Star Citizen: 10 for the Chairman - Special Edition

21 September 201600:29:41811 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] welcome to a special edition of uh 10 for the chairman I'm here my guest Josh Herman our art director character art director who's based here in Los Angeles but he's the head of the global uh character Pipeline and uh we're doing a slightly different format uh We've sort of decided to try and switch around the 10 for the dot dot dot um show so that we ask questions specifically about something we want to talk to uh talk about and then you guys come back with questions and we sort of pick the most popular and the ones that are suitable for the topic so um we have 10 uh the topic was uh about sort of character and most specifically sort of heads and and and facial stuff um so uh we're going to get to that but first I'd like to say
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thank you to Davidian who sent these very nice little teddy bears of Squadron 4 too mine's got a little name on the back there you are Chris Roberts very good I think there's quite a few more of these showed up now I just need to make sure I put this here where he doesn't collaps on the table and he can listen to our answers sit down Teddy not very good right one more time come on Teddy sit correctly there you go see not too much abuse of teddy bears as you can see all right first question is from the deadly Kenny and gazl bacon of War Kenzie snow and Steve Hunter so I guess this the question asked by quite a few people popular one they all ask so we know that character heads will be scanned in however will we be able to manipulate these scan versions to customize them to create our own characters or will we only be able
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to select a specific set for example fature features body morphology Etc so uh well a couple of things we've got sort of two levels of heads one is we scanned a whole bunch of our actors uh that we had while we doing the Squadron 42 um shoot and also a bunch of uh you know Foundry 42 folks and Imaginarium folks so I think we have over about 160 heads or so already scanned they in various processes process of being um sort of brought to sort of final quality and uh we kind of have a plan to modulate and let you sort of change and build your own uh player head that's um you know not a preset one so our plan isn't really to say oh you can have uh one of these eight male heads and one of
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these eight female heads you know you pick sort of a base head maybe combine a few of them and then also alter the uh you know various features on it um you know your hairstyle uh skin color eye color s of the general stuff and and and uh sort of adapt it around um so um I think you'll be able as a player to sort of build any kind of face that you want I mean I think a little later on there's another question that's sort of relative to this asked that question uh but um the way that we have it right now is we have 18 uh sort of I guess player heads which I think evenly split between male and female uh and so those would form the base nine architect heads for male and nine architect heads for female and then from there on you would sort of
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customize it from there you could take pieces from the other ones like you talked about that we scanned and then you could kind of create your own custom one based off of that y but we won't let you you can't have Mark H's head or Gary alman's head for not um okay so uh that's the that's the first question uh second question uh comes from Lieutenant Commander Draco and Sue cabi I think TS u k a b i not sure if I pronounce that right they are asking are both wondering about hairstyles and how customizable will they be so we're going to have a lot of different variations of hairstyles uh we have a I mean we've already scanned you know like you said 150 actors and so each one of those is going to have a lot of different variations uh you're not going to be able to customize it in the same way like you're not be able to comb one hairstyle that granular you're not going to be able to do that uh but you will
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have a huge selection both in style parting uh lengths colors yeah I mean I think we have I mean we we we have I mean besides we have specific hairstyles that we've chosen for actors and we have some that are specific to the actors uh but we also have again like set of NPC hairstyles and so we have you know the various you can be a skined you can have a mohawk you can have a Caesar cut you can have ponytail and all sorts of different hairstyle so if you think of a hairstyle out there I think we've got we'll have it something we have archetype for it that you can choose and then you can choose the color of your hair and then you can put on your head so basically you know the the base would start with an archetype head uh then choose what kind of style of hair you want what kind of hair color you want eye color you want maybe what skin color you want and
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then on top of that you can start to adjust facial features um so you know it's not it won't be too dissimilar to a lot of uh you know sophisticated sort of Avatar creation um setups in in other online other online games or even other single player games okay next question uh comes from malagor who asks uh with the amount of detail in character creation will it let me make my own doppelganger so what do you think Josh you think we'll able to make a doppelganger I think with the amount of heads that we've scanned you'll probably be able to find somebody who has like eyes like yours or a mouth like yours or you know different facial features like yours so with that you could probably like Mr Potato Head like put those pieces together and find something that looks kind of like you so you should be able to try to get close I mean I do
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sometimes when I play games try to make the character look like me uh don't necessarily succeed all the time but you never know okay next question comes from hars who asks character heads as in the modeling of the heads so I guess they're trying to qualify the question that we asked when we were soliciting these a while back uh if so I'm curious about how long the process takes to model an in-game render of someone's face for what we do uh we always um currently anyway uh we don't model it um just from scratch artistically we scan a person an actor uh fully we have a whole rig of uh you know 50 plus cameras that go around the head and we we essentially use photog Grammy to digitize and take a 3D snapshot of both um the geometry or the the sort of
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3D mesh of the head as well as what uh the face um textures would be uh and then we take that and then we do a lot to it after that so I don't know if you after that we kind of especially for some of the main actors we do full facial capture so they're getting blend shapes on specific ways that they talk um so that adds a whole another kind of layer so you that's a really difficult thing to do if you're just going to be sculpting ahead from scratch cuz I think our characters have like some upwards of 400 blend shapes that would be 400 individual sculps that we would need to make to match what we're doing uh so it's really not approach we would want to be taking to get the realism that we want especially for the actors that we have we work with there's a company called three lateral who are sort of quite well known for um their head rig
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and head animation technology and sort of pushing forward the field of scanning live real people and bring them into the 3D World we've been working with them for quite a while they've also in the past you know they did rise for instance back for krych which is in the cry engine and uh you know our head rig of the head rigs out there is you know we'll talk to it in a bit but the by far the highest Fidelity uh head rig that they've done uh I think and it's probably higher Fidelity or up there with anyone else's uh head rig uh but you know so it's a big process so if you go in and do a full set an actor will sit in this sort of whole scanning setup and we will take 78 uh basically fa poses for them so you know it's sort of like things kind of like you your nose raise an eyebrow open and you have to do
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that and each one takes about a minute collects all the data from all the cameras builds it on the computer and then you take another one you do it so it takes it can take anywhere depending on how quick or slow the person in the seat is an hour to two hours to do the full 78 um pose set and that builds and that basically gets built down by a lot of uh the techniques that three leral do into this sort of 300 pose M blend shape set up and then of course on top of the uh 400 POS blend shapes I think about 440 actually for our higher tier characters um it also has you know a whole bunch more has bones underneath that like something like and also drives specific Maps so when they're doing those specific faces like the forehead uh it drives wrinkle maps and animated diffuse maps for our higher so it's not just blend shapes it's not just bones
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it's a a wrinkle map which is sort of sort of telling the Shader kind of what parts of the skin so that's almost like a like the the wrinkle information you see here yeah kind of like it's a bump map and then the the animated diffuse is sort of showing like how your color changes in your skin so you scrunch something up maybe it'll get red or whatever it would be so it's a pretty long process but after even doing that we bring it in uh and then we actually do sort of an artistic pass yeah kind of like a makeup Polish Polish or makeup pass in a way cuz a lot of when you see those actors getting scanned it's you know you usually have to scrub their face and so you can get these dots and you get really accurate information of what they look like but that's also not what they would look like on the film set because they don't have like makeup and you know when you go on film sometimes most of the time you have like
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a very specific you don't look like you don't look like you woke up in the morning exactly everyone makes you up to look really great in a film light you properly and so uh when we actually scan uh the actors uh we don't want any makeup on them because it's for how they sort of build the 3D head so then we have this process that we bring the the the head in and then we sort of do our own sort of makeup pass uh on the character and set it up in such a way that they're going to look like a movie star playing uh running around in our 3D world that's part of our process so we do all this kind of assembling of the data that we scan and then we bring it in here and do our own pass on top of it to sort of take it up to that extra level we really work on things like the eyes the tongue the teeth uh and we
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still have a whole bunch of additional Graphics work to be done so uh the eye Shader is going to get a lot more work hair Shader hair Shader is a big one so that's our probably weakest point now so a lot of the images you'll you'll be seeing during this 10 for the chairman um we don't have um what our intended hair Shader is going to be but our hair Shader is going to be to the level of uh the best hair shaders you've seen out there in in real time uh games and uh and then also work a little bit on the skin Shader too so our goal is to sort of when the characters uh you know when you play Squadron 42 for instance the level of uh character um Tech and visual level will be as good or better than anything out there so that's what we're shooting for we're working really hard on it we' got a lot of time people work on it we're not there yet but I think uh you'll be seeing in this particular
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episode sort of some stuff along the way and it's only just going to get better okay so uh the next question comes from Perry who uh asks wouldn't it be nice to get some faces from your backers is that even possible can you tell us what is the hardest part of character creation and why we just talked about how uh the process we go through the scanning and so it's pretty in depth yeah pretty in- depth I mean so we definitely could scan some backers out there but we would have to have the full rig set up right now we have the rig set up at eing Studios takes a while to set it up so we sort of can have a sort of semi-permanent setup at eling CU that's what we've been doing all the Squadron 42 shooting and so when we bring an actor in and we shoot with them we also make sure we scan them uh and at the same time if we've got found 42 crew people or people from over here in LA or people from imaginer and they
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want to sort of appear in the game we scan them too it's not out of the realm possibility that we could have a setup somewhere and a few lucky backers could be scanned and we could put them in the game and there is a reduced sort of scan set that we do if you're not going to be up front doing lots of talking more like sort of a background player in a movie you know is what we yeah extra or something um which is instead of 78 poses I think it's something like 18 or 16 poses I have to I'm can't remember off the top of my head but it's a much reduced set because we we don't need to do quite as much because we don't build a full 400 blend shape set up for them so there is uh that could potentially happen although you know it requires a lot of work to do it at the Fidelity that we're putting into the game because even our background characters uh have to stand up to the Quality we do for our main characters uh so uh you know it's
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it's we've talked about it um haven't made any decisions we may do something like that for fun uh in the future we've also looked at some sort of standard uh kind of techniques you can do like you know for instance you could take a webcam and you could look into it and go here and go here and you could probably map your face there map your face yeah the question we would have is is it going to look weird at that level and then yeah the question you run into with like that self you know homemade either iPhone or whatever photogrametry is that the lighting condition and then the Fidelity so as we were just talking we want all of our characters to be able to stand next to each other so you should be able to stand next to as a player character next to Gary Oldman or any of the our top tier characters and if your lighting is weird when you're taking your pictures it's going to give us wrong information and the textures might not be as good of quality and it just
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creates a scenario where one can look worse than the other and that's not really what we want yeah no we don't want you to pull you out of the game because someone looks like they were shot on a really cheap camera with exactly you not great lighting and everyone else looks like a movie star um so you know I guess to to be determined uh it is possible but uh to do it at the level that we would like would be difficult okay so the next question comes from Cooper ncus I guess I think it's Copernicus CERN well it's got two so Cooper Copernicus Copernicus there go I think so uh how soon will we be able to see the heads on the NPCs or players in the persistant universe that would make for some nice variety and how editable will they be once implemented for character creation we are working on uh getting a variety of
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heads into um the persistent Universe we're actually kind of working on uh some of that stuff now because we want to mix it up some and obviously we're working hard at work at it on Squadron 42 because as you can appreciate with the I mean in Squadron 42 we actually have about 350 speaking Parts which is an same amount of speaking Parts like you know most movies would have maybe 30 40 speaking parts or 50 speaking Parts you know it's a lot um and so each one of those will obviously need their own unique head so a lot of it is going to be supplied by the custom uh actor scans but some of the stuff will be also done sort of background characters where we would almost assemble the heads kind of like how you'd assemble a player head much like the character creation that we were talking about earlier so it is kind of one of those things where once we've
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got that system in place for squadron for the background and for all those speaking roles it's really not much work to get it over to the Pu as well because it's it's basically the same system yep so uh so I would say um not in 25 and not we're going to try and get a few things in for the next release uh in the star Marine one but you know as we move on to widening out the persistent Universe with procedural planets and having some more landing locations we're going to get more variety in there and then of course Squad 4 2 is going to feel like a movie everyone's going to feel like their own uh you know cast member running around it's all going to be very high quality and very cool so uh but yes we we are very focused on that so we're we're sort of feeling like we're coming over the hump of getting the tech kind of the place where we'll
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be able to mix and match some stuff we still got some more stuff to do on the kind of um kind of morphing build your own face stuff but um just generally having a wide set of um of NPCs uh to be able to use is is um very close now mhm okay so the next question comes from Lil lak l apostrophe Mac I don't know if they're a French Macintosh or not but who asks will the faces we see on our characters other players and regular NPCs be of the Fidelity we saw on the character in pupil to planet or better or more simple like characters in The moror okay so forget the maror that was uh that was a whole combination of things uh bad lighting broken
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shaders uh quick assets that hadn't gone through any of our pipeline so you'll be interesting to know that the character in people to planet um is a character called wacke ster in Squadron 42 it's a scanner of the actor and what you saw in people the planet was an untouched up head and that was a tier 2 character our rating is our top is tier zero so that is what we use for Gary Alman Mark haml Liam Cunningham Mark Strong they're all tier zero then tier one is the next level so actually the actor Steven bin was playing marrow is a tier one head and then the next one down is a tier two head which was W Steiger and then we have a tier three head and that's basically our our ratings but all the heads um have pretty much similar Fidelity uh and they all have to stand
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up next to each other because you could be standing in a conversation with a tier zero a tier one and a tier two and really the big difference between the tier zero and the tier ones and the tier twos is a tier zero just has uh more facial uh density in the the the mesh so like for instance we use about 40,000 polygons when you're up close to a tier zero uh whereas a tier one tier 2 and tier three are about 10,000 now 10,000 much less but 10,000 is up until now the top level of a AAA up close is the top level of most of the games you'd have to look close to really see that much difference I we do it for the Gary Oldman or the mark HS of the world because we really want to capture every single new on to their face when they're
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performing and talking and and so so in those ones for the main characters you're right up close to them and you want to have some emotion to it we're just going for a little extra Fidelity in the character but you know a tier zero and a tier one essentially have almost the same number of blend shapes almost the same number of bones and so outside of the mesh itself having just more your faces it's pretty much the same and and so the difference is really just you know the wrinkle maps and everything also give you a lot of detail but maybe just the kind of you know little subtle bits in the animation I think is going to be some of it the texture sizes are the same between all the heads so that really doesn't it really doesn't change much um you know certain characters like you mentioned like Mark Strong has a very specific way that he speaks so he kind of like me actually speaks mostly out of one side
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of his mouth so you really want to capture that right um and that's because he's a tier zero so you really want to going to get that across yep so so so like I said nor marrow's tour that's yeah the past uh we've moved on quite a lot and U you know you can see in this video some of the differences for what it is and like like uh we were talking earlier there's going to be a fair amount of uh Improvement even from here in terms of what we're doing the Shader so it's generally the way it works in development is you know you think something looks good and then next year it looks better and the year after it looks better and you know you could just look at the Hornet or the Bengal uh carrier that we had when I launched the 2012 uh you know crowdfunding campaign and yeah I thought that was awesome looking and I think a lot of other
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people did but you know every year I see stuff move and now if you you know if you've just seen the the video with Christmas um new Hornet or the stuff that Nate was showing with the Bengal it's like a whole another level and that's kind of where we're pushing on the on the heads but yeah I what we do is we want you to feel like you're in say Squadron 42 or even in the Pu having a conversation um interacting with NPCs and the quality of the character animation and the facial animation is what previously you would have experienced in a pre-rendered cinematic and so that is a goal to really try and put you in the story so to speak um so that's what we're shooting for uh I I think we're going to get there but definitely taking a lot of hard work we got a lot of a lot of good people doing it like uh you know Josh here and uh and you know his character team we have a
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whole facial animation team over in the UK and a whole really talented cinematics team over in Germany so next question comes from uh fathom who asks will animations adapt to our characters as they get older or recover from past injuries for example if my character is lucky enough to reach old age will he or she take longer to stand up after sitting or perhaps start to walk with a limp having being shot in the leg earlier in the game so we we were definitely planning to do some animation that is specific to injuries and stuff like that you know if you get shot on the leg or shot on the arm we're actually planning to have that sort of impact and reflect on the the characters animation we haven't specifically thought about you aging as a character it's actually a very cool suggestion we do uh and we have done in Squadron 42
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specifically captured different uh walking and running sets and Locomotion sets for the different actors because you know obviously you know someone like say mark who's a little older will move differently than you know a 20y old a younger marel yeah a younger marel um so uh you know you never know I mean we're definitely going to have sort of uh you know older person Locomotion walking around NPC see animation sets and we'll have the younger ones so uh at that point it may actually not be that difficult to sort of move you through those but we haven't we haven't got that implemented yet but I think that's actually a pretty cool idea so cool idea you never know in the future next question comes from uh Kiran who asks with a large number of incredibly detailed characters at once both NPC and player what's the design plan to keep
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this from blowing up client resources within the persistent World game we've thrown a bunch of numbers around like you know the tier Zero's got 40,000 polygons for the face it's got 440 blend shapes the mesh itself I think with all the blend shapes and everything was about uh 300 megabytes without LEDs really really expensive before yeah and you know so you could have maybe one or two heads on the screen and we had like 44 different areas of like Blended wrinkles and Blended diffuse and the texture was really high so we used to have about 96 megabytes of blend textures which is quite a lot of that and then we had the diffuse normal spec transmissions and the scattering mask which were all these extra layers have bring the stuff in um so we had about 150 megabytes of uh texture memory per head at the resolution we're doing at these characters that's a lot that
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was a big focus of the graphics group and how to bring that down so we brought both the mesh data down and also the texture meta down so we basically reduced the 300 megabyte mesh stuff down to about 30 megabytes um so that was more about um the base mesh and how we were going to delter it and some clever compression stuff they working and then we also took the um cost of all the textures down um you know from something I think for you know we did a special thing for the the the wrinkle and the blend maps and stuff where we went from 72 megabytes just for those down a six so you know essentially yeah we've done sort of a 10x saving which makes it much more viable to have a lot of these uh heads uh and that detail in the game uh which is good and then the the last sort of segment that we've we've worked on is
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of course you know when you got 440 blend shapes and I think there's like something like 175 joints or whatever I think we put this on our Cliff Notes but um that's a lot of controllers so we have the blend shapes we have the the joints and I believe there's also some other controllers for the wrinkle Maps um and the diffuse map so in all we ended up with very close to about a th000 controllers to animate a face so that's kind of the equivalent of animating a a thousand joints and if you have 10 characters you know that's 10,000 of them and that's that's if anyone knows about game animation that's a lot of joints to do um so one of the things that's quite nice is we've been working with three lateral and they have uh a sort of rig logic that has a lot fewer inputs um that's sort of more about kind of the facial poses and
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positions and then that gets translated into where to move what blend shape to fire or where the joint is or what BL or what you know normal map uh or you know diffuse Maps wrinkle Maps firing um and that's what we call the runtime rig technology and it's also very critical because we use that uh that's how we're going to be able to have all these different heads and faces and and be able to blend them and stuff it doesn't matter we can play the same dialog on whatever head doesn't matter it can be Mark Hamel Gary alman's it can be a custom character one because it goes through this rig logic that takes in the the inputs and puts it out to the you know the appropriate blend shape and joint and everything else like that and that also has the advantage of uh it has about 183 inputs versus about a thousand of the controls so it's a lot less data
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that's going to go through on our animation data for the the facial which is which is B too um so those are all things that we're trying to keep the client resources down uh and we you know have a few other plans but um I think I think we're going to be able to deliver high quality um that you normally would see in pre-rendered cinematics but you would actually see it uh in the game live in real time so that's pretty good last question uh comes from uh Felicia faster than light uh who asked the two character design approaches I'm familiar with uh the traditional choose from a number of presets approach or the newer actually being able to edit vertex points within certain ranges approach like Black Desert uh which approach is star going to use or has the crew come up with an even more diabolical approach that will knock our socks off I think
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it's definitely a combination of both like we talked about earlier so starting with kind of a preset and you can choose your your face your skin color your eye color your hair color and then being able to mix and match from all those other combinations of heads that we've scanned uh so it really is a little bit like looking at the Black Desert stuff you can definitely you know change select the cheekbone and you can move it around you can do stuff like that but it's not really actually bringing in other mesh or other character information yeah I think if I remember when I was playing with it you sort of select your base yeah head and then you modify it and they have some really nice stuff for like the hair and altering the hair or coloring the hair and moving some stuff around but yeah they have really cool stuff but it's not actually draw I don't from what I can tell it's not really drawing from a fully another head it's just kind of pushing and
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twisting and morphing yeah I mean I think one of the things that's kind of cool that we're going to try is we're going to give you those tools but we're also going to blend heads together yeah you can say oh I like that guy and I like that guy or I like this girl and I like this girl and let's merge him and you know maybe I'll take the jawer from here and the for from match thing and it will blend them and it'll blend the and that's one of the reasons why this uh live uh realtime rig technology is very important because we can do all this stuff and it doesn't matter because it will all fall out of sort of rig logic that gets calculated in real time so the inputs the animation doesn't need to care where the eye position exactly is or doesn't where care where the mouth position it just needs to know that the you know mouth was moving and the eyes were moving around and then the logic for the the
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rig sort of does it does its magic and goes through and and changes and adjust on the the appropriate rig so uh I think it's going to be pretty interesting we'll we'll see uh what happens um and uh well with that that I think is our 10 questions we had and um and I'm sure you'll be seeing them on up and coming episodes of around the verse probably yeah showing some more of the really cool character stuff we're doing here yeah I think we got a lot of really cool stuff and looking forward to showing it all off yeah no it's great so I'm I'm I'm really psyched with sort of building this beautiful world it's nice um okay so thank you everybody uh I'd like to thank U subscribers for making uh this show and the many other shows we do possible uh because without your backing we wouldn't um have the sort of resources and the extra staff that do all the video production stuff we do uh
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I'd obviously like to thank all the backers out there for um making Squadron 42 and Star Citizen possible so thank you very very much and uh it's been fun I hope you guys have enjoyed the show and uh see you next time bye thank you for watching so if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest and Star Citizen and Squadron for 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon

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