Inside Star Citizen: Avatar Repertoire

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   one of the most anticipated aspects of the upcoming Alpha 323 has to be the persistent Universe arrival of our new character customizer enabling better representation and a true sense of ownership over your individual Avatar in the verse and to share with you the various ins and outs of what's ahead let's throw it now to just a few folks standing in front of the massive team that made all of this possible the reality of the old character creator is that the old character creator could walk so that this one could run the original mandate was let's just get the Pu customizer working in Squadron with building blocks instead of flash it was very Bare Bones we we hadn't had a lot of progress on it we had no design we had no designer or anyone else working on the project

2. 00:00:48

   except me basically the the Cass was make it look pretty the very very first underpinnings of the Character Creator actually still exist it's our DNA system in the old one you could only blend between the different faces also you could only blend from one face to another at a time the character customizer for Star Citizen is so important because players get ownership over their character they're not just representing uh some player character that some artist has created but they're representing themselves we want the player to be able to represent themselves in the world and the universe that is star citizens [Music]

3. 00:01:41

   so the character customizer that's coming into Star Citizen in 323 is broken down into four main sections the first section of the Character Creator is the DNA system and that's where the player actually interacts with the blending and the shape of the actual head itself it's still the same DNA system in terms of when we apply it to the characters the difference is how we interact with that DNA system so we've introduced face sculpting this is the big the big thing so you can just grab these nodes on the face of the character that you have and shape it as you see fit what face sculpting allows us to do is instead of saying I want a certain proportion of a certain head it allows us to say I want to pull this vertex to

4. 00:02:31

   this position and then we can work out what proportions of different heads is required to get that vertex into that position the system is very very cool as behind the scenes uh we can't just adjust the face into certain shapes and be happy with it we have to also change the rig we also have to change the corrective blend shapes but we've also kept the original DNA blending as well but we've tried to improve the user experience of that as much as possible now now you have a full list of heads at your disposal so you can see all the heads available and you can tweak you can take a bit of the nose from that face you can take the eyes from that face easily it's quick to use yeah so the Pu is is is very modern Sleek looking look we we trying to go for like the almost like the Apple

5. 00:03:19

   Vision Pro look but yeah it it it's it's very modern compared to your squadron and it's it's a lot more in date I guess you could say basically trying to reduce the number of mouse clicks it takes to get what you're looking for so some of the other things that you can do in the DNA section is the skin tone adjustment as well as the uh skin material or or the skin texture itself so what you can do within this is you can actually skin tone adjust this into realistic shades of certain skin tones to better represent yourself they're freckles and we have some blemishes on there and these represent actual scans of people that we've done uh throughout the course of the years and we've actually scanned whole bunch more that we will be adding to the pool as a time goes on but we are always making that pool larger so the faces are always

6. 00:04:09

   going to look better and better and have more variations in them so the next big aspect is hair within the hair section there's a whole bunch of new hair styles which is obviously the first and most important thing one of the interesting things and uh the teams I represent uh worked really really hard on this to have some hair simulation onto it um so you can see the hair move around as you're uh even selecting it and then as you add it on to the character you can see it move around even more but better than that you now also have a massive library of beards and facial hair and eyebrows as well so you can mix and match to get exactly what you're after instead of what we had before where you could cycle

7. 00:04:57

   through hairs you could cycle through hair color you now have a massive library of all the hairs resing the previous character customizer we just had a bunch of preset material variants for the new character customizer we want to give the player the power to go in and actually edit those materials what's even cooler about this now is though we had the hair selections before you could never tint it you could never come up with your own color set we can go in and we can change the natural color of the hair we can change the dount but we also have the new gradient system where you can choose to have one die color for the roots of your hair another die color for the tips of your hair and then you can set where the gradient changes not only do we have like a

8. 00:05:46

   blonde hair but then we have a a purple highlight that that's done at the end or done at the top and that's all player configurable so not only do you have a whole bunch of different hair styles to choose from but you've got the full color gamut as well and all of that is brand new functionality that we've added to a character customizer so we can update the Shader prams on the hair in real time so my favorite aspect of the new facial hairstyles is the variety we have a large library for being the first version of this and it's going to grow even more within the coming years and as we've begun to include more culturally diverse hairstyles in 323 the team is working on more that will be seen in the patches to come so the third major aspect of the new

9. 00:06:35

   character customizer is styling the makeup is another completely new feature for the new character customizer you'll be able to pick your makeup for eyes your cheeks and your lips we actually used to have makeup baked into the textures where uh we had already pre-selected eyeliners and uh all these kind of things to represent uh what that given skin tone was but we wanted the player to make that choice we wanted the player to have access to all the different gamuts of colors all the different specular reactions all the different highlights that they may want to do for their character for each of these you will have some base versions that you can pick from but you can also go in and tweak these on a deeper level you can set the opacity you can set

10. 00:07:24

    different colors for you can have one color for the eyeliner one for the eyes shadow like the hair we can set certain colors and parameters on the makeup so that's like how glossy it is and um the opacity of the makeup unlike the hair we actually set the shape of the makeup as well and the way that we do that is we basically adding new textures to the skin material on the players and again we update all of that in real time and that is also quite similar to the new freckles and sunspots how they work that's again another texture that we've added to the player characters skin and then we can tweak these parameters on the Shader in real time to show more or less records or more or less some spots so when it comes to the different

11. 00:08:11

    styles of what you can achieve in the character customizer it's been a constant push and pull of making it look really good really realistic and letting people just do what they want and we've been trying to keep it as realistic as possible but still letting people do exactly what they want with it because we're leaving so much power in the hands of the players they can tweak all these different colors and all of their different under hair or facial hair or eyebrows as well as these different makeup sections and it can get pretty zany so the makeup itself is actually a fairly complex feature behind the hood uh but in the end I think it actually presents as a pretty fun interaction to uh changing up the skin tone and again representing yourself within the world of Star Citizen

12. 00:09:02

    so the fourth main feature is all the additional functionality we'll have a review page where you can see your character this is when you're actually taking a look at your character as a whole from the toes all the way to the top of the head another part of the core functionality of this is the randomization so now we allow players to both randomize the whole thing so you get a totally new look so you got a good canvas to start off of now one of the really fun things about the character grator and I didn't mention at citizen con and definitely should have is that we do have the save and load functionality finally within the character creators so you'll be able to export your character onto your PC and find that file send it to your friend and they can import that into their game and see that character on their machine so no longer will you have

13. 00:09:49

    to worry about a reset or anything you can save your character you can reload it you can not only save your character to persistence and get it to load into a pu but you can save a bunch of characters that you can then just load in at any time into the character customizer and you can also send these to other players that they can then loading your custom M characters as well and this is the exact same tool that we're using internally at cig to create NPCs that we're rolling out to all players in 323 and I'd like to take this very rare opportunity to ask you guys and to challenge you guys to make a version of Jared and share it with the community and with us so that we we can see how close you've gotten and if there's one I really like maybe I'll do something pretty terrible with it what I'm really hoping to see is a hyper

14. 00:10:38

    realistic chis Perry that someone could send to me for reasons so that's what's coming in 323 but in the future we'll also be adding Tattoos Piercings stubble and more eye settings so you're going to be able to do even more customization at that point so this is a major milestone for Star Citizen because finally the presentation is exactly at a state that we wanted so many different teams have been involved in this from lighting to environments to feature teams to techer to Tech animation to animation programming everyone has seen this has been involved in this and it's gone all the way up through the chain uh through to Executive approval so it's finally to

15. 00:11:27

    a state where Chris has actually been happy with it and that we could release it to the community really happy we put a lot of time and effort into getting it to where we want it to be today so it's come a long way particularly happy with like how how it's just easy to use and you can basically go from like scratch and just completely start from a clean slate and just create whatever you want really you're going to be able to express yourself with your characters so much more than before and you're going to be able to see everyone in the verse really being themselves or whoever they want to be out there I think that we have made one of the strongest character customizers that's out there at this point and we are very proud of this so what did we learn this week well

16. 00:12:21

    we learned that the character customizer in Alpha 323 is dope as that it's the next major milestone in our continuing efforts to enable better representation and customization of your player avatars in the verse and that even more options things like tattoos scarring and even more are on their way after that and of course if you don't want to spend time creating your avatar you can just hit the little randomize button down there and see what you get random random random Rand R Rand R Rand Rand oh hi I'm David I have to read the teleprompter I'm the producer for ISC I make it possible for Jared to do stupid things like this and I'm British that's

17. 00:13:10

    it just British I say things like peanut butter water and rubbish and I'm always explained to others why Jared did things like this and I'm good at my job a but my job is being British telepromter that what was that you'd like to have fun for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckaby thanks for letting us share the process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next week all right so um are we recording yeah rolling all right so normally at the end of the show here we would have a meme image it's funny haha um David do we have anything this week uh we got

18. 00:13:59

    that one thing we're not allowed to show it yet oh the one thing we're not allowed to show yet um well I mean who wants to live forever hold on I get out of here there we go this a long bit can you can you see this no no this way this way is this wow yeah what sounds do the what sounds do the birds make clearly never heard what A bird sounds like before in our lives is that better is that what you wanted so