Star Citizen Live: Weapons Grade

7 August 202001:00:501,802 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hi everybody welcome to another episode of star citizen live game dev weapons grade i'm your host uh jared huckabee uh if you've never seen star citizen live before uh it's where we take about an hour out of our day at the end of a week and we either answer some questions about the development of the game or we speak with artists designers conceptors programmers sometimes one time we did a show on schedules with producers we just explore their process how they go about their work how they make the things uh that they make for star citizen and that's what we're doing here today so let's it's it's a let's introduce our panel of esteemed guests some of them you may have seen before some of them this may be your first time so we'll go we'll go around the room and we'll meet who's talking uh jake since you're in the
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corner there let's just start with you who are you and what do you do for star citizen hello uh i'm jake taylor and i'm a prop and 3d weapons artist and so you make props and 3d weapons indeed don't no no don't need to explain that all right all right okay uh moving along clockwise corey you've been on the show you're you're an sel veteran but it's somebody's first show who are you cory banford lead proper ice so i mostly chase these lot around now now that that's at least new the last time we had you on the show you weren't a lead so congratulations yeah oh check congratulations it's good it's good fun i enjoy it it is so soft i i i'm not chilling this is this is mine this is just this is
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beyond personal time here it's very soft um yeah and then uh uh that was my going around the room i realized i had to be up next so that's pico he's a penguin that's his introduction and last but certainly not least david who are you what do you do for star citizen yeah my name is david zipper and i'm a senior weapon artist on star so i do a lot of fps weapons sometimes ship weapons but i'm mostly on on fps weapons you helped us out with our visual guide fps weapons that we did in jump point a couple months ago i really appreciate that by the way i don't i don't think i ever said thank you by the way thank you all right so let's turn let's that's enough for enough for the introductions let's get into the show
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actually i understand that we have a lot to talk about so i'm going to turn it over to you guys what are we doing today going jake no jake jake's okay uh yeah so we'll be able to show off the block out of the new gemini sniper rifle and we could also show off the shotgun which is a bit more head a bit more ahead and we can also look at uh the where the pipeline that we do and just answer any questions talk about that kind of stuff all right all right well you've got a lot so we'll keep you on the clock then you want to start the screen share and take us away cool so corey david do you want me to just like start talking and you're like interrupt me as you wish i mean i'm
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keeping on a chat so if people have questions about what jake's doing um david and i'm sure we can field them and just generally discuss yeah i'll go i'll go ahead and take care of the questions sure yeah no worries i'm not gonna answer like when is x coming out or anything like that don't worry please don't ask us that we don't know and uh for folks who want to submit questions during the course of the show uh remember you can submit your questions in the chat with the word question uh any capital letter surrounded by brackets that's going to help our community management team pull out which questions are appropriate for our group here and then they'll pass them to me and then i'll pass them to the team uh remember that these are three artists so if your questions are about how this works or how that works or will we get this or whatever uh this is not the show for those kind of questions everybody
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art based questions for art based people for simple people yep uh cool so on the screen you can see the concept for the sniper rifle so this is the first thing that as an artist will see and this is based off a model as well so we have the lucky opportunity that our concept artists are also modellers so we get to take this in and essentially already work off a really good base so if i bring in the concept now because right now you're looking at the block out show selection this is that model for the render that you see here and if i show off all the geometry you can see that it when making no uh mind was put into making this cheap
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or or cleaning i'm already seeing 1.3 million polygons yeah that's a that's a good point you raised i want to make sure that that gets across there concept models even even when done in 3d are because they're explorations because they're working fast because they're iterating super quickly uh there is no uh conservation of of of of information or polygons being done there's no efficiency being done so that is people often ask why don't you just put the concept model in the game uh it's because if folks remember uh longtime folks might remember the uh uh freelancer when the freelancer was remade the first time uh way back around 2014-ish uh it had rivets in them it had rivets in them that were
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there were something like uh like like a hundred try a hundred thousand tries so just the rivets alone were just ridiculous and somebody copy pasted the rivets and into the actual game freelancer model and it made things very bad for a while so you don't use concept models in the game yeah it's it's when concept artists do use 3d uh packages they'll tend to use usually quite different actual um software as well so they'd be i know that a fair few concept types to do it for you we'll be using certain fusion 360 which is more for um basically like cad and stuff it's not really even the software itself isn't really designed to create the same sort of geometry as you know game ready stuff so especially with our workflow where we um you know in a lot of video games what
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you'll do is you'll create like a high poly model and then you'll sort of transform that and you'll like bake that information down onto a simpler piece of geometry um in in our workflows you can see what jake's doing here is actually modeling in like a lot of the chamfers um so every everywhere there's like a rounded edge that actually gets modeled in so yeah you can't really transfer the information directly it's more of a process of like reconstructing the shapes um to be optimal optimized for like a you know game-ready scenario so you're you're you're in the process of this is literally like uh you're you're you're about as far along in the process as you are you know building this out and converting it from the concept uh one of the questions from the chat
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is uh what do you anticipate the dif the greatest difficulty for this weapon to be at this point i know you're you're still in early days here um i know that already because i've had to tackle it a bit and it's it's this area around here like all this kind of gubbins because if i focus on the concept a sec um not only have you got kind of like these really difficult organic shapes in a hard surface asset they're all very slightly kind of turning in and oh wow that's yeah that's one of the biggest um problems we need to tackle while doing it is that that everything needs to be animated it needs to work the magazine needs to rotate out it has a mechanism and and all that needs to work
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and the parts shouldn't intersect you know shouldn't move into each other and and you know having that ugly intersection that that's something we need to prevent while while doing it and and of course you know that's something that concept artists know to look out for uh you know through metrics and stuff like that but you don't always discover every single uh uh edge case and uh issue during the concept process yeah that's how that's fine um that that's why we're doing a blockout so we're doing this blockout in this state and already do a rig a rig is basically a skeleton that an animator can use and the animator then tests it in engine and we can we while doing it we already
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usually run into issues and and see um how this this works out and then uh here we can see that the mechanism pretty pretty nice um we can test all that in engine and reiterate on it because uh in this state it's really easy to rebuild rebuild something or change something but if it's final and we have already made textures and so on so the more we've done on it the harder it gets to um to change you know so in this state it's it's still pretty easy to uh change around shapes and and rebuild it yeah and for those asking uh he's working in maya right now yeah it's quite um it's quite interesting because a lot of um a lot of the assets in star citizen for instance
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ships um props and environment they're typically made in 3ds max but um character animations and charac you know and that's all done on in maya so you know for fps weapons it makes a lot more sense to be using maya um you know you could you could technically make it all in max but it's mostly just the animators and the rigs will need to be admired anyway so if you can do the art in maya as well it just kind of streamlines it you're not supporting two different source files it just makes things a lot neater um and yeah the workflow has kind of been adapted to that uh in chat they have a question uh couldn't there be a tool of some kind that just takes the concept model and then just breaks it down from there that would that would be the yeah
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that would make our jobs obsolete yeah i think like that's what we there's a lot of automation that can be done um for 3d modelling but um i think it's just due to the fact that we've got such a a specific workflow i think it would be very difficult to get a computer you know a computer program or an algorithm or something to actually reproduce those results perfectly we we do use um for things like lods in in some other workflows we have um systems that generate our lots for us or you know we have a lot of scripts to automate parts of the process but as a whole because we have this focus on optimization and we have a lot of different requirements that really for a human once you know the rule set is quite simple but for i think getting like i don't know
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like ai or some sort of program to do man i think maybe in 10 years maybe in 20 years or something we might have you know we might be closer to that but it would also require a longer concept period because all of those absolute things the the functionality would have to be completely totally and utterly worked out in the concept phase and while we certainly target that and we certainly take those things in mind during the concept phase uh anybody that's followed uh the development over time knows that that sometimes things just have to change from concept because metrics change the the the scale and scope of development changes uh the lessons we learn along the way as we make each one of these uh improves uh it's just it's a lot easier for a human to adapt than it is for some automated tool yeah i think like if you look if you
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look back at um a lot of the workflows that we had you know even even 10 years ago for video games it has you know we have seen a lot of changes in that there are a lot of workflows that do rely more on um like procedural generation or you know computer assisted kind of um but yeah i think you know there's it's it's it's a conversation obviously as artists we have a lot is you know how long is it until our jobs are going to radically change because things like um deep learning well you know like deep learning algorithms and stuff are basically going to be like you know make this like i think nvidia have done some interesting stuff like landscape generators and things right you know when they're gonna when are they gonna make a landscape generator for 3d art it's i think with hard surface assets it's because they're so sort of organized in
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their structure it's really hard to get a computer to make them if that makes sense because i know it sounds kind of counter-intuitive but when you have an organic asset it doesn't really matter if the topology isn't perfect right you can just kind of munch it so yeah i think you know things like photogrammetry and stuff generally work better on like rocks yeah well and one of one of the core tenets of star citizen is that you know we use automation and tools and everything to help our workflow and to assist artists anything but not to take over the work from them there's it's you know some games would use procedural generation and spit out the finished product we use procedural generation in like our planets and stuff to provide a base from which artists then go and do their work after the fact so it's we we use scripts and that kind of stuff
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to help us along the way but not to do the work for us at least today there's no substitute for that human touch um one of the questions one of the questions from the chat is uh how long uh how long a process would this normally take i know there's there's almost no normal in game development but looking at this well when you got this model what was your estimate on how long it would take to make this game ready from the timeline i would say it's it's um it depends on how many problems come up while doing it like in the optimal case you can do it in about two weeks i would say in a non-optimal case where we need to change a lot where problems come up and we realize them pretty late in the process that that sometimes happens sadly um it can
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take up to a month or so that sometimes when when problems come up super late in the process that eats up a lot of time but usually we we try to plan it pretty good and get it done as fast as possible and yeah and that's right sorry not good no good good i guess that's the main reason for like the the sort of blockout phase like what we would normally do is we get the concept mesh run it through some optimization processes and get that in game and then you know you can see the character holding it we can say does this work on the mail rig does it work on the female rig does it tick all the boxes for the hand grips and stuff you know uh jake will probably show you um another weapon later where we had to make some adjustments to the weapon from the concept because the the grip wasn't quite working um
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just through like you know while the concept artists are very aware of the sort of you know the application of a weapon unlucky humans holding it they they don't necessarily test all the you know they can't necessarily test all the use cases so sometimes we do come back and we you know we get it in and we're like okay this isn't working tweet the proportions here maybe you know make make some changes you know just just just purely because it needs to be used by a character and i'll show that now sure as well one of the the problems that came up for example with the shotgun here is that the the magazine actually sticked a little bit too much into the armor of the character and we we had to address that and and that's something while doing the weapon itself um sometimes you can't even think about the possibility that the magazine because of the shape it has it it kind
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of like clips too much into the the body of the character and and therefore we had to like change the orientation of it that the flat side is on the body and not the round side that you can see here if that makes sense so some of those changes that you guys are mentioning and if i change over to the shotgun concept and this was a concept that we were given and i can't really show them side by side so i'm just going to quickly flash between the two of them but if i point it out in the concept we've got kind of got like this trigger and then this nice angle here that leads into the magazine and then it kind of leads out into this really nice long barrel and this area is where most of the change happened we were having issues with what you said david like uh
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the character's arm and clipping with this barrel and we're limited right by how big this barrel needs to be because we want it to specifically contain i think it was like 12 shotgun shells so i had to make this thicker this has to be sitting right up against the trigger now um and this whole nose area had to be brought in way back and um because there's a pump action as well if you look here like the handle's quite slim and if you were to grab that and drag that back and forth you probably break your fingers on this or something there also wasn't any like buffer was there on it wasn't like on a rail whereas what you've got now is you've got the the sort of foregrip sound forwards quite a lot and it'll articulate backwards because this correct me if i'm wrong but this this
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has got like a pump action on a fully automatic mode right um i don't want to semi-automatic sorry you don't think you're right i don't think you're right so it's got a drone mag and it's it's just a pump action uh they're a surprise i i i i can say that there was some healthy discussion about that topic uh between richard tyron and cr the other day it's still under review i think okay yeah i know that was initially this sort of brief but yeah maybe let's change now cool yeah and as you can see um like we we model it pretty detailed so that you can look inside and you even see the shotgun shell inside on the magazine um yeah you can even zoom in see the shotgun shell and what the animator does it he takes the top
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shell and actually animates it into the chamber if you like having a slow motion in engine like by 10 speed you can see the shell moving in there while the bolt is moving back yeah actually like this basically and that is a really nice touch and most people won't even notice but but it's it's really cool that we have it in engine i think i should be able to exactly so you you're switching around here so you're now in inside the lumberyard oh we lost the oh there we go so this is now inside lumberyard yeah so you can show off that shotgun uh i just let them drop to the floor and then pick them up from the ground because you're a savage i'm a professional get a table jake the table's right over there yeah uh but yeah we should
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fire a shot you can very very quickly see that come out see a dude's torso through the other side a little fun perfect dummies so i can really see how this gun feels it's looking cool yeah uh those guys just showed up for some bikini calendar shoot yeah uh you got a a question from the community here um for artists uh what are your limitations poly uh polygon count wise uh this first was this person saw the barrels flash hider uh looked like it had a ton of polygons
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in it uh and and then is gaming really moving away from polygon restrictions um yeah i think i can say something about that so you can see on this one together with the magazine is around 52 000 polygons which sounds quite a bit but you need to consider we have a different workflow than uh most other studios have so our workflow is custom normals so all these like at the front or jake is showing it with the cube here um so yeah this has 12 triangles and if you bevel it it already has 44 but um if you select the vertices now on it um like if you can select all of them you will see that that it's 24 and because of the hard edges here like the hard edges basically
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split the the object into multiple faces on the left cube so right exactly exactly and and the vertex count is actually the same for them or nearly the same so that's actually what matters in the end is the vertex count and um another reason another thing that matters is small polygons but we are using level of details of the weapon so like after about like one meter or one meter um 50 it already has um it's getting rid of the small little uh bevels here at the side so you basically after 1 meter 50 you see the the left cube instead of the the right cube right so our weapons use the same leds that ships do so so so that way we when we look up close at it we can see
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all the full crazy detail and then everybody else who's running around in game they're seeing a lower lod version until they get until they get really up close it's also worth mentioning and i'm an engineer or a graphics programmer so i might you know this is going to be a layman's explanation but um the advantage of this workflow where you're putting a lot of detail in the geometry of course it will increase your your triangle count your vertex count however in a lot of games like i said earlier they they actually bake um they actually bake the high poly information into a lower poly version and they create a texture for that called a normal map which essentially per pixel will give you like the angle essentially say you have 200 props or weapons in a scene
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and you're loading in 200 of those unique textures it's quite a lot of texture memory whereas with our workflow we do use textures for some things like palm the materials themselves and so on but we don't have like a lot of unique texture memory taken up per asset so you're actually kind of you know we're basically taking up more overhead in terms of poly count but we're also reducing the amount of texture overhead in a way so it's kind of swings around about um i think hardware is a huge part of that and that's not really a topic i'm you know hugely educated on like to you know actually you know what modern specs are for graphics cards and you know it's a difficult one to really explain it's nice but essentially like you know we're kind of
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prioritizing reducing texture and memory versus you know the amount of triangles we have yeah uh in a question that asks to look behind the curtain and see if oz is really there uh for the magazines do the weapon magazines actually have individually modeled rounds inside them um and do you move out of the magazines we need to trick it a little bit to for like not having too many polygons so round is usually modeled completely and the one under it has a little bit less details than the top one and if you go even deeper into the magazine you maybe even have a cylinder with the red stripes so you if you have like a glimpse from the side you can still yeah and in this case you can still see it pretty good but on some magazines it's it's
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um the shadow is actually taking away the detail anyway so you can can um use more uh less less details the deeper you go in yeah things like um grenade launchers and such where all the um well you know not bullets but rounds are visible they'd have to be modeled in yeah yeah but in terms of the capacity and stuff is you know stored as a value somewhere so they're kind of there but sometimes they're not drawn sorry go on jared no no that's it you you do it you do what you got to do to squeeze every answer performance where you can that's true for most video games i think or at least we should be yeah we even even though we use more polygons and the workflow we do is is still optimized quite a bit so um
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we're not using a heavy load of textures like corey said before which can in some cases if you use a 2000 by two thousand resolution or four thousand by four thousand you can easily get to um like a hundred megabyte per weapon and um if we have like a hundred weapons in game it it gets too heavy and we had to like think about ways of reducing it so and our workflow with the custom normals is really scalable um you can use it on weapons you can use it on buildings and and on it doesn't matter really what you do with it it all works yeah and that's why it's so strong in my opinion yeah it's um it's quite uh yeah the scalability is really important especially for um say props for instance where you have
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like i don't know an absolutely obscene amount of them like you know you need them to be we wanted to look good we wanted to have a lot of detail but we also want them to be fairly cheap uh folks are still talking about whether the shotgun was and semi-auto there are so no no there are accommodation uh pump semi-auto uh shotguns in the world i think the the tech 12 and there's one from uh the european union his name i i can't remember right now they're rare but but they exist uh as far as that one goes uh i know it's still under discussion about whether it's going to be both or whether it's going to the spas thank you see there's the chat is that's what i was trying to remember the spas so see you always count on chat uh so yeah so they are out there so i
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don't i don't i know that that's currently under discussion about whether where that's going to land whether it's still going to be a hybrid or whether it's going to be one to the other all right or just our only pump it's definitely going to have pump let's put it that way there is a pump on it yeah exactly there is a pump on it it will definitely have pumped i think the question is just whether it's yeah uh semi automatic as well or not so so check back later folks one thing i wanted to say as well uh those who are uh paying real close attention you probably saw that i did some work and they pretty much went back on it all and that's just gonna happen sometimes a lot of time you'll try and tackle a situation realize that it won't quite work and then you'll just tackle it in a different way so i try to get rid of the negative space on this
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on this shape here first and then with this shape here and try to combine them and realize oh that's not going to work i'm going to do it this way instead and now i can get rid of that negative space once these two pieces are combined and little things like that yeah and you always need to consider we're working like in in sub-millimeter sizes here sometimes so like the edges are like 0.7 millimeter or something it's like we need to do it a little bit bigger than it would be in the real world because if you do it in a game engine um really hard edges are like pixelated a lot and and you're reaching a point where it looks better where when you do it a little bit bigger even though it's unrealistic yeah so we have like a like the minimum value of
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i would say like point seven millimeter and usually i go for one millimeter for edges yeah on on it's probably way more because the objects are bigger right yeah usually uh our safe minimum is like for say like something that's like a meter square a meter cube would be like half a centimeter we'd say the chamfers it's it's kind of down to the use case like if we have a prop that you pick up and inspect you know similar to a weapon you'd probably want those chamfers to be sort of tuned to where they are in screen space if that makes sense like how big they are relative to the size of the the you know where they are in the world but yeah now i think the nice thing about modeling this kind of stuff is it is definitely like an iterative process
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you know you're kind of you're problem solving as you go you're sometimes tapping shapes you've never kind of worked with before or you know employing a ton of different modeling techniques you said editor is that iterative for playing the star citizen drinking game you have to drink what's your best modeling advice for an amateur cg artist uh this person specifically uses moto and zbrush at the moment yeah for starters it's it's um the software it really doesn't matter that much i would say like you can use blender it's free or you just try to get a um a version from from your uni or so if you're using my or max it's also good it's most the people in the industry use maya or max
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so that's always a safe bet i would say it's most important is that you keep doing work you know even if it's not good in the beginning just continue don't stop doing your work try to improve try to get into into fields that that you're interested in if you like characters go into characters and if you go for like more like weapons um then then try to do a lot of weapons right try to learn more about weapons how they work because for example on weapons you know you you need to kind of understand the mechanics behind it a little bit at least so yeah it's always helpful to have your a proper mindset for what you're doing you know that that's really important yeah i think using reference is a a very important thing when you're
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starting out as well like um also you know there's tons of communities out there for um getting feedback and stuff like you know you'll find that there's a lot of communities where you'd have industry veterans you know in like discords and you can get feedback from them they can tell you sort of where you're making mistakes with your modeling um like i think reproducing a shape is quite easy reproducing a shape elegantly is where the sort of challenge in you know what i would call like production are you know we're not necessarily concept artists we're not sort of designing these forms ourselves but we're reproducing them with a set kind of criteria right you know if you think about it like pixel art if you're a pixel artist you're you're employing a bunch of techniques to you know reproduce something in that sort of
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style this is this is sort of similar if you're if you're interested in in video games specifically getting into being a 3d artist for video games definitely learning about the techniques that we employ is you know gonna get you a long way um or if you're interested in like you know cgi like film and stuff you know they use a whole another bag of tricks and you can kind of yeah yeah probably modeling for them looks like the concept you did before so for film it it like of course they need to kind of look that they don't use five million polygons for screw but uh they they they kind of like don't care too much for for like the um like the i would say the polygon quality you would say like like that's more for
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game art that we like you know have to look a lot how optimized it is and that you for example for this piece we have like 200 polygons and for films you could use i don't know a couple of thousand for for this piece alone here yeah real-time rendering means you know we're rendering the asset you know 60 120 you know however many frames per second so it's very specialist hardware doing a very sort of specialist task um for films it's like they chuck it on an offline render it just choke yeah i'd like to serve the farm it'll just be absolutely chugging away you know so they can they can render like you know an hour of footage over you know 20 computer weeks or whatever i'm not sure what the ratios are i'm not too up to date on the film industry specs but
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you know for games it's it's got to run you know it's got a run uh a frame rate that you know is sufficient for people to actually interact with it and and that's why when you're working on games you're you're really a technical modeler so a big part of our work is is not i would say art in the traditional sense of just doing nice things it's it's also a lot of work that that goes into learning the techniques and um yeah that's in for games especially you need to know how to do your stuff and then with the knowledge you have you can do art but go coming to a point where you you're so good that it's you you basically know it in and out and just can do content over and over um that's
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that's a hard way definitely yeah you've also got to consider the fact that the hard surface modeling like what we're doing here we're creating you know machined industrial things that's only a single facet of what you know it can mean to be a game artist you could be a an environment artist in which case you're making terrain you're making rocks you're making that kind of stuff and we do a bit of that on the props team um or you know you could be a character art you know studying anatomy learning you know how muscles and faces and stuff work like character artists aren't real artists character concept artists aren't real we'll make a very specific character character concept artists in l.a aren't real artists we'll just i'm not i don't want to start with those guys
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just narrow it down right there we're good you're trying to drive a wedge between us jared and i'm not gonna let it happen between you i'm the one that's going to hear about it yeah um do you guys typically do high poly to low poly bakes even on unique assets like weapons props stuff like that or do you ever use like a mid poly no bake workflow yes that's all our work is so what jake's doing now is he's making like basically we use this thing called custom normals or weighted normals where essentially your big flat faces you point the normals straight and then you'll have like a single sort of 45 degree angle edge and then the normals will be kind of facing um you know towards the the larger surfaces and it'll fake a curve essentially so we don't
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bake any of our assets because you know i've got i don't know a thousand props and if each one had its own texture and you were like okay load all the props into this level it would just go and then it would die so yeah we we tend to just we only really bake unique assets when it's either something really special for squadron or um it's an organic asset that you wouldn't be able to throw enough triangles out to do it justice any anyway and it would end up cheaper just streaming in a texture um we didn't quite talk about uh palms uh before it's like the way we do details so um so poms is is a short form of parallax occlusion mapping and we use it for stuff like especially that goes in you can see this indents here and
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what we do is like we we kind of model a high poly that's the only case where we use it that's why i'm yeah i can do it now and um so you can see that they have like that that it really has perspective it really goes in and that is because it has a height map basically everything that's low is is black and everything that's high is is uh white so um yeah you can can even if you zoom in it still looks super cool because it's it's really giving yeah it's it's really giving the the certain perspective we need for screws and so on yeah palms are amazing when we started using those we started using those that that changed things overnight so it's basically putting a sticker on it with the detail and you can use the stickers as
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much as you want basically and it's it's like baking a map but just for the little part where you want the detail to be right for like like screws and indents it's it's not worth to model them it's it's really easy for us to just oh yeah jake yeah there you go so yeah so so just to make sure folks are getting this here the screws and everything a lot of those intents they're not actually like modeled it's a sticker that goes on and then yeah it's looking good yeah and the beautiful thing about having it as a sticker is it's not sort of it's not um unique to that single you know set of pixels you can place it wherever you want on the weapon so you can have a bolt that is i don't know 64 by 64 pixels of texture memory and you slap it on
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like 90 your asset on like a thousand props you know you're streaming in that one set of um you know displacement maps slapping it on like you know hundreds of and you you're just streaming that in you know what the second you stream one property and it'll stream in that texture and then you bring the rest in it's like eh you know that's fine we've already got that texture so performance wise it's it's real nice yeah and it can in in some cases it can be like uh i don't know like 200 kilobyte or something because it's a really small texture that you're using over and over again it's it just needs to be really these small pieces and like the traditional way of doing it in in a lot of games that are still done and have been done before is is doing basically this technique but for the whole weapon even in places where it technically doesn't
00:38:21
make much sense to have it because on on a flat surface we just don't need it right we don't need to to tell the engine that a flat surface is flat because it's already flat yeah if that makes sense yeah i saw one person asking the chat how many lots to use on an asset um the answer is generally up to five um usually what we do the way our loads are calculated so for anyone doesn't know lod stands for level of detail it's essentially another version of the the match the the geometry that is cheaper you know has fewer vertices or fewer triangles we basically we take the the average size of the small triangles and we say when that is a certain amount of pixels on screen switch to the next
00:39:09
one so it doesn't matter if your asset is the size of a space station or the size of a coffee cup once those small triangles are you know on in on the screen a certain amount of pixels it'll say okay use the next slot so it's a really lovely scalable system in a lot of game engines what you'll have is you'll dictate the distance that you transition transition to a lot like manually which obviously when you've got many many assets is a bit of a pain and it's just like a really elegant system here um usually what what i tend to do is um you've seen it before that that basically you have the the um parts of the weapon with the hard and and usually i leave that that parts with hard edges yeah that's it's a really low polygon area
00:39:56
and and if you go to like a distance of like 20 meter you can't tell the the difference between between it so if you're zooming out the one without a lot is disappearing on the right but but with the lots you can't see a difference yeah um it's also worth noting that um someone asked we do we do our laws manually or do you do them computer generated it's kind of it depends on what the asset is uh more organic assets you can get with automation on weapons because they're so dense we tend to you know doing them by hand is quite challenging so we tend to do i think the first slot automatically and after that we do it manually is that right yeah that's that's how i tend to do it because um like it still has enough detail to to usually look really similar to the
00:40:45
first one if you do it automatically but after that it the automatic the software kind of doesn't know anymore uh how to do it and this is like the lowest version where where it's just the basic shapes and it maybe doesn't look too good for you now but on a distance of like on it on a distance of like let's say 25 meter or like 50 meter you can't tell the difference with that lot it reminds me of halo on the original xbox yeah but but you need to realize we don't have like unique textures so we can't still make it have the texture on it and we all need to do everything with polygons and that looks like super like nintendo style oh even the characters have lots i haven't seen those
00:41:35
yeah i know we are exploring um we are exploring more automated workflows for um for lots using like houdini um that's quite exciting it's i'm a bit of a i'm a bit of an automated skeptic personally i think that human beings for i i think for the foreseeable future will be better at it than computers obviously it's not it takes a long time and it can be it can be automated but the results often are not as good so you'll have more no like in in some games you know you have more more obvious popping you know when you're moving away from an asset you might see it like deform wildly we try our best to make our odds unnoticeable and you know there there's a lot to keep track of
00:42:23
yeah nice one did you steal that joke from the chat yes i stole it from don steeler i always steal my money you're not getting away from me man no no no no i call i've called it out before dawn steelers in chat every every friday just to provide me with the worst puns possible and i steal them freely nice good good steeler jared i think can show off the uh wear and dirt as well now because we've done quite a lot of modeling so we can show off yeah yeah we've got like 15 minutes left jake so um i thought we were gonna make a weapon skin as well but that's gonna have to wait for another one isn't it all right oh yeah if time runs out we can do it again of course yeah weapon skin i really wanted jake to make like a leopard print
00:43:10
weapon skin or something yeah i i once i made one that had like this leopard skin style in pink and white and it still didn't make the way into its game i'm really disappointed i need to talk to i don't know producers why why this didn't happen yet yeah just uh just sneak it in one day yeah so dynamic won't that's what jake's kind of showing off now that's a big part of our sort of workflow this is one of the times we do use a unique texture per asset on weapons we use unique for a unique texture to generate this um wear and dirt essentially so the plan is in the future for this to um be a consequence of you know your i can't say when obviously
00:43:59
um you know your handling of the weapon will affect its wear value essentially um so to what degree i don't know i'd you know but for now it's something that we have a slider that we can you know scale um essentially we have a texture for that where we have it's split into the three channels of course red green and blue that's how um computers read textures um how they display photos and stuff they have those channels um we used a red channel for wear the green channel for dirt and the blue channels for something called ambient seclusion which um you can kind of summarize as when two things are close together they tend to block out the light you know so it's essentially just a way of very cheaply kind of faking that effect um to kind of darken your cavities and stuff so jake's been working on some tools to kind of
00:44:47
help automate the process of generating um these wear and dirt masks yeah so um using a blend map that corey was just explaining at first i try to make it within substance designer and then i've got like an auto generated one here and then i was thinking like we could bring it into substance painter have very specific parameters that we could play around with but as i was like throwing on different weapons i found that if i just make it in painter and then just bring them into designer to export it's a lot a lot simpler and often the simpler um answer is the best one and this way it gives us a lot more creative freedom so with these channels i've tried to separate them out into red
00:45:35
green and blue but with the red channel that's gonna be the edgeware so if i look at the weapon here see that's like just the edges coming in there that kind of silver and then with the blue channel i've tried to get this kind of peeling uh metal effect so when you peel it off you kind of get this different material that comes in around it just makes it feel a bit more grounded as if the material is peeling off before it gets to the layer underneath and then with the green channel i've got kind of a dirt generation which works pretty well for just creating kind of generic um grime and dirt but a big question about getting this to look good was like how do we want our weapons to wear like
00:46:24
do we want to add rust not really because let's say you've left a weapon out in like a planet that's like a desert or something and you find it after like um months of playing and it's completely rusty on a planet that has no rain it doesn't quite make any sense so we've got to try and get it to look generally grimy and beaten up like it's had a hard life but it's not necessarily like going to be seized up it's just a bit be in you know over lubricated kind of you know nasty but not you know you know that's also something we talked about that we maybe in the future can like depending on the planet you're on you have different kinds of wear and dirt and um that it's like if if
00:47:13
it's like a planet where you have a lot of rain then the wear when it's now kind of a metal or compound that you have under it it can maybe change to a more rusty version of it so it kind of depends for now this needs to be like usable on basically every planet we have but in the future the system might change to to more complicated system we'll see we'll see we'll see about it so i want this is one of those times where i need to jump in there and be like you know you guys are you guys are working on the art assets uh to support the future development of a system that will be created by engineers and programmers and systems designers so what can and cannot be done and what will and won't be done will be the preview of other
00:48:01
folks but you are here building making sure that all of your stuff is ready and willing and able for when that time comes which is which is wonderful yeah i saw someone ask about whether the concepts artists are more responsible for the functionality of a weapon or whether it's the developers or skies um generally the the concept artists will you know have a pretty decent understanding of how the weapon operates they will be coordinating with um you know designers and stuff for the pre-production process like how do we want this weapon to behave what kind of features does it have all of that stuff kind of gets kept in mind when a weapon's being you know in the pre-production stage so when we receive an asset
00:48:48
the challenges we face largely are okay we have this idea for a weapon it does x y and z it has these functions how do we make that work with dm game systems you know how does it work with the character rig um how does it look scale and proportion wise and so on you know we kind of a lot of the legwork is done not necessarily by the concept artists themselves but in the pre-production stage there's a lot of discussion about the functionality of a weapon yeah and then we're kind of like okay how do we how do we realize the dream you know this stream like of the concept artist and you know design and and so on obviously we're just one small facet of the weapons pipeline um you know weapons you know you have audio vfx animations um you know the actual gameplay systems um
00:49:38
you know in terms of weapon damage and balance and stuff we just made the thing itself you know what you know we don't necessarily we have a lot of you know talented and you know people many many different skill sets kind of who also contributes like weapons as a feature we're kind of more we're a part of weapons content but weapons feature contains a lot more um developers so we're kind of you know we're kind of what's we're downstream so to speak of some departments you know but we're also there's also people who depend on our work like animators um you know audio and vfx they kind of need to see the asset in game first right you know so it's it's it's like a multi-disc multi-disciplinary you know sort of thing
00:50:25
a there's a pipeline to it like just about anything else yeah is that another one for the star citizen drinking game nah i don't think no maybe not that one i would say what is it it's fidelity it's immersion it's iterative uh scalable that's that's getting there i don't think that's there yeah maybe not all right let's make that word bespoke bespoke isn't the uh sony chats like bespoke bespoke's not the uh star citizen that's that's the that's the jared drinking game i'm the one that abuses that word um uh what it's one of the chats we're wrapping up here uh are there any easter eggs on the weapons you guys have made that you'd like to to share
00:51:16
i've put my um sort of name my abbreviated name in a few serial numbers but that's pretty much the most fun i've had i'm very pedestrian when it comes to um some people have snuck in uh slightly more memes and uh things onto decals and stuff we try and um we don't want people to see something that takes them out of the game because you know if you if you see a decal that's got you know some meme in it it's not you know you know someone you know a developer has put that in right so it's kind of like you've got to be careful about your easter eggs that are not too immersion breaking i think yes and also you know if someone sees them and it's you know a naughty easter egg you might get in trouble so yeah you also have to be aware not to send folks on uh uh random goose chases and stuff
00:52:05
because they think it's a clue or something and some arg game and it's actually just the locker combination to your day that you had in high school or something yeah yeah it doesn't mean anything sometimes serial numbers are are just really really serial numbers and don't have a meeting meaning or something it's it's usually they don't have a meeting sometimes it's my my bank account number corey i would think anybody else was joking but with you i'm not entirely certain yeah if you know yeah you can clean that one out if you find it that's a joke 12 euros can be yours yeah you could have one whole money uh for modular weapon parts like uh scopes and suppressors and stuff uh is
00:52:54
there a version for for each uh is there a version of each weapon for every configuration of modules or are the models in game uh actually modular wow this this question goes around circles yeah it's um so we have a a kind of an item port system so um we we place uh helpers on on the weapons so um you can yeah in this case you can customize it and um you have the points there the attachment points where you can actually put a different model so you can put a laser pointer on it uh and or like a flashlight and uh yeah at the front and not every weapon supports suppressors or muscle breaks but in this case it works
00:53:44
because it's a ballistic weapon but some weapons just are not really just too big or are not the kind of weapons where you put where you would put a silencer on so uh algante uh yes you did see what you see and you'll learn more about it later in isc this quarter someone asks what is your favorite hard surface modelling technique and why is it booleans i think mine's actually splines i'm known for my splines so everyone everyone loves splines and there's definitely blue booleans brilliance i just like seeing it great uh recently uh we saw the inclusion of the lightning bolt company uh with their sniper rifles and pistols
00:54:30
uh what were the different challenges that you faced when making those you're very lucky because you have the two guys who made the pistol sniper rifle right here oh yeah um oh yeah [Music] yeah it was one of the more complicated weapons because it's um so for us if it's a static weapon we just need to model it it's it's always you know straightforward we we know what we're doing just get the weapon and uh and do it right but in this case a lot of stuff is moving around it's unfolding you have like moving stuff rotating all the little parts at the front the round stuff is actually moving and or is rotating out so
00:55:22
so yeah i would say that the more um animates about a weapon the harder it is for us to do and the more we need to consider uh actually like how stuff behaves and and if it like intersects like i said earlier and yeah do you guys have a favorite weapon that you've worked on i've only made one so a couple of squadron stuff i don't know if i can talk about that [Laughter] mine is actually the shotgun um fairly new to the weapon pipeline and i've made that pistol and that smg but the shotgun's the third one i've made and the fourth being this sniper rifle this one was the most fun because i think i
00:56:09
had a bit more control over it because there were a lot of things that did have to change thanks to things clipping with the animation so for me that's why it was more fun that's a great looking shotgun it did i'm trying to think of what it reminds me of but it it it's definitely sparking a familiarity with me that makes me appreciate it a little bit more oh yeah man thank you i just can't right yeah i just the entire show i've been trying to figure out what it reminds me of that that makes me like it so much and i can't think of it maybe it is a tommy gun maybe maybe it's a 30th century version of atomic although that would be a machine gun not a shotgun but i don't i don't think it's a tommy gun from the chat uh let's see let's see if we have any more questions before we let you go for
00:56:57
today um let's see what else do we got here someone said aa-12 which is another drum fed shotgun lots of questions of course for the show but uh folks remember these are artists so if you're asking uh bugs or or connection issues or some these would not be the people who could speak to that um do you do you ever soften uh soften or harden the normals of the geometry on a on a per need basis or or do you have like a set of guidelines for the normals on the vertices um so usually what i tend to do is i try to have everything soft and um have like on all hard edges i have the
00:57:45
um a chamfer or a bevel so um yeah that's how i usually work that that i don't leave a lot of hard edges but of course sometimes you need to do it for certain reasons and then you can just um select all the edges harden them and and just leave them in the state yeah yeah in edge case for having um a hard edge amongst custom normals is when you've got like a super third and face or actually i can actually show with a shotgun um within here because this is super thin i haven't actually beveled the edge on the inside because it doesn't need to be it's just a bit of spit like where we can save some memory nice jared yeah so uh we're we're about at the end why don't you go ahead and stop the
00:58:33
screen share and we'll uh wrap things up there i think we're on the ranks yep i'm on the wrong screen now i don't know we're right so uh yeah i was just i was showing you this this is my weapon i'm not uh toast doesn't let me fire it in the house though so i can't show it to you i can't i can't show it uh not after the eye incident sounds very expensive trip to the doctors hey eyebrows grow back yeah the eye the eye patch eyebrows grow back so guys thank you so much for taking time out of the end of your week to to hang out with us and uh you know show a bit of your process um we will we will absolutely bring you back at some point to do the weapon skin thing uh there's always there's always oh that's right toast is in the chat he's like i'm
00:59:21
not in the house go ahead um so as we are want to do uh we are not we are going to throw the raid over to a star citizen streamer who is broadcasting right now uh the streamer today uh is an oldie but a goodie it is dj knight uh dj knight who uh once once once took me to a an all-american pizza place in cologne germany uh that was just dominoes it was just dominoes and we got all excited we were like wow all american new york pizza place in the middle of germany yeah let's check it out and i was it was just dominoes can you say domino's first david yeah so so guys we're starting up the raid so you can opt in right now uh when you're when you're uh when you get there tell them uh jared says what's up with german dominoes dude
01:00:11
uh for star citizen live i'm jared i'm jared that's jake that's david that's corey and we'll see you next week everybody take care love you bye you

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