Planetary Pyro | Journey to 4.0 (CitizenCon 2952)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:03

   foreign content team today I'm a senior environment artist and I want to show you some of the cool stuff that we worked on in the last two years so I have pyro One open already it's live in engine this is like the current version of pyro so we're still gonna do like a Polish pass on it so not everything is done done but we still wanted to show you what we have so far so the idea behind pyro one is that it gets hit by solar flares like repeatedly we got some concept art from the concept art team and the way that they

2. 00:00:51

   visualized these solar flare hits was like glowing marks and streaks all over the planet unfortunately the tech for the glowing part of it is still being worked on so we had to make do with what we could use so it's not glowing but you can still see a lot of the blue coming in yeah as you can see pyro one already has some volumetric clouds not all of the Pyro planets have their volumetric clouds yet so let's jump to the one of the blue spots on the planet I just tweaked like the sun position a little bit to make it look a bit nicer and then you can see why it's blue we added like tons of these crystals to

3. 00:01:40

   pyro one um we've used crystals before on voila but I think we were a bit too um yeah we played it a bit too safe on voila I think we only put like crystals as ground cover assets but for pyro one we really wanted to push the shapes so you can find like these really large crystals here Heisenberg would be really happy here okay then another interesting thing to highlight here plants over there so what's interesting about those is we made them like three or four years ago they were supposed to be uh part of like a mission in uh on a space station the mission was scrapped um unfortunately

4. 00:02:29

   and ever since then the this asset set has just been sitting in our like Vault it's a really cool Plant set and I'm happy that we finally found a spot to use them so this is another spot I want to highlight it's also important for us that we do add something memorable to each planet um in the case of pyro one it's this spiky rock set that looks really intimidating we try to push the scale of the assets for the Pyro system we felt like by now we got like the the basic rocks and the scattering of the basic rocks to like a very good quality so now we can explore more crazy shapes I guess and this is one of the sets that we made um it's not done yet it still needs a

5. 00:03:17

   Polish pass but I wanted to show you guys what it feels like when you're in game walking around here now I want to show you my personal favorite biome of pyro one it's this biome here which has these really cool looking rock formations they are massive in scale like if I jump in game here you get a good feeling for the scale of them yeah it's possible to land your spaceship on them um it's probably really fun to yeah race through here we can imagine that this is going to be like a nice combat space as well because they do provide nice nice cover let's just jump to a couple different areas on pyro one before we move to Pyro 2.

6. 00:04:09

   [Music] so now we're on pyro 2 in comparison to pyro one you can immediately see the planet is like way more colorful there's more variation in the use and values of the colors we have like Browns and like bone white spots some red and it's all contrasted by like a blue clear ocean so pyro 2 doesn't have volumetric clouds yet but they will be there at release so now I jump to one of the biomes of pyro

7. 00:04:59

   2 what I want to highlight here is the improvements that we made to how acids spawn on the side of mountains that was something that was always quite challenging for us to do to have some natural transition from the terrain to the geometry and then also have like the rocks form in a natural way um now we can make nicer rock formations it's not quite there yet um there are still improvements planned for it but I think in comparison to what we had before this is a big step forward also what you might see is the drawing distance of acids has been greatly improved so everything you see here in the distance is actual geometry so if we were to fly all the way over there you

8. 00:05:47

   would you will see that this is um yeah like Cliff formations and I think it looks really cool like the the silhouette of the terrain yeah let's fly through the Canyons yeah I would do this in a spaceship but I'm horrible at flying so I'm just going to use the camera in editor so now I jumped ahead to a really cool biome on pyro 2. um it's simple but I think sometimes less is more in this case what sets this biome apart from the rest of the planet is that we added these calcified trees and they spawn in very dense clusters so you almost get like little forests of them so it's supposed to look very dry and kind of dead but still in a pretty

9. 00:06:37

   way okay if we look at it from this angle what I really like about this biome is the contrast that you have here on the terrain it's pale it's dry but then in the background you have like the nice clear blue ocean so this is one of the red areas on pyro 2. it's kind of like a sandy desert but we try to add like a lot of different geology assets different mixes of bushes and grasses so it's not like a dead desert but it feels kind of lively and you find like lots of foliage here we have like these cliffs in the background which are pretty dark and it's another nice contrast of this planet where you have like the saturated

10. 00:07:25

    red terrain and the dark Bedrock so jumping to this point here what I want to highlight is the improvements that we made to our ground textures so previously like two three years ago we had to rely a lot on ground cover assets to add geometry and detail that the ground textures alone couldn't give us but ever since we got terrain displacement we get like really nice shapes just from the textures alone and then if you if you combine it with ground cover assets yeah the result is really successful how things blend together and the amount of detail that you see on the ground

11. 00:08:17

    you saw some of it during last year's keynote demo but I want to use the opportunity to give you like an in-depth look at some of the biomes so last year you saw that like yellow is kind of the the accent color of pyro 3 so from this distance you can see through the volumetric clouds like a lot of the yellow coming through we talked about what's making it look yellow which is the Moss and I want to like jump down to the planet surface and show you the amount of detail that you will see when going up close to the Moss so we're down at the surface now I'm just gonna jump in game a lot of time and effort was spent on making the Moss look just right so like the right level of fluffiness and density so

12. 00:09:07

    it looks really nice when it like covers these rocks um and then we also have like lots of smaller moss on the ground um we combine it with like yellow grass and it makes for like a really interesting biome so it was really important for us to make this biome look really dense um so we pushed the amount of acids that we're using so it's basically completely covered in foliage compared to Hurston for example which Hurston and Microtech which are probably our densest planets when it comes to foliage um this is way denser the good thing is that we don't have any trees here so all the budget we can use on ground cover on grass now we jump to a pyro Coast biome the improvements we got to the coast

13. 00:09:56

    biomes is that we can now use a opr override for every single biome previously we could only use one Global override per Planet which as you can imagine is not enough when you have something like Stanton 4 where you have snowy regions and the spruce tree regions and one object preset just can't cover every Coast we added these Coral um this like Coral geology set to have some of the yellow also along the coast so you see here we always have like a little bit of yellow coming through uh and eventually it transitions into the nice Mossy areas previously when we made Coast object presets we played it a bit safe and only

14. 00:10:44

    used one or two asset sets but due to the fact that we can now push the density along the coast as well you can find different kinds of coral seaweed different Pebbles and rocks and other stuff now I jump to one of the volcanic regions on pyro 3 you might not expect to find vegetation here but we did add a little bit of vegetation to this region to make it a bit more interesting what I want to highlight here is the quality bar that we set for ourselves when it comes to improving the look of our vegetation so this is one of my favorite new vegetation sets that we created you can see the amount of detail on display here we have like nice little

15. 00:11:32

    flowers and these like knots or whatever like pots and it's just like a really cool acid set so when flying over the volcanic regions you will find pockets of these uh scattered all around just to make the area like a little bit more lively before we move on let's jump around to a couple more places which is my personal favorite of the Pyro system yeah just full disclosure you can probably tell that the clouds here are not done yet they do look a bit busted but yeah they will be they will

16. 00:12:20

    look amazing once the planet comes out so let's focus on the terrain shapes we created some of these terrain shapes special for pyro4 because it's Loosely inspired by like Scottish Highlands um so there's not a lot of like verticality not a lot of trees so everything is kind of coming from the terrain and from the smaller acids that we scatter on the terrain geometry so jumping in game and then you can see the amount of ground cover assets on display um the variation in color but it's all grounded by like the the color of the soil um and it just looks like we have multiple new vegetation sets on display here

17. 00:13:09

    so first of all we have this bush set here which is called um I think it's called a fire stock which yeah it's kind of like a modified version of the real world thing they add like a little bit of color to the area um and make things pop then we have these ones here I forgot the name of the asset set yeah they also look quite saturated and interesting we also try to improve the quality of our tree sets if you if you compare like the trees that we have on Hurston to these ones the geometry count is way higher the texture resolution is a bit higher and they just look more polished and nicer which means that eventually we have to go back to

18. 00:13:59

    person to Microtech and give the trees there like a little makeover so what was really important for us was to improve the blending between different biomes so you see here these are two fairly simple biomes there's a clear distinction between them but the transition still feels very natural so if we go down here you have like the red grass and it kind of feathers out yeah it feels very organic and natural let's jump to the most experimental biome that we've made so far so for this biome here the concept our team gave us um some really interesting concept art because this is easily some of the the biggest rock formations that we have in

19. 00:14:47

    the game so far actually let me try to fly a ship so you can see the scale of them so they're massive in scale and what was the hardest part about getting these to look right is that they're supposed to look really good from a distance because you would expect something this big um yeah to be visible almost from space but then the tricky thing is also to make them look good when you're standing up close to them let me jump in game so you see how big these rocks actually are so they are massive in scale you can probably lend your spaceship on them and walk on them and they make you feel like

20. 00:15:37

    really small but I think it's it's a really good visual that you have these like dark gray rocks against the the Crimson of the soil and the grass so here's a little happy accident where we have the volumetric clouds covering the terrain and because the the height map the difference in height um is so large we actually get like shapes of the terrain poking out of of the volumetric clouds yeah you can probably spot some of the tiling issues that we have here which is something that we still need to look at but like I said before this is still work in progress so it's gonna change a bit because I mentioned biome diversity along the coasts before I just wanted to highlight what one of the coast biomes

21. 00:16:25

    on pyro 4 looks like so this one is kind of this wet sand we scattered some of the seaweed some of these yeah lava plates and some of these Pebbles and then we also get like nice seaweed moving with the waves of the ocean one interesting thing on pyro 4 is that we have a massive crater region on other planets we have individual craters which are a whole height map or like three four smaller craters on one height map but this is actually multiple height Maps forming one large crater and you can see it all the way out in space like this whole region is one big crater so it's a mix of like the global

22. 00:17:14

    texture and then the height maps of the ecosystems spawning on top plus the volumetric clouds make it look really epic here now we've flown down to the surface of the crater we wanted this to feel very yes spooky and grim and kind of dark so we have these dark fantasy Forest looking trees yeah which look kind of creepy and then we bring some of the red grass back from the previous biome we go down to the surface of the crater you can see that we added this Dark Forest looking tree set some creepy shapes um some moist

23. 00:18:06

    looking ground cover assets and this whole area is supposed to make you feel a bit uneasy it's supposed to be hostile and it's not safe without your suit on so far we looked at four of the Pyro planets so let's switch it up and look at one of the moons this one is pyro 5c similar to pyro4 you can see that it has a landmark that you can see from space in this case it's not a crater but it's like yeah like a long streak of um slick obsidian so let's fly down to the surface of the streak and have a look what it looks like from up close again we start with like the global

24. 00:18:54

    height map where um there's there's like a little bit of a bump up and then it goes down to form um the crack and then we scatter um the ecosystem uh height maps on top to get the look that we want so if we go down here you can see we start with like flatland shapes some smaller craters and then it transitions into like these quite spiky looking uh rock for me Mountain formations and then down here they feather into like these longer Ridges of bedrock before it becomes smooth down here and if we jump to this point

25. 00:19:44

    which is a really cool spot because like the sun just hits the obsidian in the right way and everything looks like nice and shiny you can see here that the ground looks quite different from other planets so instead of soil it's it's yeah it almost looks artificial in a way acid wise we're using one of our obsidian sets that you can also find on Stanton 4. this one got a bit of an update a bit of Polish so we improved the shapes different textures just to make it look extra cool like the way the sunlight hits um these surfaces to make this area a bit more interesting we decided to add some of these white light gray shrubs

26. 00:20:33

    just so the area doesn't feel too samey and it's always nice to have like the occasional pocket of vegetation to set the obsidian biome apart from the rest of the planet we went with the opposite route for these biomes here so instead of being shiny and Slick they are more dry covered in dry sand the vegetation is dry we added some of these spiky shapes to add some verticality to the scattering but yeah outside the obsidian crack this is what you will find on the planet most of the time so this go to point I picked to show some of the subtle color

27. 00:21:22

    that we added to pyro 5c so the obsidian crack is like kind of just dark gray black the desert I just showed is also light gray so we felt this needed a bit a bit of a color breakup so we added some of these red use to uh the occasional biome it's very Rocky you also find the the red sand on the rocks from the biome accumulation and it looks really nice how how the red creeps up into the crevices of the height maps in the background we're going to end our showcase today on pyro six pyro 6 has a very interesting color palette like I really like the

28. 00:22:11

    yellows and the pale um beige tones of the terrain and then you have another blue ocean um as you can see the terrain is kind of uh ridden by craters and we get these really cool shapes where the ocean fills in those craters if we jump all the way down to the edge of one of those craters um so now we're at the edge of one of those craters I'm jumping in game right now just to show you what it feels like walking along here you can see that we added some dramatic looking uh Coral shapes and then eventually you walk down here towards

29. 00:23:00

    one of those craters that's filled with water we have a couple of floating meshes here on the left and this is still work in progress so one of us probably me has to go in and uh yeah adjust the settings of the spawning here and then we're right at the edge and I really like the the color of the water and how it looks against the the backdrop of the white chalky terrain then over here I want to introduce you to our human scale ref mesh his name is rudiger um and he's super helpful when we set up object presets because you can immediately see how the scale of assets feel

30. 00:23:49

    um when you have him in situation like he adds context to the to the scene he spawns every time that object presets spawns and yeah he helps us find the right values when it comes to the scale of our Assets in general this biome here is another good example of how our ground textures work together with the acids that we put on top so the transition is really nice from this round texture to this one and then we have like the same rock set on both of them uh and it makes for like a nice amount of detail on the ground then occasionally we spawn some of these spider looking

31. 00:24:37

    um ground cover meshes so this spot here is really nice because you get like the particles um the monochromatic terrain the acids and it's all against the backdrop of the Skybox of the Pyro system which is red then we get like some really cool looking Sun Beams coming through the uh the volumetric clouds here and then if I turn the Sun and we make this uh dark and I jump in game you can see how drastically the the Skybox impacts the lighting um when you're on the dark side of the

32. 00:25:27

    planet and the Skybox is just yeah it looks it looks really good so this is the sky box for the entire pyro system so you will see it on every single pyro planet it's just that pyro 6 has like a very thin atmosphere so you see it well here happy to have had this opportunity to show you guys the work that we did in the last two years I'm super excited to see you guys explore the Pyro system for the first time to hear your feedback um there's still work that we have to do but I hope that you are even more excited than before after seeing what I showed you today