CitizenCon 2948 - Panel: Biome on the Range

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   please welcome senior environmental artist Patrick GLaDOS so welcome to the presentation called biome on the range this is home marketing calls it is not what I call its ecosystem creation for star citizen right my name is Patrick lettuce I'm seeing environment artists at cloud Imperium games from the Germany studio this is our team currently consists of 11 people two lighting guy guys on the Left many people on our team are quite specialized in various fields which really gives us a good balance and expertise and the main responsibilities this team has the German team is the creation of the planets and moons for star citizen a smaller portion of the

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   team is dedicated to creating the landing zones besides creating content we work with our engineers on tech and tools it is not very common for a game production team to do that all the time you know we have to produce the game so we have to balance the time between actually building the content and designing the tech that we need to create that content but in the end that allows us to be way more effective in the long run as we can actually have a huge impact on how the tools are designed tailoring every-everything - already eats right those are the two main workflow steps we're going to look at in this presentation before we start off let's have a quick look at how an ecosystem is composed like what elements

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   are there in an ecosystem from our point of view or the things that we work with are based textures distance textures ground textures and object presets now you don't have to memorize all of them we're going to dive a bit deeper into the base textures now and the creation of these the distance and ground and object presets we're going to cover later in this presentation so don't don't worry about too much okay the ground textures sorry base textures those five make up one ecosystem the color is quite self-explanatory right it's a color the height handles how what the elevation of our landscape is the normal gives us a bit more surface different definition

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   and shading detail and such but they're really the two interesting maps here are the distribution and index map the distribution map lets us define what kind of object set gets scattered on what color so we can really define where cliffs are where the forests are and so on and so on well the index map also a very funky colorful map that no is really for letting us laying out allowing us to lay out the grant materials which is up to 16 as a comparison to what you guys have seen on the previous moons like the year ago this was only three so we have ramped up the definition that we can have close up for the player by quite a

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   lot for now we're gonna as I said we're going to focus on the base textures but not all of them really just the color and the height map before we start off you guys know that star citizen is you know all about building procedural content and building procedural planets and such and that kind of requires us to build the content in a procedural way and not just half the content being procedurally handed in the editor so we use a tool called substance designer for that substance designer is a tool that allows us to use nodes like the one you see in the top left corner and chain them up together to a bigger graph those nodes can be anything from shapes patterns modifiers of all sorts right

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   it doesn't might be too technical but I'll give you a quick example so we started off with this very simple I'm gonna actually go back we start off with a simple spherical shape up here and what we do is we take another pattern a second pattern and we just blend them together right so that's two notes we just combined together to produce a new result but it doesn't have to stop there we can basically go on and on and on until we create an extremely huge graph it does something extremely sophisticated and detailed and complicated but again we're going to keep it simple for the net for example adding a blur right so it just takes the result and blurs it right okay to do something a little more funky we add a little twist to to our result using a

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   swirl node to create this you know blossom or vortex kind of shape what you see here is all I have done is I swapped that spherical shape that we have used in the beginning I swapped it for a star so all the other nodes that I've used like the blending of that second pattern the blurring this the twisting it gets reapplied without me having to go in and do all these steps again right and this is where this is where the the power of that tool comes from this this is what really enables us to do really quick iterations and variations of all sorts but still this might be too abstract I'm gonna follow up with another example later on that let me talk about other

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   kinds of nodes not no noses but noises which is called the Perlin noise it's another node right I mentioned to you earlier that this might be shapes or patterns or all kinds of images really noises are fundamental for building procedurally generated contents for example materials materials substance design is in most game productions used to create materials but in our case we want to achieve landscapes so it's a bit bit of a different use case here this Perlin noise is not really a static image that's saved somewhere on my drive but a mathematically generated pattern and because of that we can change all kinds of properties of that noise at all

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   times which which is super-powerful like adding an octave for instance which is the noise added on top of itself at a higher frequency but lower intensity I know it sounds very technical let's just say we add more detail to this wobble shape all right so if added more detail to this wobble shape and but it doesn't really you know get me anywhere I want to use it as a base to you know create my lamp landscape from so what I'll do is repeat that process a couple of times and then see where we where we end up with all right this is a bit more detailed and you know somehow resembles noisy generic looking Hills of some sort I bet this this can be useful in later

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    steps to to get closer to our result before we start off I'd like to show you another type of noise it's basically the same like the same idea the same method it is a pattern a generate a mathematically generated pattern but it's just a different kind there's all kinds of kinds kinds of patterns or types of these perla noises right so this one is for example called billowy and if we add details on top the octaves that I was speaking of earlier then it gives us something like this which looks kind of like a bumpy hilly landscape surface but it's really too generic so we will have to work on that quite

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    heavily too to get a really nice and sophisticated result the next one is a rich noise and same thing we had the details on top and get kind of spiky like a spiky Mountain surface next up is custom notes so Sebastian Schroeder who's a part of our environment team in Frankfurt he built this custom note for us to actually allow us to apply erosion on top of these noises to really transform them into mountains let's have a look at how that works right so we're taking this noise and we're plugging it into our erosion node and we get this so with added erosion you can see how we start

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    getting closer to a mountainous landscape with visible erosion channels everywhere what it also can do is apply sedimentation so now you can see that if I apply or if I put in put an input to the sediment strength input I can actually get the soil or yeah the soil being basically trunk transported down the slopes accumulating in the valleys giving us a much smoother look of that environment okay I think you guys get an idea how this stuff works and how what noises are and let's let's create something very very quick and simple with it that has a bit more intent so we

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    take this noise sorry let me go back we take this noise and we apply it back onto a spherical shape up there right this is the same thing we did earlier it's just another noise then we add more contrast to that shape so it basically tightens up and gives us a better silhouette also introduces this plateau because we introduce increased contrast by so much that it basically clips out of range so to produce something a little more interesting we can put it in a mask that describes all slopes that's the slope information of that mountain and apply erosion only there to visualize where we might do this or where we might go with this mountain in

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    general let's add in two colors to visualize a a bit more context see you really just two colors very quick okay so do you guys remember the previous example where I basically swapped out the spherical shape for the star right we can basically do the same thing here and suddenly we have a star-shaped snowy mountain right what we can also do is multiple stars or add any you know any generic noise to it to see what kind of results we get from this graph that we have set up now and this is where where it gets really playful because it's always interesting to plug in random things and see what we get out of it we can of course go completely crazy with

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    this alright but it's time to actually build an ecosystem together that we will later on bring into the editor and maybe get a chance to even run around in a final result so we start off with a noise you guys know that one already we apply erosion to it but this time it looks a bit different it looks way smoother much more rough because I use different settings on it the reason I do this is as artists we always try to go from rough and large shapes and really you know define how these are supposed to look like or how we want them to look

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    like and then work ourselves through to the final tiny granular details on our environments what I do next is I'm adding a flat surface which has a little bit of bumpiness to it I am basically blending these two in to improve the balance between hills and flat land in the next step I'm doing what we have already done in previous examples I'm adding noise and I'm eroding it down I'm adding noise again and I'm eroding it down so I do that twice you see up there the noise blend erosion noise blend erosion in the next step this is not very visible but

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    let's look at the top left mmm Hill over there you see how we are adding this sand layer at the bottom of the slope like like wind has a blown sand against the slope so this is that one but I kind of like the idea and take it to more extreme levels so I decided to basically utilize a shadow node so I'm just to explain quickly imagine there's a Sun on the top left corner and it would cast a shadow to the right of every single hill right that kind of makes sense and we can use this information to create a mask and then blur everything that's in that area towards the certain direction that basically gives us that desert dune like

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    dunes like effect this is again achieved by using the shadow node in combination with a blur overall I really like the shapes of this it has a really nice balance between noisy high-frequency detail and flat shapes that provide for a little bit more IRS the next detail this isn't really super visible what you kind you can kind of see it right again we are simply utilizing a noise we're adding it everywhere where there are slopes and then we're blurring it down the slopes I want to create the I want to create details that look like the wind that is blowing through that

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    environment has certain irregularities to it and therefore adding adding tiny bumps and crevasses to our sand slopes the next step is another detailed step as I'm overall quite happy with the large shape so I won't won't try to touch them or destroy them any further this one is adding a little more bumps like this little tiny bit of granular detail and this is all height information whatever I put into this pass you guys will see in the game so every single tiny bump I add in here you will actually see as a bump on the environment you see how this one is getting really noisy and detailed this

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    is the very very last bit of fine granular noise I'm adding here you see that the nodes at the top left have suddenly changed to another color this is not the height information anymore this is the normal map information this is surface detail that will be visible to you guys but will not be added to the height map you know the map that defines how how the elevation is looking like the reason for that is we don't want you to we don't we don't want it to be way too noisy and bumpy whenever you guys drive around with a cyclone and you know beyond cobblestones all the time that would kind of suck so we have other methods of adding that detail without breaking the fun for you okay now the

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    height map is done we can move on to texturing it this is quite easy over time whenever the graph is done it's getting quite big and you have set up a lot of masks that you can use later on to actually do your texturing so what we do is we define certain color palettes and reusing this those masks we can apply these colors to certain areas of our ecosystem here to create a nice looking texture so here I am basically adding another hue of sand to create a bit mist coloration to avoid having the entire ecosystem look too flat in the next one we're taking all the rocky or yeah the rocky surface

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    that's still show details coming from our erosion past back then and coloring them in proper cliff like in a cliff like color palette something more rocky we're adding another layer of noise but at this point I noticed well I'm adding too much of noise it's getting too noisy so it's not as readable anymore so I'm knocking it a bit back without destroying it completely so I'm basically reducing it by 80% and to give it a little bit of a detail something otherworldly I'm adding this crazy blue to it because I can alright so this is our final ecosystem that we have Chris

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    just created in substance designer a couple more views of it right but again I told you guys that I can basically take any single node and basically change it up to create variations of my ecosystem right so let's take the first three colors that we that we chose or basically the entire sense that we have laid down to our ecosystem and and just recolor that one and now we get something like this simply by changing one node we can change the entire look and feel of that environment suddenly it feels less more or less barren but much more friendly almost like a jungle II place or this one which could be a

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    volcanic you know place that where where lava flows through it or something like that okay do you guys remember our snowy mountain from back then we can of course apply the same thing here time to jump in the editor cool so what we'll do now is jump into the editor so what I've prepared already right we have created this ecosystem together I'm gonna paint down that height map that we

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    have produced right so I can take this brush and just paint down on my planet this is actually a planet the camera is set to some very very slow sea all right and now we can jump down to the surface see this is how our height information looks like on the planet now but of course we have created a color so we will have to add it to our environment we can do so by adding the textures that we have created all right there's the color the blue looks kind of cool I really like the idea but if we look at

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    basically if we zoom down to the surface you see we get the default materials that come from our editor and if i zoom out a little more it really isn't holding up with all the detail because our ecosystems are only a 1,024 pixels wide by 1024 pixels big and an ecosystem can be around 3 to 6 kilometers wide so there is really not enough pixels for us to to provide you guys with all the details and and make it believable what we can do is at the distance textures begin that we talked about previously or and at the beginning of the presentation

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    right so these textures are really meant to add in that detail that we're missing let's jump to another spot and zoom out okay that looks good right the distance textures are taking over I'm zooming out then the ecosystem textures are taking over I'm gonna do the reverse this is good good good good all good all right but as I have created an index map for this ecosystem as well which helps me to lay out ground materials right I can

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    basically fill up these slots with the ground materials which I'll do now all right let's do the same cool cool cool cool cool or good back to the ground all right awesome seems like all the views so basically whenever you fly towards the ecosystem you fly down to the ecosystem you see some kind of detail at all times without getting too blurry until you reach the ground yeah so what I want to show you here is a little something that players usually don't get to see which is a debug mode for that map that I was talking about

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    which is the index map you see it says eight seven six five four it's not a countdown it's really just telling us this is the fourth slot of your ground materials the fifth slot of your ground materials and such what I want to point out here is the way they blend together is really quite simple right now it's splotches of ground materials and I want to give that one a bit more definition so what we can do is we we have something in our editor I'm not going to explain it in further detail but it basically and mixes all these channels up to provide us with even more breakup cool right so I'm I'm showing you guys this in in this debug view because whenever

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    we use sent a sand texture next to a sand texture this might not be very very visible so this one makes it quite clear next up is object so as you see texture wise or entire ecosystem kind of works but it's kind of empty right that's boring so let's add a couple object presets to it first we add the larger shapes as I mentioned to your before during the ecosystem presentation or a creation process we're working on the big stuff first on the big silhouettes

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    first and then we work ourselves through through the details so we add these larger piles then let's try to see what's up with these blueish areas in our ecosystem all right I'm gonna add a couple weird-looking plants to it right okay all right this is probably not gonna do the cup mmm okay I can see them working from a distance already but I'm not too happy with these cliffs so I'm gonna add a bit more definition to the cliffs using assets of course as this is

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    what we're doing right now okay okay this is starting to look better now that we have to find all our main objects we can really go in and detail things out right so let's snap to a random location and see what we can add in terms of detailed meshes okay cool we added a couple pebbles and grass it really adds up to the ground materials some things of course as it's a flat surface with a texture on it it cannot give us the nice silhouette and and and depth that we would like to have whenever we build these ecosystems but those meshes really

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    help us out and they weld together all the other objects that sit on top of the larger structures together so whenever you have a rock for example you expect tiny rocks to be scattered around it transition transitioning into some kind of gravel and really creating this nice transition from ground to to the object itself all right let's see what we can add here good so and as I say as I told you before right so if we were just to leave these alien plants cacti kind of looking flora just by itself it would look kind

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    of weird it doesn't have a context it's just sitting on a blue surface right but this this grass here it's really giving it the context that needs to really work fine in the environment same with this plating here it really bumps up the bumps up the terrain detailed by a lot and makes these guys sit much better in the scene all right cool so this is the very last object set that we added right you see that the detail has become quite detailed now if i zoom out you never get the feeling of

35. 00:28:11

    or you never get to see a very blurred out environment so this is working quite fine but I was kind of jumping in between places so let's have a look at the entire process from this view again we added our height map we added our texture we added our distance textures we added our grant materials we did additional breakup we added all our big objects and all our detail objects let's get back to the textures and now

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    again back to everything else like the final result so this this would be the before and after right this is how we at CI G go through and through our environments and try to build them up step by step whoa all right let's have a run through our environment what do you guys want to see it's I I seem to have forgotten to set the gravity on the plan

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    let's see how that behaves jump over it okay cool I think this works quite fine what do you guys think [Music] all right I would say we have produced

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    something really cool I'm not sure if we we're going to put this in the game or not but I hope you guys liked it I hope it gave you a little bit more of an understanding for how we create ecosystems and ultimately planets right yeah thanks a lot thank you guys [Applause]