Star Citizen Live Gamedev: Mood Lighting

16 July 202101:00:581,634 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:02
Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Star Citizen Live Game Dev. What do we call it? Mood lighting. Mood lighting. I'm your host Jared Huckaby and if you've never seen Star Citizen Live before, well it's where it's what well it's where we take about an hour out of the end of our week and we hang out with some of our developers here at Cloud Imperium Games. We answer questions, we chat about the best version of hello and sometimes we dip into the workflow and we see a little bit about how they work. That's what we're doing this week in our game dev show. Let me bring our guests in here. We have got Chris and Zach from the CIG lighting team. How are you guys doing? Hello. Doing well. How about yourself? It's I'm I'm back. I had a week of
00:00:49
vacation last week and it was delightful. I actually forgot about work for at least several hours over the course of a week. It was it was wonderful. It was delightful but I'm back and we're here at work and we are talking lighting today. So before we get into it because every show is somebody's first show and Zach I know this is your first show. Let's take a let's take a minute or two to introduce yourselves to the community. Tell them who you are, what you do. Chris we'll start with you. Um who are you? What do you do? And what's your favorite sandwich? Oh. I'm Chris Campbell. I'm the the lead lighting artist for the PU. Uh and my favorite sandwich I mean I'm going to be controversial and say I don't really like sandwiches that much. But I mean
00:01:36
I don't know. Uh a BLT is pretty good. How do you not like sandwiches? I well I guess it depends on how you define a sandwich and we could get into that but I was going to say the same thing. Not a sandwich fan so maybe it's something to do with being a lighting artist and hating sandwiches. Um but I'm Zach and I'm a junior lighting artist for Star Citizen. And I hate sandwiches. The correct answer is a Monte Cristo, by the way. A Monte Cristo from Club 33 at Disneyland is the correct answer. Um, all right. a Monte Cristo. So, we are you are lighting artists. Um, and what does a lighting artist do? Uh, not necessarily in game development at CIG. What do we do?
00:02:25
Uh, well, I mean, a lighting artist I mean, it's it's fairly self-explanatory. It's in the title, but it's um, it's basically taking the environment that's get that gets made by, you know, the environment artist and level designers and adding lighting to it in a way that represents the art director's visual target for the game. Um, while also keeping in mind things like performance constraints, uh, technical restraints, and also some gameplay considerations like leading the player, making sure that they have good visibility where we want them to have good visibility, that they know where they need to go if it's something like a linear level design or something. Mhm. Yeah. And today on the show we're doing a a game dev stream where we're going to showcase some aspect of your process. What are we doing today?
00:03:13
Yeah, so today we're going to show kind of the process of how we are uh, re-lighting some of the hubs uh, around the PU. Um, you may have noticed in the in Orison, uh, currently on the PTU, we have added um, you know, we've got new hubs there and we've added a button by the door which allows you to you can push it and basically turn down the lights. I hesitate to say turning off the lights because obviously there is still lighting there. Um, but you basically put the hub into a state of like a, you know, a chill night time, uh, either relaxation or sleep kind of, uh, state. Um and so yeah, what we're going to do is show how we do that process um and kind of our thoughts behind
00:04:01
what why we're picking certain moods or or you know, make certain decisions uh while doing that. Um and it's actually it's something that we're doing, you know, right now. So uh this is this is like real-time game dev. Sure. Yeah, as I said, this is actually tasks that you are working on at present in the game. So we're not creating any special work or anything for today. You're actually just you have to do this and I'm like, "Can we watch it for an hour?" And you're like, "Sure." So yeah, so we this this is literally what we're doing this week. All right. So we've got the screen share up. Uh Zach, why don't you take us through it? Yeah, sure. So this is our reason. And this is uh one of the switches that we've used to
00:04:49
I am selecting. Okay, that's it. All right. So thanks everybody. Remember that we'll be back next week with All right. So So explain to me your task. What what what what what do you actually have to do because these things are already lit, obviously. So why are we going back? Why are we revisiting? Yeah, so I mean uh yeah, I mean as you say, we're not we're not reinventing the hubs. We're not like changing them completely. Um but we've always had a a kind of a desire to add more player interactivity um from a a lighting perspective. I mean, you've already got some things that you can interact with in your hubs. Uh and we wanted to add to that uh through lighting. So
00:05:38
um the obvious way to do that is we've already got these uh uh these tools um called light groups, which allow us to basically change the the state uh of a light uh based on you know, whatever kind of logic. Um and you know, traditionally that's mostly been in the the ships, like when you take damage or when you're you're powering up the ship for the first time, there's like a low power state and a a full power state and an emergency state. and we've been, you know, over the over the course of the last year or so introducing some of those elements into locations where we feel it makes sense and where we can get the most bang for a buck. Um and yeah, the next kind of uh obvious thing was to do it in the hubs um where we recently got some some new kind of a uh gameplay entities that allow us to
00:06:27
tie the light group into a a switch uh which is player interactable, so that the player himself or herself can uh can manually change the uh the light state. All right, so so we're going back through all of the existing hubs and adding multiple lighting states. And now you mentioned the ships, the ships have like normal operation and then emergency or low power or whatever. What what lighting states are are we talking about for habitations? Uh I mean, so for the time being for habitations, it's just going to be a a low power state uh and a a full power yeah, we're not we're not adding too much complexity to it at the moment. We just want to get something in um kind of as a a proof of concept uh and
00:07:15
then see where we can expand it, where it makes sense to expand it. Okay, so no no red alerts. No no no no switch they have to No, No, not yet. I mean, maybe in the future you could be cooking something and then the fire alarm goes off and the whole hab changes. What about like a What about like a sexy time entertaining? Well, I mean, you know, some some of these uh low power states are very very sensual. And we're already off track. All right. So, Zach, we've been bouncing through the the hub now for a few minutes. take it away. Where do we start? Yeah, sure. So, um, I guess one of the first things we could show is the lights themselves. And right here, we have a kind of
00:08:04
default state, auxiliary state, emergency state. And so, the first thing we'll do is go through for our kind of default state and set everything the way that we want it. And then, if you're really prepared, in that process, you kind of set some auxiliary values, but normally we don't. as soon as you switch to an auxiliary state, it looks horrible. And so, you have to go back through and tweak all the auxiliary, kind of define like what your low power state is going to be. Um, and there's also ways in which you control how that transition happens. So, if you notice, um, the lights don't just kind of immediately switch from the default state to the auxiliary state. There's a bit of a a transition. And uh, I did this one, so it's not the most interesting. But, there are some others
00:08:51
where uh, different lights kind of transition at different times and you get a bit of like a different lights across the room. This is the new Bob hub. And we can have a look at the Louisville one as well. Bit of a slow one with some stuff that like flickers on towards the end. Yeah, this one's less dramatic. like an air purifier in here. Yeah. Crap floating in the air. Now, this transition, uh, you're continuously transitioning between two modes. You're you're flying around in free fly, and then you're transitioning into another mode to do this. What is this mode that you're
00:09:39
transitioning into? Um we have a little hot key control G that kind of spawns your character and just gives you um the kind of interactions that you'd expect to have as a character. So, it's just a quick way to kind of verify um how this interaction feels and how these characters are kind of receiving light in these spaces. There are other ways that we can like look at that. Um we have a client that we can run where you can actually have your own kind of version of a a server on your PC and do the whole process, spawning a HAB, move around, you know, visit in the entire kind of PU, but this is just a quick way of doing it in the editor for these smaller spaces. Got you. And it looks a bit nauseating when you go whoa. Yeah, that's what I was
00:10:27
as I we've seen it a couple of times, and I'm like, we should probably explain what that thing is that we're seeing over and over and over again. Yeah, I'm not sure what that nau- nauciousness is when you jump into game mode. Uh I think it's some some bug which will no doubt be fixed, but uh yeah, I mean, as Zach was saying, like the the the benefit of uh of being able to jump in game like this is that you know, we we're trying to make the environment look good, uh but you know, in the actual game itself, there's a lot of characters running around, and so we also have to verify that the player character looks good, uh and you know, by doing that, we also make sure that any other NPCs or AI can theoretically also, you know, look their best under the same lighting circumstances. So, that's something we always always keeping in mind when we light
00:11:13
environments. Well, so we can take a look at a few more if that's interesting, or we can just kind of like jump in and and have a crack at one. Yeah, well, let's let's jump in and and see what it is what your task is, what what you're actually trying to do here. We we we we've all we've seen these these hubs before. Uh so this is pretty new. This is Area 18 and just this week I've done kind of auxiliary setup for this hub. And we thought today we'd do kind of a a completely different alternate state alternate universe what Area 18 hubs could have looked like just to show you kind of the impact that the lighting can have
00:12:01
and then this is our neon kind of downtown inspired Area 18. Um we can See See, we're halfway to the sexy time lighting I was talking about. Exactly. Cool. So we're going to do an alternate state for this one. That's the plan. And show a little bit of that process. And it sounds like we're going to make it sexy time. By the sounds of it. It's It's It's It's It's do a shag pad. Yeah. All right, you got it. So the first step is kind of defining like what lights are we going to keep on, what lights are we going to turn off, and I can also show you the horrifying thing that we're faced with before we've set up any auxiliary Where everything's just default values.
00:12:52
So is this every light in the room just turned to 100? It's just one uh and white. Every light turned to one and everything white. Yeah, that that's kind of the the starting point by default. Interesting. You can see that here. And Chris, I don't know what you normally do, but my lazy method is to kind of select most of them and turn them off in the auxiliary state and then bring back the ones that I like. I think that's usually the the easiest way. Uh I think it's easier to start from black than it is from this horrible white nightmare that we find ourselves in. So, now we should
00:13:55
Well, everything except these cube maps. Which I think you went over last in your last kind of lighting stream, but they're essentially uh the kind of ambient lighting solution. They take a little snapshot on all six sides of the lighting in the space and reproject it out. So, instead of just having complete darkness in the areas that aren't being hit by direct lighting, you get a bit of ambient lighting and the correct kind of reflections that should be there as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think we've lost a host. No, I am. That's all right. We'll We'll just go through it. I'm changing I was changing my lighting to match your sexy time lighting. Oh, hell yeah.
00:14:42
you go. Nice. I got I got the same look. Same Same place. Well, so I think if we're going sexy time, we should probably keep all these pink ones cuz that's what's giving us that that vibe. So, we can either go for the same values that we have in the default state. So, the other lights will kind of fade out around them and these ones will stay consistent. So, we can really start with the pink lighting and then add on top of it. So, what you just selected above of lights. in for these lights here, we have like a
00:15:30
couple of different light types because they're longer strip lights. I'm using these ones that are in the engine. They're called planar. And they represent like kind of rectangle of light and it emits out from there. And then I also have these little lights here which are linked to these fixtures that control the glow. So that controls the brightness of the glow. and the color of the glow. So I'm just grabbing all of those and copying over the values that they have um in the default state to the auxiliary state so they're the same between both. Just riveting. We need the lighting team to go over to
00:16:17
Jared's apartment. I'm not in my I'm in I'm in the studio. The the the I'm in I'm in the studio. This is the LA studio. I'm back in the office. Yeah, it's kind of ironic like we spend so much time lighting these like 3D environments, but the lighting in my apartment is very uninspiring by comparison. Forgot to make them pink. Classic. We need to decide what we're going to do about these sexy horizon bulbs as well that I've brought in.
00:17:07
We can keep them blue or make them pink. I want you to chip in, Jared, and give a bit of a stand-in for our art director. Sure. we'll put the question to the chat. What do you what do you want me to do? What's what what should the um the alternate color be? So, we are looks like our primary like key light color is going to be this pink. That's going to define like the overall mood for the for the room. And then we've got these um these accent lights up in the ceiling and spotlights and stuff. And we need a we need a color for that that's going to work. well, it can't be pink. The other ones are already pink, people. You can't just put pink and pink and pink and pink. Uh let's go You'll get a very pink room, but
00:17:54
Yeah, let's go with purple. Purple? Like a deeper a deeper kind of purple. Yeah, that could work. So, now that you're you're working in the alternate light state, uh Zach, if you just uh mention how how you do that. Like in game, we can obviously flick the switch. Um but then as soon as you jump out of game, it goes back to the default light Yeah. So, oh god. Um the way that that kind of switch works is that it's hooked up to one of these light groups,
00:18:42
uh which is something that in theory should be in every kind of what we call object container or area like a hub or a a hub floor. Um and within this, you can set how you want. So, for example, like Horizon, we have the day night states where it switches from uh we switch on all those kind of lights in the garden on the trees at night time. So, one of the things we can do from this light group is set to be affected by day night and set which of those states auxiliary default or emergency we want to switch to. And then the engine when the kind of sun reaches about the horizon level on a planet, it will switch between them. And so I'm just going to manually in here switching between these states so I can see whilst I'm working what we're going to have. And then once
00:19:32
we've established those two different states is when we'll probably go back and do the transition and how those lights are going to kind of flick on or fade off. And that's the tricky bit. Uh so Jared, hopefully you can answer my question. How long do we expect 3.14 to go live? When it's ready. The answer to that question is always the same, Pedro. When we think it's ready. Oh crap, we wanted purple not blue. I'm doing blue.
00:20:19
let's let's make it a a little bit more There we go. Oof. Is that too pink? I yeah, I think what is pur- purple somewhere like 270 on the hue spectrum I think I think. Yeah, somewhere in there maybe. That's quite a pinky purple. Yeah, I think it's because of the the glow on the actual bulb itself. It's like obviously as something gets brighter as we put more light into it, the you know, the brighter the glow is
00:21:05
and the more it turns towards like a white uh and sometimes that can be they can make it difficult to like to pick an exact color. Like usually if you've got like a concept art piece, uh the concept artist can always make it, you know, exactly the color they want just by picking, you know, a brush color and that's what they paint. Color is always that into 3D takes a little a little bit more finesse. Color is always an a an annoying conversation because in in video, you know, we use RGB, red, blue, green. Uh uh uh zero a zero value is black. You know, the absence of color is black and the addition of all colors is how you get white. But in print, they use, you know, CYMK where it's the exact opposite where the absence of color is white and the
00:21:54
addition of all colors is black. And it's it's always just it's one of those, you know, weird uh you know, uh Mark Skeleton deep thoughts thing where you're like like how how is one the absence of color? How is white the absence of color in one and black is the absence of color in another? And then do you have these two polar opposite systems existing within them? then how do they both manage to be crayons? If if if if if if if if in either situation one is the absence of color, how do they both manage to be crayons and both be counted as a color? And then what's transparent? Where does transparent fit into all that? And then you figure out they can make a transparent crayon too. They have those little clear wax crayons that they use for like Easter egg coloring kits. So at that at that point, you just need sit down and take a break.
00:22:42
back. Yeah. Ah. Shout out to Mark Skeleton if you're out there. Deep thoughts. No, it it wasn't called deep thoughts, it was called hazy thoughts, wasn't it? I don't remember. So, somebody somebody in the chat will remember. I'm I'm throwing back to like 2013 stuff Go ahead. one of the other things we always try and think about is like these walkways or kind of make what what is it that we call them? I forget. Critical path. Critical path. Yeah.
00:23:30
Yeah, that's right. So, like any kind of doorways or spaces that you're supposed to interact with, you kind of need to see what you're doing and where you're going. Do I not have a doorway? Yeah, so if even though it's like a an MMO with like so much space uh that you can go around to, there's always you know, especially in locations like this, areas where we know that the player is always going to be going through, always transitioning through. Um and that's where we we generally focus either the most the highest quality of the lighting, so we we spend more we we pay for shadows if that's what needs to be there to make it look good, put more area lights there, that kind of stuff. I like that phrase, pay for shadows. Uh talk talk to me about paying for shadows.
00:24:18
Well, everything has a cost. There's no no free lunch in the in So, um yeah, I mean like the I mean I I I don't think I even can get too technical into it cuz I don't really know, but um uh like every light has the option of of being a shadow casting light. Um and uh you know, in computer graphics like shadows are generally extremely expensive, uh one of the more expensive parts of rendering uh a scene. and and so whenever we use shadows, uh we have to keep in mind um how many shadows we're using. The more that you have on the scene at at one given time, it can kind of exponentially get more expensive. Um, and uh,
00:25:08
adds adds a cost both to the the GPU in terms of like actually rendering the shadows themselves and then also a cost on the CPU for all the additional draw calls that get introduced by by the CPU trying to calculate uh, you know, how many extra shadows have to be um, computed. Right, the the lighting budget if you would. Yeah, exactly. The overall lighting budget. E- every every location doesn't have the same budget though. But I I I like how do you How do How do you Do you determine that? Is that something the art director determines? How How do you How do you determine like what your budget is for a particular location? Um, I mean like we we generally get kind of guidelines from the graphics department. Again, mostly because lighting is is
00:25:56
almost purely a a graphics side of the the equation. Um, so the graphics department gives us kind of a set of budgets to stick within and that's, you know, like the the number of overlapping shadows that you can have on screen at any given moment like two shadow casting lights next to each other. how many lights in general make up the the overall scene that you can render on screen at one one moment. Um, and stuff like that and so uh, we we basically just have to stay within those those boundaries and then we also we have to allow for a certain amount of overhead for unknown light sources basically. Right. Ghost sticks, flashlights. Ghost sticks, flashlights, ships, all of these things can
00:26:43
depending on the location can be introduced to the location and then that just adds on top of that that budget. And I imagine the size, shape, layout and everything of the location matters, too, because yeah, it's what you can hide behind a wall. You know, the you know, the the the the the layout of the place, what you can see at any given time will you would determine what can be hidden and unloaded from the you know, from the from the computer. So, it it it's like a a something like an underground facility with a lot of twists and turns and hallways and whatnot. Probably frees you up to do a lot more, but something like Orison, where it's sitting out and open and you can see one end of the city from the other, uh that's got to be a a hell of a challenge.
00:27:30
Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, like these kind of examples, like we we generally love working on hubs and and shops and stuff like that because they're not only they're very self-contained, so you can you can do a lot, but as you said, because they're they're very confined environments within like a culling volume, we can spend a lot more lighting budget you know, really making it look as good as as good as we en- envisage it. Um whereas something like Orison and outdoor environments in general, there's a lot more a lot more variables at play that that always have to be rebalanced. So, you know, when it comes to lighting somewhere like Orison, there's just a constant process of iterating. You know, you make a bunch of changes, those get populated because there's so many different like platforms which are duplicates of each other.
00:28:18
So, if you add one light, you could end up adding 500 lights to the overall scene of Orison. Um and then we have to balance uh using our various optimization methods uh to keep keep our numbers within a certain range. Yeah. Uh Bed Slayer and a couple of the folks in chat have been asking about ray trace lighting. That's actually a question for the uh graphics team. Uh Bed Slayer, it's these are the lighting artists are the ones that use the tools that are provided to them and stuff. And and actually like it it's like to you're asking a question about where whether we'll get better better or different brushes. These are the guys that use the brushes to paint the picture. So, that's really a question for our graphics team. I don't have any answer for you. Yeah, exactly. That wasn't my best analogy, but I think
00:29:06
it worked. Oh, it works. It works. Back to the lighting budget thing the performance cost stuff. Are there are there been are there been moments where you have something and it looks just the way you want it and you're you're like so happy with it like this is perfect and then somebody has to come back to you and be like your your your 50 entities over your budget. It's like you've got you've got to bring it back. And I how how how do you how do you process that? Well, I mean it it it can happen absolutely and it's it's always pretty devastating cuz you know it's like you got to hack away at your baby take off some limbs hope that it still is pretty. but yeah, I mean sometimes that's just
00:29:55
the the cost of things like it it all it all comes down to weighing up like where we want the budgets to go. So, I mean like you know in a small environment like this where there's not so many much VFX for example if we wanted to or if there was a decision made you could push some more of the lighting budget into the in towards the VFX budget cuz they're not using it. I mean the ultimate goal is always to get like a a certain frame rate and everyone every department has their own little budgets to fit within that. Um but if some departments don't exist in a location then yeah, we can we can just kind of creep in there a little bit. Yeah, they they they say that adversity is the mother of of invention. many of you see you know being able to do anything you want is not always a recipe for success.
00:30:44
Uh you know, you know, famously when when George Lucas struggled to make the movies he wanted, you got Star Wars, Empire, Return of the Jedi. And when he had the power and the wealth and the resources to do anything he wanted, we got Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith. So, you know, adversity can be a can be a good uh a lot of times. But Yeah, definitely. How many battles do you have with the VFX team? If I got Mike Snowden in here for a while in here, would he would he would he would he have a bone to pick with you guys? No, I don't think so. I think I'm I'm on good speaking terms with Mike, as far as I know. He He may feel differently. But no, we we work uh like on Horizon as well, for example, we work quite closely with the VFX team on some of the volumetric particles that they were
00:31:31
adding onto the industrial platform. Um there was uh I think there was some improvements to the way that particles are lit um and how they receive light and cast shadows that was added a a little while ago. Um and so there was a bunch of VFX added to the industrial platform. And so we had to work kind of together to make sure that their VFX looks really good and also that we kind of show off, you know, how nicely like the shadows cast through and how that we couldn't really do that before. So, where are we at, Zach? What's been going on? We We've got our kind of like our bulbs in here and nice sexy bulbs and I've done a little bit of work. Yeah, I don't know. Very pink and purple. We've got uh
00:32:19
of course, if this is some sort of love den, then the bed is going to be quite important, so. It would be tricky, wouldn't it? It would be a bit tricky. If If you could quickly model out like a a heart-shaped bed with like a nice leopard print uh cover. I think that would go a long way. Absolutely. Yeah, just a second. a rotating a platform. These um teddy bears, they're not in I saw one in Louisville as well. Are they in some of the older hubs but not in the new ones? It's a good question. I I would come down whoever dressed it. The the teddy bear is a it's a much beloved asset by the environment team. Mhm, understandably. Yeah. Well, the props team at least.
00:33:10
Props team, sorry. Yes. No, the props team is on the environment team. It it's But I I I I'm pretty sure Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's the props team that's been dropping those in there. That's all. So, we could probably I mean, I don't know how much how far you want to take this. We could move on to the stage of There would be a lot further that we would take this and a lot of the kind of detail lightings in the the shelves and cupboards. I haven't done, but that stuff does take quite a lot of time. So, we could uh keep going or we could jump into the the kind of transition phases with these lights. go into the transitions. Let's see that. I I've I've I I I've redone mine and it my mine took way less time than yours did. So, I mean, I don't have a lot of time. was ray traced as well.
00:33:58
it. Yeah, mine's got ray tracing and I don't have a shadow budget, so I don't I mean, I don't want to tell you your job here, Zach, but I mean, it didn't take me much time to do this at all. Bam. Shots fired. Yeah, I'm hurt. Okay, so the transitions is where it gets a tiny bit more complicated. Um the way that these light groups appear when you first kind of drop them in, the things that I mentioned at the beginning that kind of handle the transitions for the lights is that they just look like this. And then you have to add um within them these different kind of transitions. And the way that you distinguish between them is with these
00:34:46
uh styles. Um and we have some kind of like set up levels that show all of these. There are some that flicker and there are some that fade and there are some that take longer and some that happen much quicker. And we'll kind of jump back and forth between the that set up levels, see what kind of transitions are going on, grab the the code for the one we want and put it in here. And then you also establish how long you want the total transition to take and you give a couple of different offsets. So if you wanted a bunch of different lights to have the same transition but happen at slightly different times, um you'd use these kind of offset values to to trigger them at different points. When it works, that's how how it happens. Yeah, when it works. Yeah, it's a it's it's a bit of a like it's a lot to wrap your mind around when
00:35:34
you're when you're working on it, but it's actually quite a powerful tool which gives us a lot of freedom to kind of create these transitions in in various different styles or you know, you can get a lot of you can get quite creative with them. So within the each of the individual lights has this section here for each state that says preset tag. You define the the tag that you want for any given transition. So like seek, seek reverse, seek with reverse, flicker one, flicker two. And then you punch that into the light. And you also punch in that ID for the offset you want and you do that for every light. Basically. And if you do it for each light? You do have to do it for each light.
00:36:22
But it does mean that you have a very like Chris was saying, kind of saying you have a very fine control and it's quite powerful in terms of if you have a vision for exactly what you want to do and you know how to do it, you can get some quite interesting complex Not that I can do that right now. Yeah, it takes uh it's a lot of iteration time. You know, figuring out how what feels natural. It's like it's a it's a balance between like what feels natural for how lights would behave, what type of light it is, if it's like a you know, a compact fluorescent which like slowly flickers before the the power kind of comes on. Something incandescent where it it has to burn for a little while before it reaches its full full brightness. That kind of stuff. Um
00:37:13
it it takes a bit of iteration to go back and forth and you you test the animation, that you test the transition, you see if it feels right, you find what elements don't feel quite right and you go and you tweak them a little bit. This hub looks so sterile after looking at her shag carpet for so long. I'm just cheating there and grabbing the values that I'd already used. So I don't choke in the moment and completely mess up. Yeah, there's a little bit of a cooking show, here's one I prepared earlier. Yeah. Kind of a workflow. Yeah, it's we always had to we always had to make this disclaimer, make this reminder that there is almost nothing in game development that can be finished in an hour. every time we do one of these
00:38:00
demonstration streams, we are we are showing a very truncated version of the process. E- either either, you know, you you are going through the process itself very truncated or there have been hours of prep and setting things up before the before the live stream. So, it's uh we always we always appreciate the time that you guys put into this, but I love these shows because nobody else does these shows. You'll You'll never see You'll never see EA, you know, hanging out with lighting artists or props artists and showing how they make a box and stuff like that. You'll never see, you know, Activision doing this stuff. My My My My first criteria, people often ask like, "How do you How do you determine what you're going to do on the shows and whatever?" Like I Like most things, you know, multiple reasons, but one of them is always, would any other game
00:38:48
studio do this? And if the answer is no, I'm instantly interested. It's It's like I I I Yeah, absolutely consider this if nobody else will do it. Um you know, cuz I I don't want to get up on a on a rant here, but it's one of the one of the things that one of the things that makes my job worth doing is highlighting as many aspects of game development as possible. It's It's combating this notion that games are made by one person. You know, it's like when you when you watch What was that last game that uh Kojima made? The Death Stranding. It's like Kojima It's like that is a Hideo Kojima game and his name is on everything. You know, I'm sure he did a lot, but there were also 100 other people
00:39:36
who who who spent years making that game and I like I like to give everybody at least their 1 hour to shine. People are like, "Why did you do a show with the IT people?" Once I'm like, "Because you think we could do any of this without the IT people?" Yeah, I think they're probably not. absolutely essential to the game development process? Yeah. You give them 1 hour. The unsung heroes. That's the point. That's the point. It's It's I I see this show if if people are like if people ever wondering what the purpose of this show is, this one, the one on Friday, it's about the unsung stuff. It's It's my chance to to to show a light on No pun intended. To to to show a light uh the aspects of game development that never get shown anywhere else. Yeah. But we Does that mean we're not the glamorous front cover devs? We're
00:40:25
the unsung ones? We're the glossy, not the glossy print. That's devastating. Not not not at 23. May- maybe when you get older. But I I I I I I I I I I mean like that's one of the Yeah, for me that's one of the nice things about this kind of open game development that we're doing is being able to show the process live and you know, showing stuff at how we work and and how we do it. I think is I mean for me it's quite interesting. Obviously, as a game developer I'm interested in game development, so yeah, I think it it's quite it's quite fun to to show the community this stuff and uh hopefully also interesting to people. Yeah. Oh yeah. No, it's it's people have uh meaned me a little bit for uh
00:41:12
for ending uh every ISC with what did we learn in this week, but it's it's Oh, I do it for a couple Like I said, most things you do it for a couple of reasons. One of the reasons I do it is because somebody who meant a lot for me and got me my start in this industry used to say that. So, it's my tribute to them. But second is that I want to always remind people that the purpose of this stuff is education. It's not It's you know, sometimes sometimes sometimes this stuff, you know, dips into marketing and stuff like this. You know, I work for a marketing department. It's it's absolutely true. There's there's a marketing element to it. But uh I always try to come at it from an education standpoint. That's where my that's where my passion is. I used to be a teacher. Way back when. So. And what did you teach?
00:42:00
Uh I taught uh high school drama. All right. I I I I I I I I I I I taught at a performing arts high school, actually. Uh you ever see that High School Musical show? I taught at the high school that was the basis of that show. Oh, really? So, it was a performing arts high school where kids actually did break out into song and dance in the hallways. Is there a character based on you? No, no, no, no, no. Uh High School Musical had already been like it had already been out by that when I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if it had already been out. I don't know. I I've never seen High School Musical. I just know it's based on that school. Mm, okay. I will I will admit I I I like the I
00:42:48
really like the pink and gold that you started out with. Though. And and so did the chat like when when we first started the uh when we first started the screen share, like chat was like, "We need this. Put this in the game." Oh, that this one's more gold than pink right now, but Yeah, I I I had the pink lights pink lights are off. Yeah, what what you had at the beginning that was that nice mix of pink and gold looked really cool. I butchered it so I could show the transitions. Cuz all of the interesting lights I already had on in the default. We can bring them back, but then we don't get our transitions, so. I I I like that transition how they they turn on, you know, in the direction coming towards the camera. I think that feels really cool. White Sky Mage I'm sorry, go ahead. Continue. No, you go. You go. Uh
00:43:35
I was going off topic. Uh White Sky Mage says like, "I'm so bad at improv in in school, but now I'm role playing in D&D." Uh and they asked if we play D&D. Do you guys play D&D? I I have unfortunately never played D&D. I hear great things. Oh, good. I've heard from a lot of people that it's a lot of fun, but I've never had the opportunity. Uh the the answer is yes, I play D&D. In fact, I I host a D&D live stream on my personal Twitch channel every 2 weeks. There's a game tonight, actually. I'm not here to promote it, so I won't tell you where the channel is or what time. But, yes. I've also never played it in the club of sandwich haters and sacrilegious D&D not players. Coffee hating and tea hating. Nobody allowed. Wait, wait, wait, you
00:44:23
you you you you hate tea as well? No. Oh, I hate tea. Oh, but you're you're American. I mean, Zach's British. He's He's genetically predisposed to liking tea. Yeah, I'll be torn to shreds if that gets out that I don't like tea. But, you don't like tea, you just don't want it to get out. I definitely like tea. Just to be clear. He does not look very convincing. I I can Look look at look at his Look at his camera right here. Look at that. Does that look very convincing? I love I love tea. I love fish and chips. I love fish and chips. I'm okay with fish and chips. Fish and chips is great. But, but tea is just hot garbage. Hot garbage water. It's like It's like Here. Here. Here's hot water and a little bag of dirt.
00:45:14
But, coffee's just as bad. Oh, I don't like coffee, either. So, you don't get any argument from me there. So, there you go, Zach. You're among like company. What was the other thing we brought up earlier? dozens of you. Oh, beer. Don't like beer. Cuz a a lot of uh the lighting team is German. About half of us are German, so that was a controversial one, as well. Um I mean, I've kind of I feel like we kind of showed I can just keep going, or we can do something else. Oh, we've got about what, 15 minutes left? What are you doing? We we could try some like different color schemes, maybe like without uh you know, going too far into it, but like just pick the
00:46:02
swap around like the the primaries and secondaries. We can do that. moods we can get. We can do that or we we we we No, let's let's do that. I was going to say or we could just add all the lights and and and and just keep adding lights and keep adding lights until the engine crashes and then as soon as that happens we're done. That that that that that was me that if you were wondering what that sound was, that was me like having that one of those little angel and devil arguments, you know, on one on each shoulder. It's like how I really just want to crash the engine. It's like I'm in a very subversive mood today. It's it's been a little crash happy with me the last couple of days, so we're doing well that it hasn't crashed.
00:46:49
Yeah, absolutely. behaving very well. So we don't want to anger it too much. All right, so we we got we got 15 minutes left. The chat chat, if we were to create another mood, what what other what other mood let let let us look at your sexy time. Put your sexy time on there. Let us see your sexy time. Did you just mess up the sexy time? Yeah, we're going back. Here we go. The power of undo, yeah. Yeah. That's the way to crash it. Yeah, so so we we've got our sexy time here. What other mood should we get? Um Can we do a red alert? Yeah, we can do that. It's it's it's it's do red alert in the in the hub.
00:47:36
What what is an emergency lighting state for for a habit for a for a hab look like? Yeah. Everything's red. submarine red. Absolutely. Red on red on red. A disco mood. You just you just saw a disco mood. Look, it's it's out there. What is going on with my hair today? This is this is I took a shower this morning and then didn't do anything with That's what that is. Red. Wow. Yes. There's a new a little a little more S&M club rather than uh sensual sexy times. It reminds me of um
00:48:26
the prison hubs. Oh, I'm in the wrong level, but the prison hubs have kind of a nice uh alternate light state that leans on red. Emergency sexy time. Ooh. Oh, yeah. There we go. Uh uh now yeah. Here we go. There you go. I don't like the red and the blue though. I red and blue is very uh it's very um Star Wars 7 8 9 kind of vibes. Mhm. I always go back to Superman.
00:49:16
Superman 2. Superman 2 is all right. I prefer Superman though. Um uh uh Superman 2 did have Neil before Zod It's pretty good. Planet Houston. He's he's There were years where every time someone would bring up Houston and be like Planet Houston. Nobody knew what the heck I was talking about. How long how many years before Whoa. What what was that? What what what What you just do there? That was me accidentally, instead of clicking this slider perfectly to input a value, clicking and dragging and then setting the light value at 27,000. Several several suns worth of intensity.
00:50:11
So you're saying that just adding more light is not the answer to these situations? Not always. Not always. Just more light. Sometimes you have to go too far before you realize what how how good you had it before. Oh, yeah. No, it it it's it's actually it's actually a very a very common refrain in many aspects of game development. It's it's it's it's you you bring it to the point of excess and then you bring it back to the point of start dialing it back. dialing it back down cuz cuz if you just keep If if you just keep building and building and building and building, you never know if you've gotten where you need to be. You know, you never got to know if you've gotten as good as you can get. past the line. Exactly. You have to go past the line. You you have to find the line
00:50:57
and then you come back to just before it and that's how you know that you've pushed something as far as it can go. If you never if you never find that line That's definitely Ian our art director's approach to fog. It's constantly more Get more fog. More fog in there. I'm messaging Ian right now. Yeah, get him in here. Hey Ian, do you hear the [ __ ] that Jared on the that's your one Jared Jared show? As promised, everything
00:51:46
is red. Almost. Almost there. Once we get there, Zach, can you do me one favor and add like a really nice, strong, bright, either white or red key light that like kind of casts a shadow and like either blinks or like like flashes or like spins around. That would be cool. Oh my god, yes. I don't know how to do it spinning around off the top of my head, but you can talk me through it. I'll do a live Just rotate the model. tutorial. Just manually rotate it. Exactly. That's the secret. It's like a it's like that Simpsons joke where I can't remember someone was talking about animating live like if the the animated show was a live broadcast and they said no that would be a a terrible strain on the animators' wrists. Didn't they do something though that
00:52:37
they did they did something where like like 3 minutes of it was record was was was like voice acted live? I thought they I thought The Simpsons did an episode where like one section of it was supposedly like the voice record act was voice acted live. Yeah, that sounds about right. I think The Simpsons has probably tried just about everything at this point. Yeah. I don't know. I haven't seen an episode of The Simpsons since like the fifth season. Uh when when when when when whenever whenever they shot Mr. Burns and that and that Yeah, that's when you gave up. He was That was the line for you. Yeah, it was before the movie was out. I've never seen the movie. It was pretty good. I enjoyed the movie. I think the movie was better than it had any right to be. Shots fired at Simpsons.
00:53:27
Yeah, spoiler alert, they shot Mr. Burns. Wow. Spoiler alert, was that like 1994 or 1995? no I somewhere around there. When you get to be my age, it all just blurs. You go from the back towards the door. Yeah, so there should be I think down in the options there's like a angular speed uh setting. It's down under the general options. Or under the animation settings.
00:54:21
It's going to read like a a list of values under pressure. Angular speed. That's the one. Yeah, something something like 500 to 1,000. Okay, turn it back on. And then you got to find the right rotational axis. How do you What do you just have to spin it around until you get the right Yeah, spin it. Yeah. So I think you want to spin it on Y like 90° to get it to go horizontally. So much confusion. Oh, was that it? I went straight past it. Boop. Oh, yes. There you go.
00:55:09
It's panicking to you see, as it should be. Now make it red. Surely that's too much. I mean much brighter. There you go. Oh, Jesus. Maybe too much red. That's not what you want to wake up to, is it? No. I love how the the white is though is is is washing out the red as it passes over. It's It's always my absolute my absolute favorite thing in all of game dev is when something works exactly like you would expect it to in real life. It's like Wait, when you when you when you do when you do that, it's like, "Hey, that's that's that's just like it should be." It's just how I expect it to be.
00:55:56
Yeah, it's just how you expect it to be. Which is such a weird thing cuz it's like I I I think so much of game dev is actually striving for just that. It's It's like if if we're doing it right, it shouldn't seem weird or different to you. It shouldn't seem impressive. It should just seem like that's how it should be. moment when it works. Yeah. Uh it's always good when it doesn't cast those nice long Yeah, you got to got to get the nice shadows across the wall. That's where it Yeah, those things. That's a lot of the like the general pipeline that we do as well. Like we just stick a big bright key light in the scene and find what looks good from what
00:56:43
angle where you get the nicest shadows. And then kind of build it out from And we always every time then add a fixture that that light should be emitted from. Yeah, exactly. And then we tell the environment people to be like, "Okay, now make it actually fit into the environment." It's one of those where the light's going to go. cart before the horse things is You guys come in and you try to work with what's there and then you get to a point where it's like, "I really want a light right here." It's like this looks so good if I could have a light right here. And you have to go back to the environment guys and be like, Ooh, I didn't know you could do that. Pretty please. This does feel very Star Wars as well. Uh uh try making it a gold.
00:57:39
Yeah. Yeah. Now it's Iron Man's workshop. I give it like a flash give it like a style of two is like the crazy flash I think. Oh yes. Now what happens if you push the button? Is it is it Is it going to like gracefully go back to the default state or have we completely pantsed it? Uh that's that's not too bad. It's a little Not bad. It's a little It's a little weird. Yeah. That that red to pink transition doesn't feel so good but No. And it's really slow. Blomp blomp.
00:58:31
Oh, we can finesse that later. We'll show it to Ian. See what he thinks. Ship it. Just ship it. Yes. Yeah well well show it to Ian and be like this Zach made this today. And after the message I just send him we'll have a really great opinion about of Zach. I'm going to need to do some work on my We can try and like hide a button somewhere in the hub. You know something secret where if you push it then this is what you get. Hey. you get Is there a limit to the number of light states? Uh yeah unfortunately the the light groups only handle technically four states. So like off default auxiliary and emergency because it was it was the feature was initially designed for ships specifically. So even though like the nomenclature of auxiliary and emergency doesn't always match up to what we're doing with the
00:59:18
light states we're kind of bound by those four states for now. Cool. Well that's it gentlemen. We did it. Yeah. Right on time. Nice. Yeah, we did it. Uh thank you so much for taking the time and hanging out with us. Zach, this is your first this is your first any kind of video for us. It is. It's been a pleasure. Very good. Thank you. Still want to work here? It well, if I'm allowed to after this after you've called me out to Ian on several things. Oh, wait. Ian's responded. Uh is I Are you kidding? Sort of. All right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for watching. This has been Star Citizen Live. We are still on our ISC hiatus. Uh
01:00:09
but we'll be back here with another episode of Star Citizen Live next week for the lighting team. That's it's Chris and that's Zach and I'm hair. I just I'm realizing I don't look at myself very often. I'm like I got to do something about this soon. I'll talk to you later, everybody. Take care. Bye. Bye, guys. Bye. Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da

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