Inside Star Citizen: Creature Feature | Spring 2020

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:07

   [Music] up until now the character team has been working on various things some high-end tier one squadron 42 characters we have the new hair 2.0 we've got alien races mission givers for the persistent universe working on various armors and clothes but we're at the beginnings of something brand new and that's the creation of creatures when creating creatures in a game there are many different approaches you could take in the beginning you could start off doing something simple for example like fireflies or little rodents or things that are you know fairly simple from an AI perspective that could be one approach in the past we created a void and in that same kind of vein later on we started exploring things

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   like Spade the space cows in the space whales and while those are still gonna happen we are now focused on something that hopefully players and developers alike get a little more excited about and that would be predator creatures the first steps of creating predator creatures where do you where do you get going for us we decided to pick some archetypes that gave us at least some sort of direction and these archetypes are more be animal behaviors than they are necessarily visual but this allowed us just to have some focus rather than just complete blue sky anything that sometimes is extremely difficult for a concept artist without having any direction so what we did in archetypes was we we found some some archetypes and we named them like bear and and tiger and crab things like this but these are

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   not to say that's what they want to look like necessarily these are more about what the thing might do like a bear for example might be content to eat fruit and not bother you unless you messed with it versus let's say a pure a carnivore like a tiger that's a stealth it up and you know kills prey and that's that's how it lives so these just gave us a starting point where we could start making initial concepts and as with you know any concepts we're gonna make a lot more concepts than we're actually going to make final models of so after a couple rounds of reviews we distilled down some of the ideas we were most excited about and from there we decided to focus first on two different predators from that group first being a creature that we might encounter in the pyro system this is a creature that

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   we're terming the pyro crap so she's kind of a queen of a hive and we'll have some sort of baby ones that all have some bioluminescence and one way you might encounter this is the large queen can actually hunker down and sort of disguise herself as a group of rocks where you might end up walking right up on one and not even know it's there until it actually reveals itself the second one we wanted to focus on is a creature that you would find on the planet Microtech Microtech being a terraformed world has an appearance more like earth where you see pine trees and things like this so we took a much different approach to the way we designed that creature this creature were terming is more a result of maybe some genetic manipulation of different DNA from Earth's creatures so there are some more familiar elements to this animal

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   so now you've seen the first two predators that we're gonna be pursuing what's next for us well we're already working on creating a pipeline to make these things a reality in game what that means is a I design animation and characters will all come together to bring life to these things we're hope you're excited about these as we are and hope to show you more soon in the upcoming alpha 3.10 several existing locations are getting upgrades that set the stage for future content whether that solicit racing and gambling and grimm x new missions and commercial opportunities in new Babich or revamp derelicts that do more than look great but also provide shelter from the elements outside in 3.9 we introduced new Babbage landing

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   zone but it was not quite complete yet we still had one or two things that we needed to add one of those things being micro Tech's flagship store or the factory line Factory lion is the premier store for micro tech located in the heart of new Babbage one of the ideas that we really wanted to convey through this kind of sub style of the micro tech branding was this is the location where micro tech sells all of their consumer and enterprise products that are at the cutting edge of technology from the moment that you enter the factory line you'll be greeted with the lobby and the lobby is there to give you a sense of the experience that you're about to go

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   on from the lobby you'll descend down a glass staircase into the commercial floor the commercial floor is when you'll find all things micro tech from the mobi glass to the reverie a our contact lens all things that you can kind of purchase and will be able to purchase in the future then we have on the third floor the Vickery amphitheater named after microtext founders older brother this space serves double duty as also a not only a corporate showcase for all of their corporate technologies but also can be converted into an amphitheater for all of my critics keynotes what we wanted to achieve the team for

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   the derelict sister when the players do discover them we wanted to give a sense of story and history to this crash site once upon a time there was a crew that used to live on this this derelict and we wanted the play to come across him and discover like they've been in the tree and for years and years to come so recently with the planet VTech for the planet team has updated all of the height maps on the planets and moons however I was come into a little bit of an impact because we've had to go and validate all the PIO eyes on thee terrain to the height map so they've now become an invalid so we've gone over them while as we've done that we've actually had the chance to kind of refresh them add them up a little bit and take a little bit of time to give

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   them some love that that they needed one of the cooler things we did with the Daryl X is as a team we chose to split the interior and exterior of the object containers for the Daleks this was to help with the place there as I came online so that way calling the weather inside the derelict so these are now acting as shelters for the players to get away if it's too hot if it's too cold and then we're adding this additional function onto the Terra looks not just as to explore but as to get an escape from the weather so we've also turned on the real-time keep maps this is going to give a much accurate lighting read inside the Daleks and it's going to give the overall inside of

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    their Darrell it's a much nicer feel to them we've also had the opportunity to go back over and give them much like needed love we've been adding these like mud skirt like rocks around the actual Derrick's himself this is to give them a much better feeling as it's more integrated with the planet serene and it gives them also like a sense of direction as if there's kind of like crash-landed on the surface and like ripping up the terrain so there's been a lot more focused on there as well we've also used the terrain Blunden as well on the shader so that we've blended from these skirts to the terrain and then these are also allow us to use them on more different surfaces if it was on like snow away like constant and for or if there's some like dela Mars and think

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    that you can pick up that trainers and we're still using the same or see only on each planet there's a lot of things going on in the future of Grim packs that we needed to prepare for it grim hex is a very very illegal place where people come in to do all kinds of illegal trading illegal betting maybe some really shady deals and it's not really nice place to be so for the racing kiosk we knew that these illegal races we're gonna need a lot of sort of bedding and a mission giver and places to watch it from so what we've done is we've taken one of the sort of more rundown and forgotten areas of grammatic some kind of updated

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    it to look super nice so we have the racing shop or betting shop as we're calling it and what we've done with that place is we've really jazz it up with lots of really really cyberpunk lights are very bright pink purple lots of betting kiosks and screens that could like maybe in the future just display kinds of informations for the race standings for the season then inside the shop you'll have area that Luca Brenda's oversees everything and he's just going to be sitting there on his desk which is just surrounded by screens overlooking all kinds of information through the stem system for all these legal races and just outside of his shop you'll see the standings and a bunch of really rickety walkways that we've added where people are gonna sit there watch the races from this huge window that they have in front

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    of him there's even a little VIP area places to sell beer and people are just gonna be able to like come in there and sit in this really dingy place and be able to watch these races happening around in the asteroids and I want them to feel a little bit uncomfortable about it but know that they've got a do come in there to do their business and just bet on the races and make sure that they're not gonna get stabbed in the back so what we learn this week well we learned that today's new locations are tomorrow's new opportunities that the long path to building new pipelines for creature creation will involve several disciplines working together and that the space crab used to be so tiny and innocent but clearly pyro changes a crustacean for inside star citizen I'm Jared Huckaby tune in tomorrow to start citizen live as we kick off alien week

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    with the Laura team and of course we'll see you right back here you