hang on like as a sitcom we show the Xian and you still can continue on those and lot we're also working on like Jeremiah was talking about the vanduul so we're working on hello quite it won't be quiet
00:42:59
hello so we're still having a band or what else are we working on that worth today it'll be Angeles especially should have Mike on the air working on creatures nautical stuff yeah egg creatures and cheese steak Gillen's creature I was thinking of more uh those pigs just gonna hide hey what cool how much uh space month what worms what yeah you see space man all right everybody that's it for worse than other rebels Giada thank you so much for spending time with us today mmm now it's just gonna be an open panel between Gage and Jeremiah and myself
00:43:48
we're actually gonna play some quick Dungeons and Dragons oh well game characters right yeah that was good come on let's play yes it was they burned down a tavern wasn't Shane's fault those problems but Noah's actually out it was actually uh James Q and Ellen really Jacob yeah I was like you meet two two hooded figures in a busy tavern and they're trying to get information and l1 wasn't getting any information so he hit him in the face I loved his method so next question yet from the live chat this comes up quite a bit what do we think about the ability to allow players to dye the armor it's a diet change dad Lisa died in the armor look there
00:44:38
I Daniel yeah yeah absolutely um well there's two trains of thought right you can either say you just like it in real life if you go to a store they're good you're only gonna be able to buy what they have available right so yeah in a way that's like dying because you can say I'm gonna pick from whatever color that I want it to be it's available or maybe I need to go somewhere else to get it right and the other option is I bought something and I want to paint it or change it a different color mm-hmm which comes a little bit more complicated because you're talking about customization which essentially of that piece which means they're gonna be changing the shader itself which means you need a front-end of UI and all that fun stuff or you can have them get the option which is similar to what other games have done which is it would choose a different color variant that already
00:45:28
exists like like a dye pack you buy a dye pack and yes and it's just blue and black yes it does rather than you going around and flying somewhere buying the blue black one and when you have the orange one you can just purchase it at somewhere else so color variants in general we're pushing for a lot because we want to add a lot of variation in the existing assets that we already have so all the clothes all the armor like the gold executive make the gold yeah exactly that kind of stuff is really fun there's actually I think there's one tea variations of that soon I think we've only released all the our site Explorer they have the Explorer suit a deck cruise - there's a bunch there's like 20 of each I think the gold one cuz it makes me look like captain power every time I hear you talk about it you always say captain power power yeah we're definitely working on that and I think
00:46:18
it's more the design side out how do you how does the player choose it yeah so basically it's definitely just to add on there you know so that everybody understands it's definitely something that we're interested in but it's not something that's on the schedule it's not some that you're going to see in 2018 it's not something that we know precisely how we want to implement if we want copy as anybody who's ever played and know before you know cosmetic features are also one of the ways that can monetize its episode so there's a lot of options that have to be explored there sure but so so not committing ourselves to any path one way or the other but it is definitely something that I that I think we can all agree would have had greater variety to the purse isn't it as Muslim in there too it's really just implementation is kind of like how what we're figuring out yeah and actually what might be interesting
00:47:06
to people too is a on top of just having the colors metrics that design and wants to get from players using those colors is something we're still thinking about like if they let's say with all the people in the verse how many people actually wanted the red version how many people wanted the gold version right and then they can use those metrics to then improve player experience I mean as an avid MMO player myself he third the meme that's going around so go out for a couple years now and game is always glamour that's for all I'm a mouse it's always glamour you beat the raid boss but like that but I want to look pretty right so like the raid armor yeah so there's that I want the stats on that but I wanted to look like exactly yeah thanks how long can it take to design an armor close from sketches to approval from sketches to approval it depends on
00:47:57
what that asset actually is some I've done some which have taken maybe two or three days I've done one extra squadron character in eight hours before they're like we needed now so but it was a very simple character it wasn't something complex but then some concepts or some costumes or some armor needs some intricacy right so there's moving parts or like there's maybe there's a special feature of this some specific part of the suit so I've the longest I probably done was maybe a month I spend like a month fleshing out every angle of the character so really depends on what the asset is but it can range from a couple hours to guess a
00:48:46
month I would say it depends on the level of complexity that character requires plus it's a creative endeavor right so you know sometimes I and I see this more on the ship side than other characters I have done more involve of the ships but sometimes you you're just lucky enough to get that right mix of concept and artists and and you're able to hit it right away right out there getting really and lightnings it's like lightning stroke and yeah that's it no that one and sometimes you chase this thing oh yeah we a lot of them and weeks and sometimes you know that you know there's a ship that you know we thought we were gonna have ready in April it's like nope you know push it all the way back to November whatever because it's this has just been a more difficult birth and not because it was super complex really not because it was even particularly different than anything
00:49:34
else it's just for whatever reason those intangibles are part of any creative endeavor weren't quite lining up yeah it wasn't quite there yet and sometimes that's just part of the approval process of saying is this good like what do we like this yeah but could it be better yeah imagine our big full of further I mentioned it's a big part of your job as the art director sure is figuring out what those intangibles for each thing is you think how to communicate it's finding the you know one thing that you hear a lot with art is like art is never finished right so it's basically your time runs out or abandoned Shore but it's kind of choosing where that line is is it worth spending an extra week two weeks month just on the concept which is gonna make it maybe cooler - you have one percent
00:50:23
cooler ten percent cooler 100 percent cool or whatever or you know and that goes all the way through where it's with the art itself with everything that until it gets in game - all those colors - all the colors look cool and then do we release it or do we it's kind of finding that balance on a mission one of the questions from the thread that was voted up on very simply States tattoos yeah I mean I think I would love to have tattoos I have tattoos so I want to put tattoos in the game that's a biased sure but it's the only reason yeah I think it's like it's a customization thing a lot of people want and think it's something I know that we've been talking about we put them on some of our other characters like we did a test recently to have my hand drawing all the tattoos right there was a drawing all those tattoos yeah like
00:51:13
sadaqa for the squadron for squadron that we showed on the Christmas special Heather really good you didn't notice - no those were some hands wrong - light of those were hand Ron mmm like some of them I actually drew on a piece of paper the end the nice animals and I scanned him in and then Michael was like you know I can make a brush that does that same tag header at the looks like a pin yeah and I was like where were you two days ago so but every single piece on on the sleeve the tattoo none of that was photos or whatever it was legit hand-drawn yeah so a lot of its gonna be when we get when we get to that creating them what do they look like where can you put them what's the UI for that do we limit you from changing them once you
00:52:02
create that would be an interesting restriction on character kiss tonight everything's fine take it to tattoos no you can't change it it's like are you sure exactly or you have to live with this did you ask yeah there's a lot that goes into that and it also goes into like more customization questions like in the future so we're talking about at that point basically doing decals on limbs so is there potential for doing damage decals so are we talking about like more designee stuff on that we've talked Sam I recently about you know other things that could happen with damage maybe
00:52:50
we're talking in the future about cybernetics we're talking about replacements we're talking about fully modifying the character's body which goes into deeper stuff yes but that's not iteration 0.1 right that's much further down the line okay I sense much refactoring in my future the good thing no question Fred what happened to the helmets with the opening and closing animations that I saw in 2016 we were to spread this around our chat regionally actually they're still there we haven't gotten rid of them we're just for a little while we were just trying to figure out how we would do them there was shifts and the type of attachment or tiny skin or TG yes eg a dot skin and like because for a while they were
00:53:41
static helmets then they became skin tones because they had some parts that would connect to the under suits things like that and those different item attachment types do change the things we can do with them so if it's a dot skin for instance we can attach the mannequin and have like animations playing similar to how weapons work but of course it depends on back then we didn't solidify it because there were specifications that change yeah we did we weren't 100% on what these helmets are gonna do players are interact with them what they need so yeah it's in flux I think I don't want yeah it doesn't there's nothing that stops us except for some time to go in and check out them and animations to ones that already could have on the board or need them or that we want to happen and I think you'll probably see some of that especially on some of the more hero helmets that were wanting to do first quadrant for sure mm-hmm and I think as we get into that where you're gonna see potential for
00:54:30
future but we're gonna play it out in one scenario first mm-hm again we've been avoiding a lot of the questions about the character customizer because again we have a whole feature coming in just a couple weeks on ETV but can we expect to see deeper character customization options such as age is that something you put wrinkles on like old Han versus young ha right I don't know that I think that's definitely more on the design side on the art side it would require the ability to make something aged from one texture and overlaying a texture blending would be which you can texture blend to get that and then end up baking out like a specific texture that saves as that characters texture which is totally possible and it's something I know that we know Chris
00:55:21
has talked about a long time about about aging of characters and stuff like that so it's something that we're shooting towards it's more how do we do it right now if you don't want to do it just have Dave haddock we're gonna add to the Lord that facial moisturizer 914 years no it is just know it just seems legit so I say how you get older you everybody every 60 or so but in his face this is beautiful right yeah you know that's easily fixed by the way I can save you all oh thank you it's definitely some we're thinking about them and how it's more not that we are thinking about how yeah the only part that scares me is not like how like how where you start and where you end it's the transition from one asset to another that scares me it's just like what is the how do we blend the two assets cuz we should do like we could
00:56:08
literally like you walk past the wall and also and we just swap assets like that's doable but I shake right but then we would want the whole transitioning as you're getting older right so like what does that look like and that's the part that's scary for me but because they were willing to the hair you're like saying yeah yeah yeah hair like the end of the beginning are easy it's between that's exactly and actually there was some tech that was I don't go too deep into this but on the DNA side there was a discovery that okay we can do something similar to that like growing hair but so technically possible are visually appealing that's where it's always a matter of quality control yeah yeah hi gentlemen well that's it you made it Hey getting to end congratulations thank you anything yes you want to say anything you want the community to know before we let you go mmm-hmm no I don't think so
00:56:59
thanks to all the backers and subscribers obviously and thanks for having us on thanks Jerry well I can't actually a throw to the next segment because JJ is here in the shot Addie and mr. potato man assigned to Jeremiah it's like guys we're gonna take a short break we got a neat video for you to watch and then we'll be right back with the wrap-up so stay tuned we'll see in a minute I'm so sorry sup guys utha here and today we're going to have a quick behind-the-scenes look at the creation of a star citizen themed parallax enhanced motion graphic quite quite a mouthful I know but in short it means making an animation out of a still image via layering it's quite simple as you'll see me do here in the background
00:57:47
we start off with our favourite piece of star citizen concept art I myself am quite fond of the banner so it's going to be the banner home world in this case we slice it up into four different layers using our image editing software after removing the foreground backgrounds detail layers and finally sky box we're done with preparing the image and can move on into animation keep in mind though that when slicing up a still image you'll of course leave holes everywhere that will need some fixing for a smooth panning animation I usually simply draw a slash recreates any part of the layer that ends up missing but you can do all sorts of techniques moving swiftly on here you'll see me make use of video editing software to put the layers together when animating a motion graphic you'll most
00:58:36
likely make use of scaling positioning warp and corner pin tools to get all of your images to behave as desired to spruce things up light CGI elements were added as well among whom were lens flares that's why we're going to channel our inner JJ Abrams as they make a great trustor effects but also cover a wide range of uses by adding glow to any area that needs extra lighting attention fractal noise was also used to get a bit more separation by generating a dynamic smoke like texture in between the four and background layers making them blend together a bit better and finally some particles were generated to give the thruster effects a bit more life and that marks the completion of our animation I hope you all found it interesting to see the process behind what you can do with just a flat piece
00:59:23
of concept art in terms of animation and I hope to see you all in the first Cheers no tracks animations by Luther Riley's not just the star citizen composer guy also it it occurs to me that it would probably save them a lot of time if I just gave them the original PSD s that are already layered but you know well I make it easy for anybody write that about that about wraps up this month subscriber edition reverse the worst
01:00:10
live I hope you enjoyed it guys a special thanks to Josh Herrmann Jeremiah Lee engaged home and for appearing on the show this week now some housekeeping before we let you go this is the last weekend for the aegis Vulcan concert promotion that ends on Monday also the alpha 3.1 file ships promotion is still underway it is your it is your chance to get either the monstrous reclaimer the swift razor the rugged Terrapin the sporty cyclone all before they go back into hiding on Monday now Monday is also another episode of calling all Deb's where we discuss such topics as multi-crew gameplay cockpit customizations and ships and the future of radar scanning ship to ship docking and the return of blind Quantum Jumping and how it plays into the exploration of the universe so from calling all devs to brown the burst reverse the verse - calling all Deb's to
01:00:59
around the verse to reverse the verse - calling all Deb's you guys are worth it so for reverse the first live I'm content manager for global video production Jared Huckaby and I sleep a lot on the weekends I'm hungry - all right hi everybody you thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen a squadron 42 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.uvu.edu/library

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