Inside Cloud Imperium Games - The 300i Pipeline

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   [Music] hey everybody uh here at Cloud Imperium gains we're going to take an inside look at with artist Chris Smith on the 300i I know a lot of you out there have been wondering what's going on with the ship and so we thought we'd take a look so what do we got here man uh well this is the uh the concept drawing for the 300i um made by massive black by Kemp Kemp rard Kemp rard rard yeah and uh well yeah this is how it starts pretty much um so how's take us to the the thing right you start with you start with the uh approved image of a concept and then you go from there how do you how do you take what's on paper that's been

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   approved that Chris has looked at and said yeah man this is the way we want it to look and then how do you get from that to uh the finished product take us through the steps all right so yeah it gets approved by Chris Roberts uh uh through the concept stations uh stations it's either a 2d concept or a 3D Concept in this case it was a a 3D model already and then um so basically I'll start out with a simple blockout so this is the we're going to the original this is the original model you get from so this is the actual concept model I got okay and you see there's a lot of problems with it it was mainly it wasn't model like this it was just messed up from the exporter right um but basically yeah this it seems very it seems I mean polygonally it it seems like it's it's got just a few and and uh we're going for a real high depth look yeah it's

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   very low res um you know very simple and uh blockout type and so what I do is I basically go in and retopologize it and rebuild it with a cleaner mesh topologized yes I topologized I'm a topologist yeah you're a topologist so you're making you're making uh you're going in there cleaning it all up making it look round sleeker well first I actually uh make the the mesh so it's smooth and it makes sense you have to build it things a certain way to make it work correctly and to make it clean just basically clean where do you go after this so so after this this part is the blockout and then it goes from that to basically I'll just start refining and cutting in more MH and then you kind of end up with

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   something like this where you can see there's a lot more polyes and a lot more different definition right so you've really really ramped up the amount of triangles or polygons in there too now this also is already a textured version um show you just the gray scale um the difference but yeah you can see the edges are like smoother and and things look more rounded out like they have a certain highlight to them you know and do you have to worry about scale at all for for pilots and stuff uh yeah for sure I mean we have um fortun our animator Brian he made us a little proxy model of a of a pilot that he reaches at at all the screens and stuff and so I can use him as a template for my interior placed and so yeah this what

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   I have here is the interior model for the 300i look at that and it was you know that model was used to make sure all the dimensions are right and it fit the fit the character fit the player correctly right so now you've been working on this a while this this is not a quick process this is not something you get a a concept from and then a week later you've got a finished product correct yeah it's definitely not a a week long deal yeah uh you know there were a couple growing pains with this and we're trying we're figuring out workflow and stuff like that and um this is it's definitely we're modeling these game Assets in a different way than than traditional game assets are modeled uh where you use like a low amount of polyes and and you kind of bake in normal Maps you bake in maps for all the

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   details in our case since we want a lot of resolution out of the textures when you walk up to it you we're using til texture so the modeling process is a little bit different yeah and everything has to work on this thing like the the wheel wells the the doors the ladder needs to place to once it goes in there it's actually part of the model right yeah so yeah I model everything out so you know I I do a little test animations make sure things fit and whatnot um and here's like a little demo like the landing gear coming out wow with the uh the ladders and stuff cool we'll take we'll take a look at that with Brian here in a little bit too so we can show exactly how that all happens cuz I mean sometimes when you model stuff you know if you don't have the collisions on right it'll just pop through the through the floorboard or

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   something I need to find a place to fit all that yeah it was a little back and forth between Brian and me uh for sure you know some things will always pop in and some issues will come come up but uh we we'll get those worked out so this is a pretty sexy ship so you've got you're going to have some some custom customizable part so can you show a little B about some of the stuff and how you customize or how you planed for that so uh initially when I when we modeled the 300i um the plans for the engine stuff came a little bit later fortunately though the uh the design of the ship was already sort of modular and so I was able to take away the engine to replace it with different power plants and here I'll give you like a little preview of one of the variations for for the 300i sure right here is the

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   alternative version for the for the 300i uh this is going to be called the 315p uhhuh and basically what I've done here is replace this whole area basically the well except for the air scoop in this case but everything else the whole engine will be replaced it's not really an air scoop it's more of a hydrogen scoop hydrogen yes sorry I'm so earth based that's okay maybe it's it's a dual hydrogen air scoop it just it has dual rolls yes particle scoop particle scoop thank you and uh so yeah basically you know we wanted a bulkier beefier version of the engine for this one Bas right so basically you can take your 300i you can upgrade it with better engines missiles guns you can really customize what you want to do with it yes so the engine is part one uh like here is a small

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   blockout which I already have a model for it but this is the proxy this will be something like a tractor beam that you upgrade too nice the block out usually a turret fits on there and it kind of comes down and it's SL forward cool in this case the anything that you attach to the thing will so you have a hard point you have a Hardo right there and you and you and we design things that can be attached to that hard point either be guns Radars turrets you know things whatever you know whatever you can do to your ship that's over here I'll show you some ingame shots oh now that's cool now this is actually ing game right so yeah this is exported into the cry Engine with the with its lighting and everything and you know it's got lights at it so it looks and the in the materials you know the the shininess is added to it so it definitely gives a little bit more zing

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    and uh again yeah hard points so here's here's like a laser cannon that will be inable here missiles that will be on some versions they won't be there on some versions the person whatever they put on their ship and then later on they can always add them can we get into there yeah we can take a look you kind of walk in it's got a little leather on the sides there it's a little bit plush yes I was um we kind of wanting to mimic the uh the nice like Mercedes is BMW look at that with some leather yeah it's got the little cigar lounge Cigar Lounge in the 300 eye uh and then you walk up to it yeah that's basically how you walk up to the to your cockpit is through the ladder right right right and then through the little little hallway into your seat very nice and here's your

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    command Command Center command console yes see looks a lot better here than it does in Max yeah it does actually the cry engine and this and this folks is why we've chosen the cry engine you can see the detail there and how pretty it is and and this already has like a little bit of a of a lighting pass on the inside with some moood lighting and uh and you know how the ship would looking the game all right man once you're going around flying with it well there folks there's the 300i um thank you Chris for for showing us sneak peek or a peek of what people are going to be getting pretty soon and now we're going to head over to Brian Brewer and take a look at the uh how animations work on the thing as promised now we're over here with Brian we're going to take a look at some of the things we have to do on the 300i to um give you those realistic animations to make it look real and really come alive so hey Ryan

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    how you doing good good good so this is the 300i so there's going to be a lot of moving Parts on it right that's right uh we're trying to make all of our ships articulate and move and feel a Little More Alive supposed like this the static Vehicles you get in in the average game right exactly so let's get an example of what um show me something here that uh that you're going to articulate things you're going to move around like what uh for example we're doing the landing gear so uh I take the landing gear I rig it up now rig it up what does that mean rig it up okay so what I do is I um in the case of the landing gear it's a skinned mesh so I create a skeleton I take that skeleton I put constraints on that skeleton and then I animate the skeleton and that allows all the the Pistons the

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    Hydraulics everything that's um articulates to to move properly show them moving you can see look at that you can see actually the Pistons coming down look boom it goes a little further down so all that stuff it's a skeleton and that's the same process you use for character animation correct that's correct and there we because this is a vehicle we we have two different types of Animation that we use we have skeletal animation on a skinned object such as the landing gear then we have animated geometry such as the doors on this um for the landing gear so the landing gear doors are actually animated geometry that I went in I broke apart I created pivots and animated all these parts individually

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    uh in order to work proper in the cry engine well this is the kind of level of detail they can expect out of all of our ships yeah I want a high level of accuracy in animation uh I'll give you another example on this door so on this door uh we have like this handle here and if I scrub over to that animation you can see that the handle actually starts to spin right I see that right there yeah that's really cool and then the door lifts up and out of the way let me uh back up here let's back up and get a good look at that door so here's the and this is one of the things Chris wants in all of his games right is this level of realism look at that so th this is a little more complex it is several pieces that have been broken apart uh fixed uh parented put together and animated when

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    you actually do get to get inside your ship right which will be in the hanger which will be in the hanger and you you push the open door button and you get to see the move up and articulate just like real life so you're own your own Lamborghini slash you know Gold Wing doors on the 3 eye yeah so and that's just that's just a a small piece I mean there's lots of things like we have a we have a hatch here on the top that articulates it'll open up a air lock so if you're you want to couple with a a larger ship you get inside of it out in space you should be able to dock it should be able to open up drop a ladder down and you'd be able to climb out and get inside that other ship uh we have when you go Planet Side we have you know flaps it's a very small animation it's

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    just a slider that's created and will get played programmatically in code depending on what the player inputs you know so he pushes up on the keyboard or pulls back on his flight stick or whatever it happens to be and it will cause these flaps to go up and down and there's all kinds of things to get animated as well like guns any reticulating Parts on on missiles any of those kind of things the fins may be extending out now do you have any engine um movement back there in the uh yeah yeah we do so let me turn on my little helpers here so I can see what I'm doing and uh okay so this is the those green thing they're like they help you whichever animations they help you control yeah so they do several different things the ones that I have selected here are are controls so I can actually control the different parts of my engine so I'll put my keys on this

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    and then I'll bake it down you have this on faces body parts the helpers are all over and anything you're animating right uh exactly so what I did is I set up a a bunch of controllers on this this engine so you know we can you can open it up we can close it you know go into our After Burner and then I uh added a little bit more flare to it so these open up so you can kind of get this nice little animation of it that is really cool so if you can imagine being like on the runway and the camera's behind the ship and you see the after burners kick on right before it's getting ready to to take off and it does this little puls you know it pulses and fluctuates and then tightens up and you know you take off and then when you hit the brakes it just kind of opens up and helps you slow down very very cool so now let's let's

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    get inside there's some animations in the cockpit right all right so one of the things we want was we want an interactive cockpit right we want you know mechan you know mechanics to uh articulate and panels to come up that you can interact with and and whatnot so uh we have our chair here which spins around so you can actually comfortably you got to be able to get into the chair you can't just climb over the back yeah it's a little little you know again details folks it's all about the details so chair spins around you hop in you'll be able to put your seat belt on if it's a seat belt system uh and after you sit down all the controls come to life and fold out and panels come up and allow you to interact with it and the way we set these animations up for this is we have kind of two two animations we have a deploy and and a retract kind of an

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    animation so you know you sit down and all the panels come out like so and then we say freeze on that frame in in engine so it's kind of like the the weight State or the yeah so so now it's at a in an interactive state for your character and they can punch buttons and whatever it happens to be and then when you decide all right I'm going to get up out of my seat it will play the retract and it will pull the controls back back and let you out of out of your seat very very cool well cool well thanks everybody this has uh been Brian um having a look at the animations on 300 ey and you've got a lot of ships to do yeah yeah there's going to be a lot of ships and a lot of animations so I think it's a full-time job doing yeah so you'll see more of Brian too um when we do a little more in-depth look at the mocap Studio which we got because they helped us get it that's pretty amazing in it oh it's

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    going to be great I in fact I can't wait until uh we get our character animating and then then I'm I'm animating a character to this as opposed to just arbitrarily animating things you know to just to get it to working right now fair enough fair enough all right thanks guys and uh that's a look at the 300 eye