Star Citizen Live Gamedev: Derelict Outposts

13 May 202201:04:091,634 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] hello everybody welcome to star citizen live game dev colonialism outposts i'm your host jared huckabee and we are once again uh in my home welcome to my home uh here in manchester united kingdom uh on if you've never seen star citizen live uh before it's where we take about an hour out of the end of our week and we do stuff uh sometimes we we do q and a's where we answer questions and put our developers on the spot like last week's uh show with the graphics and engine guys and other times we take us through take you through our process uh show you a bit about how we work uh and uh usually make fun of somebody while they do it uh that's what we're doing today
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uh with members of our esteemed uh modular content team let's bring them on here we've got uh joel say hi joel hi we got cairo hey everybody and eddie hello eddie why are you in like four threes penance again i do not know it's like watching an old vhs i'm pretty sure my webcam is 780p so i'm not sure why i'm uh yeah four by three it's reminiscing yeah yeah yeah better times the nostalgia thing it's like we rented you from the blockbuster we're just watching you on an old school vhs yeah i need some scan lines and stuff so uh the modular con is that still the modular content because i know there's been some reorganization we sort of dub ourselves the sandbox one team these days um yeah because we have multiple sandbox teams so yes but we are
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responsible for these slightly smaller more modular um and things that get scattered all over the place kind of content rather than the sort of more bespoke landing zone content yeah and uh your job on the team what what what's your title and what do you do eddie uh i am senior lead on the team so um yeah i um organize things and make sure everyone's happy and try my best to get things out for when uh when we need them out essentially uh cairo this is your first video for star citizen either pre-recorded or live welcome to the show who are you what do you do for uh yeah i'm cairo i'm an environment artist too i just joined the team in january and i'm all the way here from
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south africa so yeah it's been a good time enjoying it and i will say cairo has been killing it since pretty much day one so you started in january you said yeah i think i got your new year's day started on the 10th something like that we we actually legitimately have a six-month moratorium period we usually don't have people on the show in the first six months we don't we try not to scare them away basically it's it's it's not official it's a deal that i have made with all the leads and directors that i won't scare their new hires away in the first six months uh by going that but uh so we're skirting that just a little bit but i appreciate you being here um and then uh joel uh no stranger to star citizen uh uh videos uh citizencon isc seos before but it's it's somebody's first show so who are you
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what do you do for star citizen yeah i'm joel i'm a senior environment artist too on the sandbox one team and i just do the art and i do level setup and i just do the art yeah just do it that's simple i mean yeah slightly down playing joel's role yeah i would say but you know he's a modest guy what can i say all right so this is our this is a game dev uh show this week uh where we're going to showcase some some process uh eddie why don't you want you want to tease up what are we doing today um so we're gonna have a look at something we've been sort of working on in parallel with the colonial outposts which is ruined versions of the colonial outposts
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the colonial outposts have been around in law for a long time um in terms of like the the age of a lot of the systems that we're looking at because these are sort of ideally the sort of first explorers into the sort of systems it's like when we say colonialism you know um it's the sort of first intrepid explorers the frontiersmen who've come in so obviously we wanted to have a look at some sort of smaller ruined versions of these at the same time i was looking at the more complete ones that we've also thought everyone sort of saw in sitcom citizencon last year um so joel and cairo have been so informing a little strike team to look at these and we're going to go through today and build uh what we'd call a module so a lot of these most of these are sort of built as
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sort of individual module that can modules that men can come there that then uh sort of combined into sort of locations by sort of using them in different combinations of things each module has a basically a foundation which is what you're looking at now and that foundation is quite bare bones and then we add an overlay to that module which gives that module its theme and today we're going to look at what we're calling an occupied module so the first version of these there'll be two there'll be sort of just a ruined which is kind of the default overlay theme and then we've also got some a bit more occupied as if um the idea is as if there's some bad guys or whatever who's sort of just using this area this ruin as sort of a temporary sort of forward operating base or maybe there's
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been a heist and they've come back here to sort of just re uh regroup before the next one a little hideouty kind of vibe yeah right well uh joel we've got your screen up on the show now so uh you can go ahead if you want to take it away uh we do have the first question from the chat already um just looking at your toolbar at the top uh what the hell is wrong with you uh so this is just to carry over from too many viruses on internet explorer you know the ask g's toolbar and stuff uh no i'm a glutton for punishment uh these are just some handy little tools um that you can use you know debug um
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albedo mode and whatnot um i can certainly talk through the toolbars if you want to get started i'm actually building some job um but yeah so so basically you know this is the that base module that eddie was talking about um you know it's bare bones um and you know that's for a reason because we build on top of that and then the stuff that we build on top of that can be swapped out for different things built on top of it so um they vary in kind of levels of complexity like how much is is you know hard placed in these and can't be changed
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and mainly they're there for that reason like we don't want that element to change to be changed but um because yeah these are simple kind of locations or elements that make up a larger location um we're quite happy for a lot of it to be changed up so we generally just keep like the footprint of what was once a building um in the main main pass and then we do everything on top of it so it just like we we get some wild variations between the modules um yeah so that's what we're looking at now i basically i've got like a little kit library here um pre ready to go and this is generally the stuff that we've been using to kind of start dressing and building up
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these uh these modules uh so my first step is gonna be i need to sell some of the destruction of this uh module i it has been a very long time so there is gonna be elements that have just gone to time but you know when things are destroyed they often leave stuff behind and so i'm gonna just start placing some of these pieces from over here um to kind of hint at that that damage that's fallen off these walls so yeah you know just start getting some of these rubble piles um i'm just gonna grab all these because i know i'm gonna use all of them
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move it to the proper layer yes i mean so what joel was saying about the the how much is in the sort of base module versus how much becomes in the overlay the ratio obviously with these is very strongly towards what's in the overlay versus what's in the base module but if you take our other the more intact outposts you'll find there's a lot more basically the architecture of the thing is in the base module those are the sort of basic walls floors and ceilings that don't change between each overlay and the overlay brings in the theme so the overlay brings in the the dressing the lighting the vfx the the sort of um all the props all the furniture all that stuff all the stuff that brings the sort of the life to the bare walls essentially
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and it just it's a quick way that we use to sort of get another get multiple themes within the same space so that we don't have to like create a different variation of the same thing every time we keep the things that should stay the same the same between each we don't have to like touch them after we've made the base version we just create more and more overlays with different variations to get a quick variety of things so i'm gonna i'm gonna step in and i'm gonna interrupt here real quick uh whichever one of you has your discord open we're hearing your your notifications no i don't know just checking i don't think i have discord i think it's just good you're right it was discord it wasn't me but it was definitely the discord nice
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continue uh yeah so a little bit about um you know you know why i'm deciding to place one place and where um generally just kind of want to hit uh you know the hierarchy of like big shapes medium shapes and small shapes and kind of like feather them out so you know you got these big rubble piles and then i'm just supplementing them with you know some of the these smaller um just so like that the transition um with the terrain is a lot a lot nicer um and we just don't just like have just large details like right at you um and these these brushes are using the
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organic shader which has some um weld aligned uh texture and tiling behavior so uh we could scale these quite liberally um as you see me i'm going to show you that do you want to show that skill like massive gel because like so you maintain basically the texture detail no matter how big you scale these up and down obviously at some point this thing's going to get too big to be in any way believable but um yeah it's pretty cool so yeah i could i could take what would be like a large shape and then bring it down to like a medium shape as well um it's just super handy um and these uh you know they're quite dark at the moment that's just our um terrain color pickup uh
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text for on the shader um obviously there's no planet in this level so it's just defaulting to to a black value but once we drop this down onto a planet we'll start seeing it pick up some of the planets colors i think you know that that's pretty good for now i'm definitely going to add more like once i start adding like some of the uh some of the hard surface elements definitely want to add some some rubble there as well um you know like the wind's kind of like blown it and it's kind of pulled and collected near these these elements um maybe something in this corner as well that should be good uh for now
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the next part i want to look at is getting some interest and um break up on the structure itself uh like little bits and pieces uh fallen off but some have maybe stuck together and start hinting at you know some of the construction properties that were used um to to build the structure uh from like a law perspective um um that's definitely you know a part of our art direction you know the the elements that have made up the walls you'll you'll see some of that hinted at in the main uh outposts and uh you know we're trying to we're trying to show you like what that um what those elements like on down to uh kind of thing
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so i'm just gonna do that real quick so you know we got some rebar pieces some concrete uh slabs some more rebar so i'm gonna grab all these i like these floors as well i mean but they're for the age of them like it doesn't quite make sense that some of these tiles are as intact and um you know are still there but i think it's the term used the other day uh eddie like the rule of call like of course it just looks cool um it adds some visual interest to the ground um not just walking on like the fresh terrain with the wall jutting out of it we always play this game with the
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environment a lot of the time it's like yes we want to make everything realistic we want to make everything feel believable and the player kind of needs those familiar like landmarks to be able to say oh i recognize what this thing once was but um you can push that thing too far into the realism side oh this you know physically wouldn't be able to happen this technically wouldn't be able to happen because this thing but ultimately like you've got to sort of find those compromises a lot of the time with stuff you see all the time like well that's fine maybe it wouldn't happen in reality but is it fun does it look cool then yeah then maybe we'll sort of make that you know you know i mean there is the rule of call as we call it quite a lot ian likes to use it a lot um when we're talking about the art direction sort of things like at some point you just have to do well that's
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paul so we're going to keep it in because you know it makes sense there's the rule of cool and then there's also how you balance between this is supposed to be 930 years in the future versus things that are going to be recognizable to players today it's like like like somebody somebody can go to spectrum and make an argument about how whatever floor tiling like this you know should be indestructible 900 you know almost a millennium in the future like this but you have to you have to make things that connect to the people today yeah and a whole sort of vibe with all of the um sort of more rustic stuff that we've been doing for a little while now on our team is is like there would be there is always
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that kind of like sci-fi element to everything there is always that kind of like oh yeah i don't recognize this it's a lot but then if you don't like interspersa family with all that it just ends up feeling like a fantasy game and that's not what we're making we want to make something that is feel grounded it does feel real real to the player you know um the player today so yeah and it's a it's a con yeah exactly it needs to be sort of at least somewhat recognized there needs to be these little landmarks everywhere like oh well i mean and ultimately like a bathtub still going to be a bathtub but a lamppost is still going to be that a door is still going to be a door because humans are built in certain ways and they like certain things and even in like however many thousands of years that that stuff's not going to change too much you know one of my one of my favorites is always trying to figure out how language changes in a thousand years i think that would be yeah that would be
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insanely different wouldn't it i mean heck just you know just like english a thousand years ago with like the old you know canterbury tales and the middle english you know with the show you know like what is that like that's english i agree yeah i had a major in college oh i had a creative writing uh yeah thing in university it didn't really help me in real life either it was fun though i expect pay attention [Laughter]
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he does at every opportunity now i can't do piglet actually i don't know why i've got a i've tried i've you know you went for the sophisticated middle english instead i don't know why i just it's just though it's it just doesn't work in my brain so it's this kind of stuff this kind of bedding in and this kind of like attention to detail that separates the sort of you know it's it's really important i game it it pushes everything that stage further it's just about attention to detail after you've got the big shape sorted out it makes a huge difference to things so glad we're still using rebar
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a thousand years ago yeah it's a plastic or composite something well i think the idea is a lot of this stuff i think when when the first colonists would arrive they would they would come down in their ships and whatever but they'd also just like use whatever's available on the land to actually make their yeah i'm sorry germinator is correct it's space rebar space repair exactly they're very different yeah they would stuff yeah exactly they would use the cheapest methods like maybe these things were extruded originally maybe like there was some kind of like weird 3d printing machine but they'd still be built out of like whatever the cheapest materials were available on the planet that they landed on i like the idea that there could be something that was like creating this to form or like you know there'd be ships that could sort of
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process local or into sort of usable materials and things like that um you know but i don't think like these are not supposed to be rich or affluent or particularly like these are like hard scrabble kind of colonists frontiers people so they just use whatever's available so i'm going to use these uh these big pieces are well as well because some of the these um some of these like scatter assets they can go out get quite like high frequency um and it's good to have like some visual rest now and then um so i like to use these these pieces just to sit on top of them to to knock down the frequency a bit and i'm also going to use some of the small bits to supplement
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some of these like rebar like you know it's in the process of falling down and it just hasn't quite detached from the the rebar yet it will start breaking up some of these these surfaces and it's a super good example of well the whole scene is coming together but like primary secondary tertiary reads is something else we also talk about a lot in environment are you've got to get those big forms in first and make sure that those look good and are right before you really concentrate on the sort of secondary and tertiary but of like they're all equally important to that final read it's just about how they're distributed and the ratios of each so ira you could you can't cover surfaces in just visual noise it looks terrible you need
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those spaces of irs do you need those moments of rest and usually what you'll you'll split things up into sort of sensible sort of almost like 70 30 ratios of things to to sort of just ultimately like lead to a pleasing a pleasing final read on things yeah it's not so much about like it's not just the geometry as well like because these are old locations like there's a lot of um there's a lot of wear and and on the material side of things as well so you know it's a combination of you know the geometry frequency but it's also the frequency of the textures and the environment it's going to be sitting on
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uh we'll see in a bit like popping this down on planet um it's good to work in these construct levels but like as soon as you can you need to start seeing it in situation yeah um so you can really validate like the experience with like all the other disciplines kind of involved um because that's just one piece of the puzzle at the end of the day yeah we can show you some of the sort of little physics stuff we've been looking at as well and just it's not even really i wouldn't even call it like puzzles in the traditional sense it's just more like things we can add to the environment to make it feel and behave a little more dynamically as well because things like movement and thing and stuff like that are also really important to to bringing an environment to life and obviously like joel said we're building out of context
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with where the final actual placement on the planet is going to be right now so that's something you also have to have in the back of your mind while you're building something like this is like you know i'm also going to be introducing like a whole bunch of trees and rocks and landscape into the reed of the scene as a whole at some point as well joel there's some conversation in the chat about uh where your accent originates do you want to reveal that i do uh i'm from australia melbourne australia australia australia okay and honestly gradually joel's been introducing all of the australian slang to the team to the point where we now we now use it regularly and
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people look at it strangely when we use it uh yeah who we've got a good good quota of australian guys on the team actually do gradually taking over yeah you know we've got studios in five studios in four countries around the world but you know the uh the international nature of our development team cannot be understated that you you go to those studios then you find people from all over oh yeah no absolutely a place we've been brought in like we we will we'll take the talent from wherever we can get it angel yeah i think obviously you know it's not done but i
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think you know we're starting to get a decent picture of of like the footprint and um what was once a a building uh kind of thing so we could probably just get rid of these so we don't accidentally export them out with the oc but what i want to do now is i just want to get this cover mesh block i have 1.25 crouch cover um i just kind of want to start thinking about uh because this is going to be uh occupied overlay where some some areas uh that i could potentially
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tweak to to get the cover height um so you're not just a sitting duck explorer in this area or you know if someone's here and you want what they got you can approach uh tactically and not just be deleted as you uh approach um so some of these areas are good um and i just want to figure out you know do i want to just add some more of this uh structural stuff to up to cover high or maybe do i want to leave it for some of the man-made stuff and i think uh i mean obviously i think here is quite cover height uh just need to think about uh that peaking angle
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can i peak this angle and engage whoever's behind it um fairly maybe this area this this this little uh nook in the in the structure that that could be like a little nice uh shooting gully kind of thing so i might just move some of this rock out the way we like as artists we like pushing rocks and things up against bottoms of walls quite a lot just because that beds everything into the environment right and you don't see those polygons clipping straight through like floor like floor wall like straight polygons but that also means that designers showers there's quite a lot because
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obviously you want as a designer to stack up clean against that wall and be able to peek over it and know that that's all along that wall is going to be like a good crouch cover height so it's one of those things we have conversations with can you just move this rock that you put in the way of my nice cover please and that's exactly why we do this kind of pass as well like obviously environments are not built just as art we work very closely with the designers as we're putting one together to make sure they work from both so we both kind of are growing grow to understand one another's requirements for an environment as well i'm going to take this moment here real quick you guys keep working i'm going to take this moment here oh that's too close uh i want to shout out uh not boof in the chat right now uh not boof knows better he knows that environment artists don't work on login
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servers but he knows that ai programmers and physics programmers don't work on login servers too but he's acting like he doesn't in the chat you know and it's making for a lively conversation uh you can keep doing that or you can enjoy the show i'd recommend enjoying the show get back to the show what is a login server we only speak in terms of rocks and poly counts yeah while i'm doing this just uh to make you know some conversation um so you know obviously dressing
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building up the location and dressing it's like kind of one of the last hurdles of the location but um you know as as we're starting uh you know a location like this they obviously do the the usual you know white box gray box pipeline and stuff like that but when it comes to like producing the content um you know a little bit about that process uh we kind of stop and we we think uh you know how do we want to break this up like who do we want on on what um you know that could be down to people's preference what they want to work on their strengths etc and then we break it down from there and
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so like in this case uh you know cairo uh handled all the the structural elements which you know he's going to show hopefully later on a bit about that process as well i focus mainly on materials and some of the structure kit over here but you know as we're working uh you know it's it's constant communication like oh hey uh could i get this this kind of asset because at the end of the day you know we're trying to make a content kit uh that a lot of different disciplines and people can can get in and and start building these locations maybe maybe this part might be a bit too meta um but definitely like placing down the locations and stuff like that so it's important that the content is
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robust and you know it works well for everyone so you know that constant communication is is great um an entire skill in itself yeah absolutely just uh did you like it's like building with lego but you've also got to decide what shape and form all the bricks take as well uh you know from the get-go as well so it's about constant particularly at the start when you're white boxing you're basically just throwing in loads of shapes in quite a broad kind of sense and then it's about breaking those shapes down into sensible things that can be combined and recombined in different ways and then it's about figuring out like the final look of all those things and making them all sit together as a kit at the same time it's then been building the actual locations themselves so yeah it's a it's quite a long process actually especially when you're starting
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with nothing you might just be starting with some concept art and sometimes that's quite loose concept art to then break that whole thing down into like usable kits and stuff is is quite a long job yeah i think we had uh you had fred on last time he was going over some of the concept art for this maybe last time all the time before that oh gosh and it's hard to remember you do too many of these i won't complain we do a lot of these i've also done also too many a lot well don't have too many of these the the fever that started during last week's show turned into like one of the worst colds of my life last week i'm just coming out of it now uh two days ago we were thinking we were
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gonna have to cancel the show because my voice sounded like deckard kane diablo should take a lot of relationships but a fever broke yesterday which was nice folks who watched yesterday's isc i was that was that was a lot of cough drops and a lot of uh syrup going to get that show recorded it's not as bad as a citizencon uh 2019 we had to do that you know the whole 10 hours on the stage and sent out sent out a volunteer for for for cough medication he came back with a bottle of stuff and i took a couple of sips i'm like oh yeah this will work go get me
00:32:43
more and it comes back with a bunch of bottles and it's about halfway through the show we're about five hours into the show at this point uh during during during the cosplay contest and i'm starting to get a little wobbly and i'm like am i lit and i look at the bottle and it's it's yeah it's got alcohol in it and i'm like oh i've been i've been pre-gaming the entire show haven't i but then i got like the last hour of citizencon in 2019 i was like super paranoid that consummate professional that that i was just like does everybody know does everybody know i'm i'm just borderline drunk at this point uh because of the coffee maybe i'm not supposed to would be admitting those things but so important bit here like validation
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from a first person point of view like super important we have like scale references as well that we use quite a lot for human scale super important otherwise you'd end up making things far too big or far too small so getting in and actually dropping down and and playing the game um it's really just that constant iteration i swear to god if it has my face i'm shutting this show down no unfortunately they are generic grey people one team of professionals in this company glad we're here with him today like that come on yeah just uh finding any clipping issues as well like jumping into into game
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making sure you know i got the scale because it's one thing zooming up here like a demigod um but it's a completely different story at human height so just want to make sure you know the ratio like the size of these these rubble piles are not too big they're believable because i you know if they're any bigger they'd be actual pieces of the wall kind of thing and i think uh you know this is a good base uh so if you know this was an unoccupied you know this would probably be where it's at uh you know we'd work with design to add some loot crates um potentially uh you know other interactable spots etc uh but it you
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know it would be fairly unoccupied it's been gone for a long time and you're probably the first to stumble across it in quite some time but as we said we're going to make an occupied overlay um so you know the premise of that is you know a certain type of uh npcs has come along um and they're kind of hunkering down here maybe they're hiding from their law and they kind of want to you know set up shop somewhere uh that's you know defensible uh with with kind of minimum requirements of materials um uh or you know explorers who have you know kind of making camp here um you know so that
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occupied is is kind of like a broad spectrum uh it doesn't always have to be you know a hostile encounter it could yeah as i said like an explorer it's just i know i've been trekking you know i'm gonna pop a sleeping bag down here and have a little kip under the stars but i think i think we'll go with er maybe a combat encounter for this one just cause it'll be cool i think you know that makes a lot more use of uh this kit where they've kind of salvaged uh some scrap parts from you know around the planet of you know some some of the metal elements
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that were once in the outpost they've kind of retrofitted into like some sheets and to use this cover or makeshift structures kind of thing um so i'm just going to grab a couple of and i think i'm going to start blocking out um some of those these cover areas i was talking about before okay and even with the like the just the pure ruined ones you'd still see some of this stuff we want to build up layers of history it's not like a single thing happened to this outpost that caused it to collapse and that's how it's been left maybe like 50 years ago someone came in for a while and then left again so it's about building up some layers to the to the sort of story of the location as well and not just being a bit like one note about it uh you've also got uh about 20 minutes
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left 20 minutes yeah i know mate i was just looking at the clock i'm going to start spray bottles yeah and to answer uh there's some chat there's some chat going on about the uh the frame rate you're seeing uh this is because we're all in four distinct locations and we're screen sharing over zoom zoom has basically two screen sharing modes one where it's high frame rate but it's low picture quality and one where it's a slightly lower frame rate but it gives you a higher picture quality and in the testing we were doing before the show we opted to maintain the higher picture quality at the lower frame rate so yeah that's what you see you can see that it only really suffers when it's actually moving the camera around yeah it's moving fine for joel on his end yeah this is just when you're scaling stuff and rotating stuff you're like you're fine really i'm
00:38:25
soon that was not benny hill music who knows what that music was from i'm in the chat somebody in the chat had to recognize that somebody very old so i think what i might do is uh i'll do like one area here and then i think we'll give kyrie some time to to show yeah uh what he was on and then in the background i'll continue and then maybe if there's some time at the end we can kind of jump back to it and show you where where i got up to kind of thing we kind of want to put this on a planet as a sort of final thing anyway just so you can see it all in context but yeah we won't have
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time to probably build what we normally might call a full a full one today yeah maybe if it's not too far along i i guess we will we could use one of the existing ones uh we're just very weary about you know spoiling too much of it but i'll just give joel a task to finish this off next week we'll get in hey i gotta do these shows every week you wanna come back parked it you just needed jiren for it otherwise my producer shouts at me maybe we need the pressure of a twitch audience for everything we do i think we might maybe we'd get
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stuff done a bit quicker that has not been my experience besides we need all those uh we need all those devs dedicated to uh bed sheet deformation you know i think you know for this little area this might be enough have we got terrain modifiers in this already joel oh we do oh we do oh that's nice i did a pass before beforehand good because obviously we're building on a we're building on a flat surface right now but when we get onto the planet no
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planets a flat surface so we have the terrain modification volumes which will give us a nice flat uh it'll deform the verts of the terrain event essentially to give us a nice flat place to put this on and also we've got exclusion volumes because um you could also put this in the middle of a bunch of rocks and trees and the exclusion volumes will cut out the scattered assets of the of the planet um we kind of need to make a lot of these a little bit far fire and forget because we have a lot of them we want to use them over and over and over in different combinations uh becomes very hard to manually manage each individual location as you can probably imagine so like the more
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automated we can the more safe we can make these to place anywhere on a planet the better for us um yeah fewer bugs and all that stuff just thinking about adding some side cover here you guys aren't hearing me cough right i'm rocking the mute button okay maybe caught the tail end of that last one that that seems uh about right you know so that would be you know it doesn't need to be much more
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than that um at the moment so yeah i guess if we want to uh switch over and kyra can go over some of the asset creation side of stuff i'll continue working this up in the background you won't you're maybe um maybe get it on planet yes you want to tag out and uh cairo you started your screen share yeah can do that yeah it was uh i don't remember who it was but uh it was it was the match game cool all right cool and we'll switch to
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cairo's uh the screen change joel was talking a little bit about earlier at the beginning of when he was building a scene of those sort of bare-bones strip-backed structures that we're making that we you know build our kits on top of and sort of supplement and add secondary and tertiary details to so i'm just going to demonstrate with our houdini tool how we would go about making one of those structures and also introducing some damage for that and how about and how we do that in a procedural way so that we can knock out quite a few of these and get them done in a relatively short time frame what's cool about houdini is it's very much a node based software and it's very much non-destructive so basically
00:44:02
anything we do here can be replicated so that i don't have to go into max and make another broken wall you can either for this tool you can give it a mesh input and then that's going to be what's going to be damaged and deformed or you can give it a profile input which is what we're going to do in this case so i think this is the one so this is the pretty recognizable profile of the buildings that we have for the colonialism outposts probably would have been seen in citizencon on pyro so now we're going to take this wall and we're going to just mess it up a little bit so what i can do is i can make a curve
00:44:49
which we're then going to extrude that profile along and then what we can do pretty freely in houdini without too much extra fuss is we can also define extra points for it so i can just add another point over there and it's going to instantly give me a wall that's been curved for us we do have quite a bit of extra functionality within this so if i wanted to i could just snap stuff to the grid and move it across over here if we wanted another section of wall probably wouldn't do in this destroyed situation but we can do that as well then if i go into some of the sub functions that we have over here we can also play around with what areas are going to be curved what are going to be straight
00:45:36
so we do have a lot of freedom with this technique to really get quite a lot of content going for it i think at the moment we'll we'll deal with quite a simple wall just so that we can get this done fairly quickly so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to go back to my curve delete these and we'll just have a straight wall about yeah i think about 20 meters long and then we can also supplement this geo that we've created with additional geo whether that's procedural or not so i've just added some boxes to this over here which are going to make up the interior walls of the structure now for the the interesting part of the tool is
00:46:23
we can run the damage simulation and then it gives us something like this so it can really very quickly give us an idea of what the what the damage looks like and we can very quickly iterate on that so this has been done just by placing some booleans around the structure and then we apply a noise modifier and then that sub function looks something like this so you can see it's just a it's a lot of noise and a lot of spheres but what's what's really nice about it is that we have quite a lot of control over the look and feel of the damage so this is quite a large structure so if i wanted to i could increase the height of this noise and then that would sort of increase
00:47:10
the the sort of jagged edges and the look of that or we can go back to something that's been a bit more worn down by time and because this is a boolean operation i have control over each of the individual spheres that make up the damage so if i just want to move some of the damage over a bit you can also do that so it makes it very quick for us to art direct the kind of damage and the style that we would want and but perhaps most amazingly is that it's all non-destructive so you're you're not ever you can go back and change any aspect of it at any point in the process so if i don't decide i didn't like the damage i can go right back up my node tree and we've got a whole wall intact and we can
00:47:58
just go back down again and it generates variations it's super quick as well like a b c d e that easy yeah so once we end up with something like this that we like the look of we think it provides a nice silhouette for the play on the horizon if this reaches high enough to see that that is obviously this is a little bit more built up and less run down than the one that joel was demonstrating but we have quite a nice variety of those so once we've got to that point we're going to run chamfer modifier on our edges because we would ideally like to get a very distinct difference between the the stucco walls and then the concrete and the sort of interiors of the walls so we just do that so we can
00:48:48
generate edge decals for sid walls so all i'm doing over here is i'm duplicating the boolean operation getting geometry that we can use for age decals and we can apply various materials to that just to break up the material read of that wall and then another great thing about houdini is the um the ability to automatically generate uvs for this at certain texture ratio that we require so it might not get you all the way but it gets you definitely i'd say about 90 percent of the way and this is basically ready for us to throw into 3ds max and get into engine
00:49:36
and see how it feels in place yeah houdini's got quite a lot of functions that are really useful for us so we can design different material types we can split since various different fbxs or 3d files and yeah it's very useful and as we said so now we've now generated this wall with one input but i've now decided i would like to go back to this mesh generated in max all i have to do is i have to plug this into the boolean operation and then it's going to inherit that damage now it's not as bespoke as the the other wall because it's not been tailored to the specific mesh but all we have to do is then
00:50:24
go in and just have a bit of play around move these spheres around and you can really end up with anything that you want so this was a pretty much the process that we used to generate all of the base structures for the derelict outpost and that's part of the kit that we built up and that troll started to use with and it just meant we could essentially take a load of the meshes we'd already made for the outposts and just run them through houdini to create destroyed variants of them that quick yeah yep and then with new tech with new tools like mighty bridge that you don't even it comes online yeah we're not using it here in this example but eventually you
00:51:12
won't even have to go between the two programs at some point yeah hopefully this could all be an editor yeah how much time do we have left jared well i got about nine minutes do you wanna do you wanna schedule up sort of yeah as much as they can be here i'm just gonna remember how again you may have to stop your share kyra sometimes zoom lets you take over sharon sometimes it doesn't it's pretty
00:52:00
weirdly inconsistent can i give a shout out because jared is all right yeah my boys my sons are watching downstairs on the twitch stream so i said i'd give them a shout out so dexter felix shout out there you go uh and to a freak sheep as we discussed earlier today uh the frame rate is because we're screen sharing over zoom at high picture quality and low frame rate uh in order to maintain high pressure quality because we're not all in the same place so what you're see what you're seeing is frame rate is not the program as it's being used uh by joel or cairo what you're seeing is zoom brushing it down i'll leave the uh fps counter up here if you like just so you know where it's like 60.
00:52:50
yeah so here i am on stanton2b damar i've gone ahead and i've placed you know that base module down i only got like a little bit more more work done on on the structure stuff um so it won't look terribly too different uh but a couple of things you know i wanted to highlight um you know one of the the first things is the the the terrain um entity that's you know gonna get rid of some of these unwanted large structures as well as uh there's the smoothing uh volume so we don't always have to find you know ideal flat spots anymore you know we could have you know a structure up here silhouetting
00:53:39
um on the sky etc um and those two systems yeah just basically mean that you know we when scouting for locations we just find somewhere that looks cool now um and obviously you know we don't want to go too overboard with the the smoothing volume because you we're going to start ruining the behavior of the planet and it's it's going to look a bit unnatural but they still don't work well on like cliff hedges or like super steep slopes but so hopefully if i bring back the oc that i placed you can see i got rid of that big rock we've got all those elements placed down on planet
00:54:29
see all the rock assets are blending much much more much better now yeah so all those ones that are black in the construction level are now picking up the tint of the biome that they're on to blend blend really nicely oh sorry i'm moving too quick i i keep forgetting about the so i'll move yeah so i guess at this point it would be about finding errors uh you know brushes that aren't meant to be there i think i forgot completely forgot to put one of the brushes on the correct layer so i can quickly fix that if i release that oc to be overwritten
00:55:22
and then i'm just gonna update it real quick i did that in a in a separate editor um so yeah now it's back it's just a i had to delete the oc because it um locks it for for writing if it's been referenced in a in a different level just so you can't mess anything up um we use we use multiple editors all the time because we have our construction levels we have the levels with the context in we often we maybe even have three or four editors open at once because we deal with like these hierarchies of locations so i guess uh from from here what i would do is i kind of identify areas that i i kind of want to work up up a bit more i think
00:56:12
you know areas here could use a bit more feathering um into into the terrain like this area works well uh just trying to see if i could get more of this around here i think the rubble piles are good maybe i'd introduce some more to kind of insinuate a wall that was there but it's no longer there so kind of tracing out like um the outline of a building with some of these rubble piles and then implementing uh start implementing some of the you know traversal mechanics uh vaulting ledge grabs and stuff so you could get up here um get some ai in as well yeah mike might send us over to design say hey if
00:57:02
you got any ideas of maybe where we could hide some loot um that kind of thing uh and then it would just be like working it up um a bit like slowly but surely over time like you don't have to commit to anything like i could put this in here and like now i've got it in here it just feels kind of awkward on the silhouette but you know i could either remedy that by um filling it out like i think maybe what would be good is if i added another platform over here um let me get some verticals there as and then maybe you've got to jump over here or something like that or use a tractor beam to to kind of makeshift the bridge using some of the the metal sheets that are lying around just that kind of thing and then
00:57:52
you know once once all that those foundations are there like other elements that are currently there are they do they feel good are they fun kind of thing and then you'd kind of go in and start polishing things like cleaning up clipping and um putting like the bells and whistles on everything really get some movement in as well i think you start adding some soft decks we've got some physicalized cloth and stuff that uses the wind from the planet so adding that is always a win because it just adds that sort of life and movement to the scene uh there's a question in the chat uh is this considered one entity or are multiple entities within the objective system i guess this is made up of two object containers right now you've got your base object container and then the overlay object container that sits on
00:58:39
top of that so at the moment this is two entities but those object containers will also contain entities themselves so the object containers you know lighter entities cover markup as entities fog volumes are entities soft dx's and like everything's lots of stuff are entities within the in the us vfx yeah all of that yeah anything anything that's basically dynamic and isn't just a static brush there's an entity of some kind we've we've basically made all of this out of just static geometry right now so that's just static i mean even that's a type of entity if you want to get technical about it but it's like there's a difference basically anything that's generally dynamic or interactable is is what we'd call an entity the ocs are entities themselves but the nfcs are really just
00:59:28
entities that contain other entities like we deal a lot with hierarchies oh oh you died is that where we ended and that's the end of the show good job oh it's night time uh yeah the planet spanners rounds just like we've built something within the space of an hour that's actually a pretty cool little thing that you could easily come across just on your travels and maybe it's populated with a bit of ai maybe you find a little bit of loot this is the kind of thing maybe there's a combination of five or six of these types of modules in one area so that you have a little sort of just encounter that you can easily come across um yeah you spun the planet so fast to knock
01:00:18
himself over i mean once once we have like the kits and the sort of assets and stuff because that is usually the thing that takes the most amount of time is the asset work actually sort of world building and set dressing like joel's been doing here is actually that it's really fun and and doesn't take as much time as actually putting the sort of kits together in the first place what is that oh is that is that it's not a guy though what is that and with that my my mic the vfx uh principal's going to showers now for zooming in nope nope there that'll be that'll be that'll be a mystery that'll be a mystery we won't reveal that today uh that's it everybody you did it congratulations cairo you've done your first you've done
01:01:06
your first video for star citizen how did it feel yeah good i enjoyed it thanks for having us again it's not so bad it always feels more anxiety-inducing than it ever actually is joel cairo eddie thank you for taking the time out of the end of your week to hang out with us uh if you haven't checked it out already check out uh inside star citizen from yesterday it's a full sprint report episode with updates from development teams all across the world uh remember that invictus launch week starts next week uh you can go to the robertsspaceindustries.com website and find out more details about that it's one of the biggest events of the year uh yes it is it is coming to the planet crusader this year uh for the first time so who knows
01:01:53
what else that enables and leads to we'll have to find out uh and then uh the next two weeks of isc are all invictus launch week related uh we'll be exploring we'll be exploring uh um uh some of the new uh uh ships and vehicles that are coming to the star citizen universe uh throughout the event some that you're familiar with some that you're probably not supposed to be familiar with but you are because you read certain subreddits and maybe one or two that it's a complete surprise who knows i don't know what you do with your time maybe the whole thing's gonna be a surprise so uh so yeah so tune in for that and then we'll be right back here uh next friday with the ai team uh we got members of the ai content feature in tech teams on we've been talking about
01:02:41
their work uh quite a bit lately in inside star citizen and they'll be here to answer your questions uh look out for the question gathering thread that goes up uh usually on mondays for that if you want to uh uh submit your questions jared can you adopt me uh no uh i don't even have like like super formal residency here in the uk right now i'm just here on a visa so that would that would be a lot of paperwork not gonna happen all right everybody take care see you next week thanks jared bye everybody thanks everyone bye bye all right what was that thing all right i'm gonna go no idea i'm gonna suss it out now i think it was just some weird vfx in weird planetary like wind the effects
01:03:31
yeah it's like a little serpent in the sky i don't know i don't want it didn't didn't look super glitchy at least it sort of looked like it was supposed to be but now now now we've like i've left the stream the stream's still on but they can't see it so they're just being tortured right now with our discussion of it they can't see what is it oh but they can hear us right now they can hear us but they can't see it i mean oh god wow

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.