Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Facial Customization System

5 April 201901:05:501,756 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] do you have any sevens Go Fish no hey everybody welcome to another episode of reverse the verse live this time focused on the facial customization the character customization team system and we are here with just some of the team members who have worked on bringing this if I can say so as an outside observer amazing system online let's go around the tables introduce yourselves tell everybody who you are and what you do for the facial system and what you do for starters in general so we can kind of cater the questions that come in a can let's start with you we haven't had you on the show no my name is Kay Letourneau I am the senior systems designer here and mostly what I do is fidget and make a mess in the office but on the
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character customizer I was doing a lot of the R&D for how our design would shape up and turning this relatively actually quite novel system into something usable and and that's what I'm getting possible yeah you gotta you gotta crack it if you don't rock it you can't use it stare point it's very nice see so much so a lot of your work I focused on the front end they the user experience making this we showed in your demo on a TV last week the the way our devs use the tool and then your work a lot of your work was on making it player phasing yeah cuz I wanted it it was really important for it to be useful to someone who doesn't know the intricacies of how it works and also like there are elements of how it works now like using on the dev side that are just annoying and like trying trying to
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overcome those like tuna to an extent while the players are my focus because that's people we want to use it the most I mean I want to make Shawn's life better I want him to be able to get in there and like make NPCs and make them all like pretty and like they would speak to him he's lonely my life it's better when your estimates go from this to this that's just do that just say five days Naz two days it's two days my life will be for you soon yeah what you do for his choices and in the character customer hey I'm Spencer Johnson associate gameplay engineer been working with calyx this quarter on the user facing and user experience side of the customizer all the programming to back up the UI so things like the sliders locking the the transitions
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between the steps and the facial editing but yeah all the the user experience side of things not so much the animation and actually the blending between the faces but how do you as a players interact with the system and make your own character and Sean last week we had Chris Farrar was the janitor on the show tell us who you are and what you do for starters I'm Chris is the jannah' I guess I'm the I'm like the janitor assistant or like the janitors yeah like the cleaner then okay yeah so anyways tech director of content we developed the backend system with the the the engine guys and then directed the the feature going to the feature team which is where Spencer and Kayla statement now at the end I want to make sure that we give that whatever that we
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we remind everybody that at the end of the 87th we did some a little usual we had a title card with a special thanks to a whole litany of people this is assist I think that's important it actually uh you know like I guess marketed without you because the first time as I did it right we did during the ATV segment anyways I was trying to just rattle off the names off the top of my head and and that that that goes awful every time because you always I don't forget one or the other and it's not that you don't care instead you just thinking in that moment right you don't remember I wanted to get it everything correct for everybody but yeah we should do that with all the features but as far as I'm concerned because usually like they see one person talking about the feature but it's coming from like you know in in this case probably ten or eleven people at at different points in time so it's not like
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you know ten or eleven of us we're all working on this edge of all at the same time and everything but it was like you know Dean or sorry the facial customisation stuff has been progressing over the course of truly the you know two to three years and this is all happening behind the scenes it's how we drive our facial system it's always been and what's super interesting about this was this was in septage you know four or five years ago when he initially got our head deliveries started working with three lateral I did all this that we had expected fully to do this system individuality what we didn't expect was well we expected challenges but we didn't expect that it would end up in a coma for about a year with a problem that we just we just could not solve we just couldn't get past it
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but we're gonna know luckily at the attachment problem so the attachment problem heads G is so ministry interesting to talk about and it's it's it's not the first thing you'd think about within this but you know and maybe we'll talk some body customization questions earlier because that's what the big challenge is but then there's the attachments so so morphing a face and doing all these things is complex enough but then when you tack on attachments to it so now you've got hair now you've got scalps now even though glasses now you've got helmets now you've got multiples now you've got top hats now you've got you know all these kind of things you have to make sure that those still fit every single face that you can have and like like we showed in a TV there's a huge range of of human anatomy and generally you know that's why they have multiple sizes of hats that's why they have multiple sizes of helmets that's why but guess what we
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can't make that we can't I can't go to jog and say cool you got this awesome idea for I don't look great give me 30 of those right with just you know slight adjustments to every single one so we needed a much more dynamic system now we can put those in our shops we could have a size one a helmet a size two helmet well yeah but then you could only get a hat shop you would have a helmet shop you would have it you know all these things so we needed to make sure that we could implement a system that could adapt the the shape of the attachments to fit base so that's what we did when Andres Rourke came on last year who did part of the demonstration there it says is gone he was the one to kind of crack the case on this which was using some concepts on a to to be fair from the film side that he had done most of the work within but
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then applying them to a runtime implementation so these were all these new deformers that we've created that a runtime deformers so you know we call one at last everyone is non-uniform scaling and these are these are deformers are a method of moving verts around or deforming them obviously at runtime based on some sort of input and the input is the phase right now what gets weird about it is there's different to former types for different types of attachments and you know Ivana andreas went through this really well in their presentation but you know certain the certain the elastic type basically this is one that follows pervert the offsets for every single part against every other Verdun the attachment wouldn't work on a helmet because the whole thing would contort into such a weird shape that you wouldn't be able to recognize
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that helmet anymore so yeah it was really important to bring those those those those deformers online so that we could actually roll the system out and that's why there was a big big delay within it you're still using the system behind the scenes but we couldn't apply it or give it to the players without something the attachment problem all right now we are here taking questions live from the chat you can suite your questions into play places either in the twitch chat where you can preface your question with the word question and capital letter surrounded by brackets or do the same thing in spectrum which is our bespoke communication platform available in Robert's bass industries com in addition we did put up a thread all week and collect questions for those who maybe couldn't be here live and also let our community vote them up so I want to go in and start into some of the most voted up questions some of these didn't
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really apply what we're talking about you know facial customization and some of them we're talking about you know things will but but further down the road like like tattoos and and stuff like that we're not ready to go into that just yet but the by far the most prevalent question was age where are we what aren't thinking about a dreams I mean are we gonna be able to have 70 year old people 20 year old people so the short answer is is yes but not exactly as you're asking for it so you know we're not gonna have I just don't want to do it in such an overt way where it's like oh what's your age and then you just have this slider and then eventually it sort of just adjusts the face what I prefer is that there was different levels of basically different variants to the skin tone so like for example you might have that pretty
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standard Caucasian sort of skin tone but I'd like to see and I know Chris wants to see this an old version of it a younger version of it a sun-damaged version of it a a scart version of it or you know basically variations within those tones so that you can basically get that sort of result but whether you're setting yourself to a seven-year-old because I've seen you know anyway 67 year olds that look young you know what I mean so I think it implies a lot that that oh you're 70 so you're gonna have you know you know liver spots or something like this and that's not a guarantee but I prefer that we had variants within the skin tones and making those is not a nightmare by any stretch of the imagination so because we're kind of an a data-driven setup now we can add those as as we need it's interesting because if we bring up a good point you know I remember my grandparents growing up they always seem so old
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yeah I'm sorry they know it's just it just the aging has changed in just the last 50 years here on earth it's the the way that 70 year olds looked 50 years ago versus the way 70 year olds look now that's true is different you know and and when you extrapolate that nine hundred and forty years in the future sure you know seven you know we could the seven year old could look like us yeah I want to run around like a jacked 70 year old in the verse I guess like Jack LaLanne yeah like this hair like totally gray and like 40 ABS like that's cool yeah I'm glad you mentioned that hair we need to get this hair yeah we should we should we got to talk to Josh they're gonna make it happen I'm just not sure we could handle the poly counter that banister oh it's the physics simulation that I'm really in can ya look at it I
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mean honestly if you want to stress the character creator you do his hair and my 3.0 beard with all the color and everything because I could never do that here look if you can get that combo going you anything there's 20 different colors you get my 3.0 beard his hair if you can get that combo doing you can do anything the character combined no noted am I not right character Voltron right all right which leads us into our next questions what are their plans for long hair and helmets are you guys working on long hair tech yes but first we have to okay so here steak let's talk here let's talk here okay hair is hard hair is really hard and not just hard for me it's a hard real-time rendering hair is very
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difficult right and and to be fair nobody's really solved it in in a new or unique way for the last let's say 10 or 10 years it all uses alpha cards and whether you use alpha test or awful blend but there's there's plus or minuses to the whole thing and I don't know how deep it like or what's it like the difference between an alpha Blender and alpha test I would go a little bit and so the difference between alpha blending of the tests you have a card you have an alpha Channel that's basically saying this is transparent here not transparent here alpha test only does a singular test of that and it says is this pixel basically is this vert gonna render or not is this pixel here or not and it does one check and it goes through or it doesn't go through alpha blend does multiple right it actually blends it rather than doing just a test against the singular pixel
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so when you make alpha blend on a bunch of the hair cards the the the softness of the hair can look amazing the problem is is performance changes depending on the distance that you are so how much of the screen space alpha blend actually takes up so it's a bit of a red or anything so we showed it citizen pretty much an update to not only the hair shader but the method that we make that right so this has not at all been applied to the the current character great so that's step one is take those hairstyles that are there now and make sure that they're using the updated shader and the updated pipeline so that they're all going to look they're all gonna look a lot better we also had to update it to unify them so that we could have them on all of our different head shapes and all that different characters and and make the attachment system work for that so they they use that elastic
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sort of technique the trick is getting it simulating definitely on top of that so once we've got the visuals where we want it then we'll then we'll get into the simulation side of it and that has to do with the complexity of these attachments so now think of think of how this works so we have this hair we have an adaptable face and we have this runtime to former that contorts the hair to fit and it's not like just a uniform scale thing it's you know we can move the scalp so we can move all of all of the all of the areas of the head that your positions move so the hair has to move up and down and now adjoint chains into that because generally you're gonna want to simulate these things with either joint chains or some sort of cloth vertex simulation or you go crazy and you go you know tress-fx end video you want the paired of things right but all those systems use some form of
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vertex simulation to some degree pipe down onto the GPU so whether we want to implement that that's probably a bit further than we'll go but on the joint chain technique we need to be able to we need to be able to update the offsets of their joint change so that the simulation happens from the right place all the time depending on the depending on the attachment changing from the constraints and the constraints exactly I have a question for you the the blending that that we that we're doing on these items on these attachments that hair is a part of are we able to do that multiple steps or is it just the one step for it for like my head is this shape so my hair has to attach to that but if I put on a beanie or whatever are we able to then like also clamp it on the secondary step or is that problematic that's a bit problematic and
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I know what I know what you're saying so what we do instead we do sub geometries that's basically like different forms of that geometry depending on what attachment is a great example of this is the current Snoopy cap so basically and we finally fixed this thing well kind of it's coming that bugs absolutely perfect this was a fun one so everybody's seen it I'm sure you've got Mohawk sticking through helmets you've got although now that we have long hair it's more like the rule than than it was before it's it's it's it used to just be the exception the one hair the Mohawk would always go through the helmet great we had set up a bunch of logic but there was a Koch bug within here that the tank wasn't being respected so basically what we do with the Snoopy cap if your hair is so long that it would clip through the helmet we instead put a Snoopy cap on the hair but that's all adapted based on what hair
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you have so when the helmet comes on just to go to your point of like putting on a beanie and change again we do this with the Snoopy cap so when the helmet goes on if the hair is so long that it would clip we put this new P cap on you because of the way we do that with the sub G Oh change we don't necessarily have to pick the same Snoopy cap exactly every hair we can't have like that whole like totally hair sticking out the bottom of it sure whatever else and that's all just asset work and generally you know with character team you know I talked to Corey a lot of time about it would he calls hat hair so it's basically like you know when you put a helmet on what's your hair looked like when you put a hat on what's your hair look like and it's just how many of those they actually want to make and you know for every single hairstyle if you now have to make you know I had hair version a helmet hair version that's already multiplied it by two you know are three anyways the three different
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forms of each hairstyle and then you've got yeah you just don't wanna make so much complexity for the for them anyways space behaves well yeah it's kind of ingress gonna be captain beanie where you still have I'm just not sure what shopping be in if it is well yeah I think we have them and I think I feel like I've seen what I'm imagining is like Pacheco's hair but then you a hat on top but the dreads are still we need to like tennis visor yeah but but again Alejo again wear that look like in a helmet because you've got Dre okay cool you put on a helmet and you've got dreads hanging down here what's that look like in a helmet like actually what would that look like and you know what that would look like and it'd be really weird right like I mean you have this bunched up stuff you know in your helmet
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so it's a bit I realize if I'm wavy and put that Snoopy cap on and the you know that volume of hair just kind of goes away like I don't know if you could fit that into a Snoopy cap what you got this is what it's actually doing see talking though anytime I judge your hair is I got I can't say I can't say anyway yeah so so yeah I guess short answer is yes that's what it sounds like to me yeah cool I know folks in the chat we're asking about well they have the ability to create their own hairstyles and I was something like everything we just talked about oh man like okay that's oh yeah and I don't have a rigid plan for this but like we've all seen it when we were starting on the character creator we all took a little look at all the you know
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there's a million of them but one of the best ones not overall character creation but for hair specifically is black desert online like those guys and I think I have a pretty good idea how they're doing it but I need to solve our joint offset problem the first with the with the attachments but I love that you get control strands within their hair styles this is super cool because then it it's one of these like 10x things like if we can make it so that we're only having 10 to 20 hairstyles and basically the players can modify them to give them the kind of style that they want or or tweak to the style it's gonna save our content creators a ton of work right if we can get such a system online and I think if the black desert online one is actually very intuitive because how it worked how it how will you see it anyways you put the hair cell on you've
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got all these control strands kind of coming off it and you can adjust those control strands you know individually and I think that's super cool I'd love to do something like this but it's not right now laid out in the plan as an absolute do one of the questions that came in from the chat says is the face model shown in the customizer the same tear and quality is what they're going to have in the game that's it that's identical to your character in the game actually we use exactly the same data exactly the same and actually what's interesting is those are tier two tier one it's pretty silly the same thing you know so yeah and our whole intent is that those heads need to be able to stand in the same scene as Bishop or captain white or anybody like that and speak to them and there not be any real massive texture chakra quality aldia's
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quality difference between them as an extension of the harem head question facial hair beard deformity is a good thing but the helmets is yes it already works um we even showed it in the in the citizencon demonstration with Yvonne Andreas we should we show there specifically captive white beard the tricky part is we just don't have many beards right now that's all it's just content so those aspects what was so interesting about the whole deformer thing too is what I expected to be the hardest in making these runtime attachments and formers actually ended up being neediest the easiest and the stuff I thought was gonna be the easiest ended up being the hardest so the helmets I thought were gonna be the easy one but we just gotta scale them whatever that was way harder than I thought um but the beards and
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hair typically like things that touch the face are super hard to deal with just because you've got blend shapes in there you've got all kinds of stuff going on that you can't just skim to because you've got different topology and so but the elastic performance the same ones we use for the hair is actually the simplest ones for us to make so what it means is that every single firt that moves around will move that same attachment so as he speaks and everything so we get much much better results even with this attachment stuff than we had ever before because it was just skinning and actually even though you might not have noticed even in the early squadron sort of videos and vertical slice stuff if blood shapes will clip through the beard and stuff like this you kind of didn't notice cuz we try to hide it a little bit but this is more so much better for that so making beards is actually much easier than it ever was before what's also nice about that is there's other things like beards that that go
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across your face so if you can think of you know like a banded bandana type thing right around your face that totally works and you can see the speaking happening below it which is just incredible to me that that's it that's not an easy thing to pull off doctors mask is another one that I write to see which is the exact same thing and it's actually those ones are so that my internal demo exactly like I showed that Internet demo that that it all moves around and what's cool about doctors mask too is it's got the instructions sort of loops that go back around the ears and because of the way the deformity work as the ears move around that whole strap stuff moves around so it just makes you know having the singular asset mark it up one time and it works for everybody good let's get to some of the things that are in there folks have been asking if we're gonna be able to save our current look in the editor so that you know they can find a
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look and then if they want to play with it you know change it and end up messing it up can't quite get back they could they can go back to a safe preset when planning for improvements for this next quarter and like having concept like and I'll do history and stuff like that definitely on the radar I think depending on what's the level of undo we want to do I think we're talking about having like an undo stack right so what we do is just save off all the DNA values which is actually a really small set of data it's like 200 bytes we exposed DNA yeah it's a string of characters that's like yeah the matrix oh really short string of characters so much the complexity comes from the fact
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that we have all these these different types of modifications we have changing the DNA deformer as well as changing the actual items that are attached and that's that's when it starts to get a little bit more complicated in terms of how we're going to manage that history yeah because actually all these like you know the I Donna me stuff that we have right now for hair or I seem to be beard and stuff is actually a totally separate than DNA this is actually an item being attached to you so we need to have this you know history of your changes be sort of agnostic to the data that you changed like okay if you had a DNA we need to say here's the value refer to that value of DNA matrix if you had an attachment it's like okay well what I'd important what was there and the more the smarter the system can be about that the better we can have it update like if if we
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don't have any idea what the change was and we just say okay here's the last state it was in where we have to we have to reinitialize the entire character he's gonna pop off screen for a second and then come back on yeah it's just a way worse experience and now you've forgotten like you don't get to see the actual change happen so you can judge it yeah so you have to just hold more of it in your head at a given time so making it smarter is worth doing because that'll make it a lot more usable yeah I think so dude that main point is there's there's two different data well there's a couple data sets in hearing them mainland is yeah kind of like the anatomy the shape G oh yeah like how how the colors are being attached all the tiers are being a touch exactly that's totally like this tiny matrix so like I know I made the joke in the ATV was like oh I see blood ever see Burnett actually that dad is not in there so you can lied
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to us so we have the DNA matrix for the anatomy and now we need some string for the ID on sort of data to represent what hair style what what color what skin tone color I think you just wanted to say that out loud I got ID on him yeah yeah so yeah I heard good yeah there was another one you said today but heterochromia yeah we might want to skip to that question because we're gonna talk about words won't get the best out of your federal chromia the biggest words gotta say the biggest words of the end you know keep people watching I'm sorry everybody I think over the farms or anybody's played a game like the WWE 2k what not nut nose
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when you the Creator wrestlers is a major feature there and one of the things you do is you can sort of they have to do it manually but there's a numerical value for everything so they so players export a code it's like here is my combination for this character yes so I so they've made if they've made a person that they're like haven't recreated a famous person or whatever they want to give it to somebody else they can do it if you make a character and you want to roleplay as his twin you could give him the code and he could make his character I was I was really hoping Orin that was gonna lead to you asking if you can have a custom entrance with our character customizer Noise music yeah so quite the question is have we considered not just saving things beyond presets and views but actually exposing that that full combinations
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that players can give that combination of the people's like another you could be my sister in addition to it being useful I think that there's something that's really beautiful about anytime we expose the data in our game because for once we don't have to fake it we have so much going on in this game that we can just here's the actual values of it have have that represented on screen in any number of ways and I think that it's very easy to end up with something that's kind of beautiful and engaging just on the data side of it like you know in so many and so many things you'll have like the doctors you know panel or whatever they're manipulating all these aspects of it and it's all just you know and wavy em it looks nice but it doesn't mean anything
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yeah and here like it's actually tied to something that's real and you know sometimes that thing that's real is still like abstracted away like the way that we do our blending but even just having my manipulation of the world result in actual changes to it I always find that compelling yeah especially as a programmer like I love you can actually like when the data is written in hex like it doesn't take too much of a leap to say like oh I can actually look at this and see what it means like oh like this head has this much weight in the face like I can look at it and actually you know it doesn't take too much actually explaining to say like okay this is what it means I really see what this code is doing no I know which I do think it's cool why I make that matrix joke because there is like you know no you're looking at a yo the 1099
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yes playing it at 20% and so like I totally wanted to have like a copy to clipboard function that we could have so you just paste it be like this my dude you want to like tweak it you think I have two big ears here's the guy I make sure and especially since we reset them every kind of major release right now I think that's a nice way to bring it back but one big point about it is and and it is what we're doing right now is you'll see it on the next roadmap publish but we have a v2 planned we've got lots of iteration to the actual UI the actual interface we've been talking about it a lot this week anyways taking the feedback from people and everything so don't want to go too deep into it cuz I'm sure we'll do an ATV about it or something like that about the next iteration of it but the whole the whole mentality around that is is simplify some of the interface a little bit make it a little easier to
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get to what you want yeah take up a little more screen space try to make things are more clear but the point being is that we're gonna change them the content that is in there so one of the things about being at able to output that string would be between releases if we change that content that strings gonna meet something very different all of a sudden because our indices are gonna change the amount of heads are gonna change the hairstyle is gonna change so unless we're very additive in the way that we add the the indexes we're always gonna basically clobber that that data so once we're in a state that we're actually pretty solid on our data and that would be a better time to do it but it can also have an internal mapping to where we try our best to future-proof it and say if we're gonna change the order stuff it won't break it exactly so for the next release it knows
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okay well if they and are importing data that ID one is actually for or you know whatever whatever we want to do with that but yeah maybe that's a good time to talk about some of the some of the hybrid approach stuff that were we're looking at for for v2 so but what I'm just I'm just gonna keep talking about forget the question go right by talking I mean you could take a break just go for smoke okay so hybrids so what's super interesting about the hybrids and what do I mean by having hybrid is a resulting head that we can reuse as a source head again so the idea with this we're kind of started was what we found when using it and this was over the course of the last years anyways what I found when using it is that you know a lot of people there's
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a lot of redundancy within faces within heads and you probably even notice it right now that basically we've got that we've got nine male nine female within the system right now but of those for example on the female side there's probably four of them are mostly the same they're they're very close to the to the same let's say archetype right so there's some redundancy within there and it definitely what's interesting to see about it is it makes the average head that people end up creating look a little heavier on the on the sort of asian Eastern European kind of side right what that no that's exactly right yeah it's like a lot of people kind of look like that and a lot of that has to
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do with just the source heads themselves right so what we did in this early iteration because we didn't want to make this thing wait until halfway through this year we wanted to get this in front of players the main reason was we wanted to get that feedback because like we use it all the time but they are interacting with it is so key to the actual feature that just seeing the results isn't sufficient yeah exactly so and you know I'll go off on a cosign we'll make sure we do the cosine tangent will then come back for cosine comes back yeah yeah yeah it comes back right anyways so to make this a cosine the the heads within there have some redundancy so what we want to do instead is make each each piece of data that you are that you are sourcing be meaningful in its own way so that there's no redundancy in there but again we didn't want to wait until
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halfway through this year to get it in front of players to get that sort of feedback on on on using the system so what we're gonna be doing over this next v2 thing is what we've done is across all the squadron heads at everybody and there's so many benefits of doing it this way we've we've archetype tall the head so there's a huge Maya scene that basically has every single face that we've got and what we've done is kind of align all the people into their own archetypes so you know to use an example that I'm almost scared to use oh but but sandy and Rhona Mitra have a very similar archetype of a you know face they have an archetype but then between the two there might be unique features of each so what we're gonna do within the data sets is instead of just the nine male and nine female that you had you know for the last years since the
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first you know character creator is that it will replace all of those with our hybrids of meaningful data sets so we'll take the unique air of that guy the unique nose of that guy the unique brow of that guy all within the same archetype group and make that a single head so yeah we're distilling it to the extremes so that you can pick between a full yet exactly meaningful data so we don't have redundancy across it so what it does is it makes it a lot easier to use because each of the each of the sorts that each of the data sources are unique in their own way and you don't have a lot of redundancy kind of sort between and and this doesn't mean that we're only gonna have you know four or five head even within that archetype and hybrid approach the reason we can do this is that I can take very specific features of you know maybe an actor that we can't use the full likeness of and
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create that into a hybrid and that's actually not an issue at all we make we're making people that aren't actually two people but are combinations of people so basically we're combining we're using our own system to source our system which makes some sense the other cool part about that is because we're gonna have this ability it does make a pipeline for us making you guys admission givers our new heads a little bit easier but what's really cool about it I think is it is an interesting design idea that we're trying to flesh out between myself and Todd and CR it's the I call it the loopback or the feedback pipeline or the sins of a father kind of idea this is yeah the legacy or your errand looming or something like this whereas if you create a character and within death of a spaceman after you've died a certain
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amount of times or whatever you can't respawn and you have to create a new character but I would love to be able to then source back my original character as as a source head now within the pool and this is totally possible because again it exists as a combination of those those hex values we feed it back in as a source and then we blend against it now you can only do that so many times because eventually you will just end up back at the average you know it's going to just keep blending blending blending blending blending brother you'll just end up back to the average all the time but I like the option for that for four characters to do that so I like this concept of you know if you were playing the game as a criminal or something like this you've got a certain amount of reputation that when you roll your next character if he's kind of you know quote-unquote this son or your
00:34:45
child I like this idea that some of that reputation comes with you because yeah if your dad's a horrible criminal maybe you start life as a bit of a you know with a little bit of that right and and you have to work against it or if you just want to make something anew but I love the idea of being able to source back the the player head so we do and I'm sorry good we're doing where we could like source from different people to like other players like like your help and somebody my pool because you know so certain reason so that kind of goes to the to the copy/paste of the data right so we could absolutely do that because if you could share the data between players you could feed that back into your pool but one of the ideas that came up over this and by the way a lot of this is theory crafting still there's a none I don't have a plan for that hybrids are in that's happening this quarter but the the sins of a father
00:35:34
kind of thing is a middle yeah we're exploring all the potentials consequence in ways we can really leverage it right so so we've talked about possibly having like like the gene pool or that the head pool basically controlled via two org so for example the could expose all the heads although the characters that they have within their organs as sourcing so if the org just I don't know it's a dangerous road to tread Doughboy you just want everybody looking a certain way or looking a certain type is I mean might be I'd be able to get but it's also like sort of element of family or whatever you have do it just things to think about I don't know people spending time together I like the bigger nose org yeah I like the idea of like dominant trait sticking around like what if I have a player that has this massive crook nose and I just never die or whatever and
00:36:22
eventually like it's guys like a hundred or whatever like trace stick around the gene pool because uh killings there's a dangerous conversation there no I know I'm just a voting going down there yeah mm-hmm using opinions of everyone at this table they don't represent those a cladogram games Roberts face in the streets or I'm not diving in there whatsoever what's up but that is an idea that has been expressed that that Forks could share individually within there heterochromia it's actually the next question that came up here that's what it is it's about having different colored eyes and as far as the asset side of it I don't see a reason we couldn't support it I don't think that we do I haven't heard of any plans to do
00:37:11
so how do you feel about this John uh I loved the word again I'm just like different eye colors you're like it's it's a pretty it's a pretty rare and I'm like their color and the whole this is like I Donna me what's a dog for an anime yeah especially animals and anime animals and orders and education anime yeah uh you guys are freaking nerds I feel like we already support blade symmetry so they would just be like locking one island that asymmetry thing - yeah I mean actually the the helmet thing was a big part of that asymmetry decision because we supported asymmetry like manipulating your your face just directly asymmetry and that was a problematic because you can
00:38:00
even if you end up with a non humonculon character you still end up with a one that when the helmet morphs to match your face it's the helmet symmetry becomes the asymmetry in the helmet becomes really apparent and problematic yeah it's a really polite way to put it it looks awful right like I mean the bulbous you know thing yeah you have a slaver helmet that looks like a face and then you have half of it looking like it was melted on the material side which is what what supporting heterochromia would mean I don't know if we have any anything coming down the pipe for being able to do any manipulations of material at men at that scale that would be very similar
00:38:48
for how you would handle alterations to eyebrows makeup yeah so much tones so we did build this into the character system from the get-go as an option site I thought eventually we want this and actually what I thought eventually we want would be like holographic upgrades and things like that that you and I or contact lens on one eye that's where they are lands or a robot eye or something well but within the item ports at the character it's actually split up to left and right eye we just use this we use one of them right now and that's all and it has the two eyes in it so like the easiest way to do it is actually just to add another set of eyes and then we zone called one or the other yeah so there's actually four eyes but we're still calling the opposite ones do you know what I mean and that totally works right now maybe we can do it so I think depending on how much people want yeah
00:39:35
sure this is it's not a not a nightmarish add I'm holding a line for the start and all we do is want to be able to make cable from x-force right no that's exactly yes Cara 1ra and then yes yeah I mean things like scarification and having any sort of you know post like manipulation things like having augmentations or anything like that yeah prosthetics those are all would be handled on the asset side at this point same as like adding adding a hair which is a weird way to do it I'll admit like having if you'd if your guys well know if you're adding extra eye and are you adding a scar or something like doesn't it doesn't initially make sense that you would attach that to a person but they're probably oh yeah yeah the color is
00:40:25
somehow attached to the person yeah onto that's that's the sort of like abstraction you have to to get your head around in order to manipulate it mm-hmm correctly shrim so what's what's the term again that's asking about a single button to just randomize all yeah yes I've never moved it on the release we had a great forever yeah we have we had a great out we removed it just because and it's actually because we we didn't want to confuse about whether or not it would randomize the the head blending and the I Donna me aspect because those are just two completely different processes and we didn't get both of them working concurrently yeah so that that's why that's not in there right now so we
00:41:12
need to get those two things to line up nicely which actually ties into some of the stuff that that's interesting about for doing undo being able to manipulate those those steps all the different datasets yeah it with the different datasets yeah yes just that a randomized all and it checkmark weather allow homunculus or not so you end up looking like sloth from the Goonies yeah randomize him oh good well whenever you voted whenever Evo who is the main you know engineer behind all of this he loves to make some monsters I mean he always sends a video through he said check you know you like that like you know there's what will be updating the interface and evil kind of sent a video through with the interface that he founded likes and wants to work with and like there's just these these monsters
00:42:03
they're monsters they're crazy created yeah when somebody's no it's like is for people's sons at one head but one on one side one of the other it's very weird anyways so make up we're getting a lot of questions about the makeup yeah we talk about just like scars or just like you know a cybernetic what about the ability of maybe the same tech is doing different kind of eyebrows right yeah that's someone and and if people had probably noticed this anyways some of the skin tones for the females have makeup built into them it's so we there was kind of this character our past that they did to make pass basically against all the all the heads so they added some
00:42:52
some eyeliner eyeshadow kind of things but whether that's a separable thing it's completely up to character out on that front um it's again not a huge nightmare to do we have a great feature within the skin shader to deal with it but I'm not sure that it's gonna be perfect because the thing we have in the skin shader is really good for tattoos for decals for dirt or mud or face paint basically and the reason I say it like you know instead of blending nearly as well exactly and it doesn't it doesn't adapt the specular so it's the biggest thing that happens when you put on makeup is is you're changing the light reactionary so like a good example is that you know you put powder on so that you're not as greasy sort of looking we don't really
00:43:41
have that control so if we'd put makeup in it would look like face paint and not like makeup because makeup changes the specular reaction a lot of that skin so we'd have to support that that's also right now to have like a really good makeup it has to be pretty much painted into the texture itself and not a layer on top so we would need something like that so if we do progress on the tattoo sort of front or or or the face being sort of front we'll have to do something and that way but right now we wouldn't just put the makeup in because it would just look like face paint and it would look like a bunch of game developers thought what would makeup look like oh that's how and you know we have a choice platen here who is a who was a beauty specialist let's say she has podcasts and everything so we had had her come
00:44:29
over a couple times and we talked through this quite a few times and we even showed her that the sort of detail stuff which doesn't that's not at all what it should look like no don't do please don't do this so so yeah face paint yes makeup not not not really it's kind of built into the shader and I know what is some of the skin tones already have it within there many many are the tails of video game disaster when the developers try to design the design looks for things that they don't fully understand themselves absolutely like hi Donna me like hetero which leads me to the next question what are our chances of seeing more hairstyles relevant to people of color ah that's it that's a great great question it's it's really one for Josh on the on the character outside I do not
00:45:17
know exactly what they're quarter plans are so we're doing our quarterly planning over there over this week anyways so we'll know I mean next week I guess but we won't be on the show so hopefully mostly they've got to get all those hairs that are in there for me if if is my call and not really I'll talk to Josh but but we've got to get the hairstyles that are and they're all updated to the new hair shader first that's number one before we add any new content let's make sure the concept we have is at the highest level that it can be and then let's add some new stuff but if we just start adding new stuff and the old shader is just more work that we have to come back to so I'd rather not do that and of course will almost certainly have an update on that ATV when the time comes yeah definitely ATV you're back here in authority definitely know once we have the new iteration that we're that we're working
00:46:04
on the design for now figuring out that new flow and breaking down how much work it is and and yeah how much of the how much the quarter I have to steal from these poor guys yeah we people show it and chocolate let's do a follow up to something Chris mentioned the other week about being able to blend male and female right now the blends are all mal mal mal mal for males which is oppressive or for females which is impressive but not between males and females to get that traditional mom-and-pop you know thing is you mentioned that it's something that we're interested in something that we might pursue down the road this person is just asking if there's an update is this is this a is this a neat is this as soon or is this assume yeah it's the second one and it's it's less about whether we want
00:46:54
to do it or not and it's it's more about this this whole systems the data management challenge so I had mentioned you know I feel like I'm just I'm dealing with it I'm the only one answering questions how about you guys take those well I uh I haven't at least seen the face melting your you describe yeah okay so I want to describe that first so right now if you blended a male and female because of the positional differences of the of the of the the origin join our neck joint that we actually align when you blend a male to a female right now it looks like it's really creepy them to face melts into the female yeah so I like it literally melts I have drawn great images I mean there's a first for pike in that episode of Star Trek well what's super creepy as it keeps animating so it's like a melted talking face and it's really whoa like you know
00:47:45
exactly right so there's some there's some great images and anytime somebody comes on a Stuart studio tour asked to see the page the things we've seen because wait images on it and we are happy to show that is under NDA only yeah so right now they melt the reason they melt is that the offset is different so again the females about four inches shorter than the male the origin position is totally different so we don't do the blend necessarily relative to just that origin but that's what we could do to do that work what it would mean though is either taking all the data from the female proto rig right now and adding that to the male and then taking all the male ones and I think that's the Frodo ring there but the issue I have with that is what I talked about in a TV is the performance
00:48:32
winds that we got from this whole system so like and to read to reiterate like this is massive every all the heads in that one proto file are cheaper than any single one face was before so we now have all the faces for the same cost that a single face was before like the difference there is incredible I don't want to make that much worse I don't want to I don't want to take away that benefit that we have because as you add more heads into that that gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger bigger and if we take all the female ones we out of its the same place now that means every character that loads has to lose the same sort of pool of memory but if you're only rendering males you're only gonna have you know that I think it's something like 60 or 70 Meg's at this point but if you're only rendering
00:49:20
females it's only about 20-30 Meg's could we go out a couple less of those but combining them together you'd always have the same amount block of memory which would be easier to manage but it's gonna be more then you necessarily need to use you have to make that choice between you kitty now we're gonna add 20 30 40 more female has this or are we gonna use that space to put male head put the male heads that are exist in that scene that's correct yeah exactly and that's why I say it's a data management problem because it's you know for example I'd really like to get a squadron proto rig so that the only ones that are squadron related are loading in that in that proto rig so it's a way of us managing that data in a kind of an interesting way but it does take some work that's all so yeah far further out but again if there becomes a lot of gameplay relevance to doing it like we
00:50:09
do do the sense of a father thing or if we do you want to you guys to picture parents or something like that like the GTA kind of approach then then yeah that'll become more important but at this point it's not really massive requirement and I think you guys will get super far just with the hybrids already and I think that's gonna make a big big big difference to the way that you guys interface with it and I don't think you'll find necessarily that you need to blend them yeah I think it's a matter of priority it's more important to get more female heads and yes double up on the male and we're I always get to is just a I want a reason to do it I don't like doing things for the sake of doing things I'd rather have a goal or an end goal or a reason to actually do that tech rather than just doing tech for the sake of tech questions about eyebrows it probably just goes along to the same thing with the makeup yeah the eyebrows are baked in yeah that's
00:50:57
like the texture and and and same problem around your eyebrows you do get a difference back to the reaction and we actually have to paint out the cloth around the eyebrows because what ends up looking it ends up looking really fake when when light rolls oh man do your faces have so much subtle stuff in it that if it's not there completely breaks it down and and it's just it's constant but within the eyebrows the we paint out the gloss in that area so basically make it less glossy around the eyebrows the reason we do that is it looks a lot less fake is the idea they're part of the texture right now what I've talked to Corey about it's the same problem with scalps we have to make sure we've remove all the basic hair out of some of our texture scans so when the guys were scanned with textures they had little beanie caps on with their hair sticking
00:51:45
honest up we got to remove all of that because now we have a generic scalp that we can apply and we need a scout because it has directionality on it so when inspected the rolls around and then when you put the hair on top of that but you can't have other hair underneath because your hairline then doesn't line up to what the scalp is and it can look really weird so basically what I'm saying is we've got to treat eyebrows the same as hair we actually kind of talked about this already but I I was so impressed by the question I want to make sure it gets in there and see if there's anything more we can add to it the question I murdered this verbatim here says a child can always be slightly outside the limitations of their parents idea a child can grow taller or shorter than both parents DNA phases are always in between the two pair faces so if player face will always be more average than the parents faces how will we prevent all phases from
00:52:33
ending up as the same average face after a number of generations and then introduces heirs every time you do that there's no no clear solution on that right now but I quite honestly haven't had it be a massive problem yet and at the point that it does become one then sure we'll do something about it but right now I just don't see it as a is a huge issue especially because again we're gonna randomize the weights and everything within their mom you could eventually get to that state but i just-i can't-- haven't seen it happen with regard to character customization it's a matter of introducing more extreme options yeah and waffle more meaningful choices to make I mean with regards to the legacy system it would be about managing it so that it does introduce elements of error
00:53:22
does within that blend you wouldn't ever end up beyond that blend but you because we blend between four different heads you don't necessarily have just the weights between these two people that's right eventually you know this just that this does come into the depth of a spaceman and yeah and legacy and stuff eventually you know the mom's gonna have the data among cue us to just really shake things up yeah I like the word just take it's my gift to you a minor detail but can you let us choose skin color and texture before we model our faces yes so we are that's one of the things that we're trying to do for the the v-2 is to make those decisions less
00:54:11
segregated we want to make it so that you're able to jump back and forth between all the elements that really impact your choices much much easier so we want to bring in the the skin selection into the same screen as where you're doing a lot of the head selection and stuff that's some of the stuff that we're exploring right now and and yeah that'll definitely help that that process because right now if you want to see what what this feature would look like and you start going towards something oh the skin tone doesn't really feel right anymore I want to go towards something lighter or darker or different and then you need to navigate away from the thing you were just doing it's it's a it's definitely a UX problem it's like context switching you totally lost the perfect frame child yeah I
00:55:00
thought that person would look like with a different tone I mean I mean vv1 of this character customizer with blending is all about how do we communicate how this novel system works to two new players one of the things that was really important is it is not a sculpting system so we don't want to use any any tools that operate similar to what you might use in ZBrush or Macs or anything look I'm gonna take this thing and move it over here that's not how the data works it's not something we're gonna be able to actually get you towards the result that you're expecting from China at the moment you try to do something and it it and it reacts incorrectly you immediately have a break of that mental model and you immediately have a bad experience so step one not sculpting we need to communicate that and then we want it step two was trying
00:55:49
to get it so that we can try to communicate but when you're blending these things you have the full breadth of choices at every step so one of the initial things is like we we keep showing you the heads that come in and out and they do all that stuff because we felt that it was important to try to get across that when you go to edit the nose you don't need to be using the same pool of four foreheads to manipulate that nose that you used for the brows or you can have you can have a unique head selection on every single of these features and blend them independently that is a level of control and minutia that we're feeling is proven to be a little bit beyond what has helped us
00:56:36
more what do with yeah so we're I we've sort of keyed in on the thing that worked the thing that was was nice about the way that we set it up is trying to make the coarsest broadest choices early and refine from there so each choice is how do get closer to what I'm looking for instead of how do I identify which thing I need to change so it's you know focusing in more on then the next step is I want to look more like this guy and I want to look more like this I want this skin instead so bringing that into the same panel making it so that you don't have to go to a different stuff is absolutely part of that process of how do I give you the clearest broadest choice such that you can refine from
00:57:25
there yeah so for the for the v2 for the v2 stuff what we do and what we've talked about a lot is is currently the UX and the way that people end up making their characters I don't know we're not feeling like they're actually getting the result that they necessarily want or expect necessarily and a lot of this is a experimentation but rather than being be held to what your result is because I think you know a lot of people play with it and and they'll get to a result that they're kind of happy with but it kind of takes you there rather than you taking it there if that makes any sense in the v2 version of it that the whole that whole mentality is kind of switching where we'd rather you have a very precise cut you know as Catholics talked about like it ever increasing
00:58:13
sort of complexity controls within it but get the result that you want out of it actually a little more directly yeah if you go into the system with an idea of what you want you will get it we want you to be able to get it currently that's a bit more difficult because you have to sort of comb through the system for the tools that you need and that was you know in service of trying to explain this this novel system but it it might eat up those choices and so we're trying to clarify those choices so that they can be a little bit more useful and available when players want to use them yep we're just about I want to get a couple more questions in here for the chat somebody had a suggestion would be really cool if we could trigger certain emos during the character creation just to see how the thing else
00:59:01
and put that one spent yeah one more task on me is the x2 something we talked about yeah and I was like alright that's great for me to task and it's on the bottom of like 20 cuz it later and then Spence goes Sean do you want eeeem own animations or do you want the heads blend you know and when you press X it actually goes away and it's like we got to make a call and I'm like yeah I want to emotes but and actually we were meant and we tried to get it in time I don't I don't think we made it the different animation at the end for the review oh that got it got it is in it kind of cuts to the new animation student like oh really it just kind of blends we gotta go baby we got a fixed date yeah blend time yeah school I didn't know it got in because we did get some animation at the end uh nobody liked the the pose that we had at the end because it was super slouchy it was
00:59:49
like yeah well no the girl I guess you're the female looks very slow she and what it and the angle of it it was coming back yeah so what it does it with the at that fov and with that perspective it makes her head look tiny on the body like it does to the male - to be fair it's just it's seemingly more obvious on the female so so short answer is yeah we want we want to get that but it'll become a priority call once we get closer to the end of the quarter I'm sure yeah we wanted to expand the review step with a lot of those sorts of things of not checking out your inner emotes checking out different loadouts checking out different lighting situations that's right and I don't know if we've talked about it much but like that the whole example I keep using and and hopefully people recognize it is the is the XCOM photo mode like - and when you were making your soldiers basically you had
01:00:40
this great little photo mode that you could go into which was like you could see different attachments on them and put different backgrounds you know things like that that was kind of the mentality around review we'd also like for v2 and I'm not sure if we put this in the estimate actually yet but we'd like to have the different loadouts so we'd like to be able to show you guys at the end of that similar to how other character graders in mmo's work generally they like to show you like the really really awesome armor like endgame perfect you know you've got everything like the shop there I said basically right so so I can imagine just having the three loadouts within it would be nice so basically the the you know no clothes civilian clothes an awesome armor so you could just see how your characters gonna look with each one of them I think would be a nice next
01:01:28
thing okay last question and recognizing that Josh is in here when I so would not be able to talk about this a whole lot sure let's promise stuff on his back oh yeah I can speak for Josh yeah me too the this is a lot about we've been talking about the facial customization because a lot of a lot of this first V one is specific to the fit to the face to the base into the head what about south of the neck it's the character creator going to expand to think it's a phrase I'm looking at you because you're talking uh yeah we'll do that in the how to do the whole Jared that yeah yeah all right is this going to are we thinking this is going to expand to be games the views and opinions of all the people on there but I'm so sorry I know we talked a lot about the platelet the player
01:02:21
metrics how they have to be exercised but but is that but is that gonna stop us from being able to do like muscle tone changes you know so I can be a soft body person at the same okay so Ripton yeah and perceptually replace and address is very keen to do this and he's he's pretty confident that he could get there longhand cough a keen and confident it's white so that's why I told him I adore him for that because because I have my own reservations about it I'm not I'm not sure technically it's a it's a technical and and a bit of a visual thing to we have you know 1502 I think about 1500 character items right now when we did the facial attachments there was like 50 not a big deal to go over the facial attachments put the mark-up in the DA
01:03:09
that the facial customization and runtime deformers needed a little different story on 1500 mm assets and that's what's getting harder and harder by the way about about doing systems within star citizen and for the game is that the sheer breadth of content that you have sometimes have to update makes a it makes a very real impact on the feature like are we gonna do it this way because holy holy that's a lot of updates that we gotta make it routes also it's easy to balloon from there like you're just you're just talking about character assets for what they're wearing yeah you're not even talking about what's what has to change about their animations whatever change about anything short harding yeah the seats and the ladders like that's true so so i'd i cool i don't expect he'll do anything with the heights but absolutely the body shapes we do want this right we do want this it's just there is a
01:03:58
technical challenge within it and there's different ones than the face brought but i have lots of confidence and address and evo and those guys over in frankfurt and they're absolutely looking at it but i mean we can't promise it at all because we don't have it work in yet but we'd like to and if we get there it'll use very similar system with the runtime deformers and it'll be quite interesting i think once we get there all right well that wraps this up thank you so much calyx spencer shawn for taking time out of your busy day i know everybody's a got a lot of 3-5 tasks on them to try to get that make that final push out the door for those out there and star citizen land keep an eye out for a road map update when that comes keep an eye out for the
01:04:46
push of 3.5 when that goes live i don't have a time but i know every it's all hands on deck trying to make that happen and yeah that's it that's all I got thank you so much closer next week everybody just give everybody just do the dead stare just where's the camp oh that camera oh that's a yeah oh that's a 2d camera that's what that is it's a big 2d camera thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you
01:05:34
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Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.