10 for the Artists: Episode 03 (2015.06.15)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:01

   [Music] greetings citizens welcome to another episode of 10 for the artist my name is Forest Stefan CG supervisor to my left is Omar AA concept artist and we'd like to thank uh all the um subscribers for making this show possible and having us as guests yeah thank you all right so first one is from Geral Deval how much of your inspiration is drawn from existing sci-fi and how much is organic could you provide examples of each so I guess when I'm concepting uh to try and make something really unique generally we we try to

2. 00:00:52

   stick away from like sci-fi for example like with weapons I would look more towards uh different pieces of Machinery maybe drills or power tools or things that uh aren't necessarily already considered weapons maybe even like uh remote control submarines and all sorts of like weird electronics that way you kind of get a little bit new and original shapes and ideas but then at the same time a lot of the direction or the art Direction calls towards pre-existing like sci-fi for example like certain ships from Halo or Firefly or elisium and all these kind of things like we're thinking about this kind of feel for this kind of ship and it's a great way to put you in the right direction but then once you kind of

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   understand that you start to go deeper and look at a variety of different objects and different references but really something that's just completely creative and like organic something that's like conceptual it just comes during the design process it's not something that necessarily uh I would look for or I would try to do I I would gather reference I do a lot of research and whatever happens during the creative process uh that's what's organic but generally I don't try to create anything just straight out of my head yeah when they're cuz where you're making a weapon or a ship they're they're machines right so you don't just like make a weapon you got to do the research on figuring out how would you actually build this if I was going to theoretically build this in real life right so you can investigate on you know different types of you know I don't know that's tell like like

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   engineering like you're a designer and you're also semi like an engineer but you also make cool art right so we don't necessarily take everything to the full level of fully fully functionality but we try to make it as functional as possible with the knowledge that we know and like the more weapons you do the more realistic it gets the ships you know the more ships you build the more you create the more you kind of know this is my route for getting reference and inspiration and all sorts of stuff yeah and then we definitely like to keep you know there's different styles to different weapons and different ships which a lot lot of the times the parts that we do look at to build this stuff will be from different eras so maybe one style of one weapon in one ship is more you know World War II style and that kind of thing but then maybe another ship at another weapon is much more kind of slick modern and Chic and then we look at more modern parts and uh things that

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   are being created today and that kind of helps to find the different styles is the different time periods that we pull our Inspirations from totally yeah and also too like the design like each Corporation there's so many corporations there's so many manufacturers that each kind of have their own unique style for example apocalypse arms uh there's like Detroit biker gang like that would be like the design brief how can we take a Detroit biking community and make them science fiction yeah exactly uh so yeah all right well hopefully that answers that question yeah for Mr dval Mr dval Gerald dval okay next question is from Fallen is there any chance of showing it's a great movie by the way Fallen yeah it's the best ending I never saw it way to throw me off track I'm sorry continue just kidding continue

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   okay is there any chance of showing those of us who are artistically curious a video of some staging progress and shots of an artist working on a concept some people enjoy watching how others do it and can be a new segment to building interests so I love when we do that or whoever does that I love watching Remember When David um David hobbins uh they recorded him doing a time um sketch of one of the [ __ ] and I thought it was like the coolest thing ever so I would love to see more of that um even like speed modeling when you guys are kid bashing you know Parts together and ships together and I think that'd be great yeah yeah I haven't necessarily had any experience doing that but I would definitely uh I mean it's really common for a lot of artists to record their process and post it so people can see um but maybe doing it under like the Star Citizen like label like see what

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   how each artist Works differently because each artist is super unique so everybody has a completely process to doing it so I mean I'm not opposed I would love to do that yeah and it's like you know the future so I could like you know something that will take me like two weeks yeah that would take you five minutes you know we could just like speed it up a little bit right kind of like you see yeah you model you speed it up 17 times and you say that's how long it took yeah exactly um okay I I hope that answered that question yeah I know I think it's a great idea great uh this guy this one from solo when you uh set out to design anything how do you get your inspiration for the task I tend to I love watching movies I tend if a task says to do something very specific whether it's an

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   explosion or an effect or a character or an environment uh I generally pick kind of my favorite art directed um onscreen demonstration of it and then I use that as my inspiration um and then I kind of go from there and I try to make it you know my own right yeah totally I I do the exact same thing a lot of it is uh your reference from film but I think right now I for me it's going into like a Pinterest hole I can't stop yeah where I the worst pin hting everything and it just gets like wild and c and then you start like going deeper and deeper into like weird abstract shapes you get like a bolt that's in the underc carriage of a Ferrari and you're like that's what I need on this thing and you cycle through that information you'll you'll spend 4

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   hours pinning and then I'll follow you yeah and then I get all your stuff and then I fall down the rabbit hole and then before you know it's the end of the day we never did our task we should stop pinteresting we just we just plug Pinterest so hard they should give us some gear they should but yeah I mean that's that's my favorite way like movies I mean when you're creating trying to create like a theme or a feel then you got to kind of look towards like life experiences and emotion that gets a little bit deeper but a lot of the times we do design like cold sci-fi assets like a hard asset that might not exist in the world I just need it to function I need to be real when you're drawing a picture or something like that or like a painting then you want to actually get like the mood and the color and the theme and that comes from a whole different exactly different thing a lot of that's the artist like skill and taste and life experience but yep sometimes you just got to make and a

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    good artist can make any any nut and bolt look good with composition right so that's where the art comes in you have the engineering and the architecture side um to be an architect and to be an engineer to create this stuff but then that's then it falls into the art and that's how you you know that's the difference between just something and something that looks amazing right yeah I mean that's a really good point yeah so uh definely agree with that okay uh next we have LT wolf how do you personally deal with negative criticism when you're presenting something you'd otherwise be proud of negative criticism oh I just brush it off you just brush it off oh no big deal no uh well I mean if if there is NE negative criticism It's always important to figure out where um the negative criticism is coming from

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    right so you want to make sure that the direction is correct you want to make sure that you're going the right route and making sure that what you're delivering is what's being expected right because sometimes you could create something very good but if it's not exactly what is needed and then you will get Negative criticism right because there very specific things that we need to deliver on right um so I kind of re-evaluate um the initial steps which is the finding the right um references making sure I under understand the task properly and then obviously going to the the direct source for the criticism and figuring out um how to improve to you know achieve what obviously that person or group of people are uh actually looking for right like the direction like what are you trying to yeah some direction yeah or I just delete the email everybody everybody has an opinion

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    right and then there's how many people uh commenting on any think thousands of people so even if you have 99% of people love it there's still going to be 10 comments that you'll you'll see all 10 of them and then they'll just like crush your soul but generally most of the negative criticism comes from within the studio and it's not necessarily negative criticism it's more like we have a critique critiquing process which is what's working what's not working and that's with everything you do so that's just a part of the job I mean that doesn't really like affect me emotionally or make me like not sleep but honestly usually the hardest critiques are ourselves yeah absolutely I mean the person making the art is usually the hardest critiquer I I find for sure right and usually it's the other people that are telling them it's okay what I always say I always say I

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    always say how many artists does it take to screw in a light bulb takes 10 one to screw it in the other nine to tell them it looks okay and it's bright enough right that's just you know yeah maybe that's what it is I I critique even when it's done you know I'm never satisfied with it I'm always critiquing it it's so funny too to hear a bunch of artists like they be like oh man I this looks so bad I can't believe I did this like I really you know screwed up this project and then to post it and then all the fans be like this is amazing this is the greatest thing you're like you like that like and you look at it for so long though sometimes you lose sight because you get caught up in you know all the issues and then all of a sudden you step back then someone goes that looks great and you're like what yeah yeah I just had to spend you know like there one wobbly line in the back that no one ever noticed but you were zoomed in in that

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    area pain you guys notic oh yeah that's that's a whole another Beast SAR citizen fans are crucial they're just like they just pin it rip it apart they want it good they want it good that kind of caliber won't shoot that kind of bullet you're just like I'm just a concept ttis I don't know man but uh like it looks cool right but yeah I did I feel it's not too bad it's not like we're losing sleep at night no no I don't lose sleep at night no this is from uh Damon 2 okay did we get any questions from Damon 1 no okay Damon that's tragic accident uh I'm wondering if there will be a customizable character Helmet or body in the Pu would it be possible perhaps in the near future that we could buy alien looking or perhaps Mecca looking armor

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    helmets Etc another perhaps each part with their own perks and disadvantages so let me tell you boy is there customization in the PE you because we have spent the last 3 months concentrating on making sure that the characters have um a good amount of customization for the Pu and you will absolutely be able to change your helmet get new helmets and I don't know what the limitations are on um alien races and stuff but um I think it's pretty safe to say that um that's going to be a big aspect of the game yeah and it's a really large task too I mean I think the concept itself is like pretty simple I should be able to swap in my helmet something but it's it's it's remarkably difficult to make everything work to swap out the different areas of the character um to make it always not look

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    weird I think is the hardest thing cuz you give someone full customization man I'm going to turn change this shirt to like bright pink make my pants bright blue but there's a lot of most of it is like pink nothing's wrong with pink you can have a p if it's designed to be pink but then we have to come up with a bunch of limitations too like what you can and cannot uh Tech limitations because there's always a constant give and take because okay if you want this thing then you get a less character on screen and you want more of this unless then you have to take away from certain areas so what you try to do is you try to find out what's the best balance if I want to give you everything you want but you know you're going to have to lose a little bit of something in another area because there's only so much memory out there uh and I know optimization that's that's the most difficult thing right is uh is the memory I mean the obviously

17. 00:12:58

    the more objects you have uh that get loaded up into the game um takes you know a certain amount of memory the amount of textures that are required to bring that into the game takes a certain amount of memory but um we we've definitely spent a lot of attention to that and we want to have the biggest uh pu character experience that you could possibly have um with this game because like everything else we try to make everything as good as possible um as good as technically possible um with the day and age that we're in so uh we do a lot of um tricks um we're starting to uh pull pull what we call pulling our materials and textures so we get everything in a library uh and then everything is pulling from these libraries that way we could have um hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of objects instead of being restricted to dozens or only a hundred right right so uh the game can exponentially grow in

18. 00:13:49

    size uh over the months and the years and uh we should be able to still support it and it should still run yeah right I'm saying that we're developing the tech too now literally right now we have a programmer upstairs hia that's helping us uh write the stuff and then also uh we have a great graphics director Ali Brown who um also has considerably helped us um with getting this system in place does all the hard Parts yeah definitely I mean it's and and also we're learning it too we learning new tech so as time goes on in the next few years we're going to get better at understanding it better at utiliz in it and better optimizing it ourselves as artists um just because you know we're we're we're learning a new

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    tool right essentially so what's the best way to use this tool so I think at at first it's it's something that'll just grow over time right you know yep no absolutely and it's heading the right direction so yeah I'm I'm excited yeah I think that when it's release it'll be a decent amount of customization and then obviously through uh as the game evolves over the course of years Years it'll really start to the universe will end up populating itself yeah and we put a lot of effort to making sure that our objects are almost dynamic in a way so as we make better textures as we make better materials um the objects aren't just kind of baked and static uh they also get better over time so um we don't plan on the game you know just throwing it away in a year you know we want it to evolve and to continue for years to come

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    so uh it was very important that the art evolved with um with the game and and the time that way when new games come out we still are uh competitive two years from now with the same asset that we made today so oh yeah that's yeah that's a really good point how we can always like change things because because of the system that we're developing right it can always grow all right there you go do you get an alien hat I don't know I'll make you one if we don't if they don't make you one yeah that's that's that's the we'll make you an alien hat or an alien head like a mask put on my you have like is there Halloween parties in the universe like what if you want to put on like a like a V how cool would that be like you have like a vuel costume you can put like a V then you just have like the little things you put on like the overalls I'm loving it Christmas parties oh Christmas party

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    Halloween parties Christmas parties bad Christmas sweatshirts all of a sudden the universe is snowing in a vacuum of space I love it all right all right uh Frank Fusco or Fusco sorry P your name does sorry about that cry Engen support inverse Square light fall off it does it does support that it was a requirement for a physical based rendering system when the system first went in it wasn't uh completely implemented so the lighting was a little weird um so that's something that they did Implement because uh it is 100% necessary and even right now with our current build um the lighting in cry engine is still not completely um been revamped for the physical base system so while we do have the inverse Square lighting um now which is really nice uh

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    we continually and kryc continually um updating that system um to improve the lighting for sure and it's not quite there yet but uh it's going to be there very soon cool yeah awesome next one is from uh Fillin fir tracker I love it how do you build a ship in this game well easy that's not a problem I'm curious with all this detail then it gets made yep it's a breeze takes a couple weeks I'm curious with all the detail are the ships a one shot thing on the production on the production end or when uh taking it to this level of professional work are they built in parts and stuck together and then it's the cry engine that turns them into a singular mesh um so that's obviously a

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    very complicated question but we could give a very basic I think explanation of how we do it and uh we use a 3D program and we first thing we do is we block it out you know we get it over to design they approve it um obviously this is after it's been concepted um and then uh we block it out further and make sure that everything is functional and everything's working and it's still meeting all the Divi design specifications that have been made by our designers by Ben um by Chris Roberts and then we continue the process get it flyable get some thrusters on it making sure that it actually flies Okay and then we and this is just the block body of the ship and then we we have the interior and all that stuff so then we get to the more fine detail um and at that point you kind of you export out your ship as a whole but it doesn't include the weapons and the components

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    um and those get dynamically spawned in the engine so while somebody's building the ship somebody else is building components somebody else is building the weapons and then um through XML and scripts um it calls the correct weapon and the correct thing at the right time then we have this entire backend database that knows what the ship is what needs to go on it and so it knows how to call the script and then it knows obviously the users and what the users own and what they have and then uh that stuff gets dynamically in I it's like magic actually I don't know how it works a lot of times I have no idea how it works uh I don't really answer the question space magic Space Magic it's Space Magic yeah and then from like a design perspective I mean it's really really hard because each uh ship is based upon a concept and sometimes it's just the hull of the ship right that

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    gets approved so then you got to figure out all the spatial volumes inside and not all of it always works all the time what areas of the shipper modular like where can we use where can we reuse assets and ships but have it real like true to form and that's something we've really been concentrating on is making sure that we have our manufacturers and we kind of starting to do a great job of getting styles for manufacturers right and then um reusing stuff you know if you have a weapon rack that's made by you know Aegis for example why can't it be used in um this agent ship and this ages ship right so the idea is we're really starting to finally nail down um the direction of the art and really starting to get this modular system rolling so obviously uh ships take a long time the first time you do it the second time you do it they get faster and they get faster and the faster and

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    the more uh kits that we kind of make out of these ships and the more pieces that we can piece together and the more modular um framework that we already have build allows to build these ships much faster and speed up development time which obviously is always a great thing for us and for you guys cuz they really are I mean they they these ships are they're a remarkable undertaking like if you even knew how long they actually take from the beginning to the end because we focus on every minute bit and also every animation with everything like every button you touch it all this kind of stuff getting into the ship how the ship flies the Hut we have you know designers for who designed specifically everything Zayn upstairs is doing just what you see when you're flying it to the point of everything else you know there's so much that goes into it and how long the concept getting the concept approved by everybody being like this is what we

27. 00:21:02

    want moving that forward to this area I don't know how we ever get a ship done I dude well we got like 21 of them yeah and then some are being redone which is a good thing because like I said the ships we built early on that's as we've grown we've like oh okay here's a better way to do this so when we realize that we can give a better product that's when we go back revisit a better product and we want to make sure that everything's compatible so you know it while we were kind of working hard at first you know eventually you got to start working smart and that's when we started figuring out that there is a lot more modular ways to do it and also we figured out how to you utilize the engine better so we can optimize the ships better so when a ship loads up it doesn't take 6 seconds it takes a couple milliseconds right so we want to make sure that every ship that's going into the game has the same uh level of efficiency and the same level of quality

28. 00:21:51

    right so I think there's a couple ships you know the Gladius the Retaliator you know the Merlin um have have hit those bars now and that is our bar and so and the techniques and the ways that we're doing it so now we're kind of been going back and kind of trying to make sure that all the other ships are um up to par with those and that way if we do have things modular we can be swapping out between everything right totally because we really want this flexible Universe yeah and I like what you said like we're smarter not harder right yeah mhm but some people know what it's like to build a [ __ ] when we didn't for those that remember um the next great Starship um we had tons of teams build ships for us and it's uh when I talked to them when they came and they're on the show they uh they're like it ain't easy no no it's not and then they come Builders ship here like oh

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    still equally as difficult even with the support of a team yep um all right cool should I move on yeah let's do got like two left or something yeah this is give be the top 12 for the artists because you guys have been so great You' been so quiet that blow right through this thing I was going to be a sure should we I can add live do a little song and dance okay I won't all right next question Al Dragon the that live the question will it be possible that we get some kind of high specular faux chrome paint job obviously it won't actually be reflective I'm hoping we can get something similar to the look of p a polished aluminum fightercraft so that is kind of reflective but what's interesting about that reflective um surface is it's all distorted wobbly

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    it's like looking one of those magic mirrors or one of those fun shop mirrors you know where you look all weird in it and stuff like it's a very interesting Chris wak actually did a version of the cutless for a screenshot that had that material and it looked awesome right and it kind of has like the you can see the drilled in bolts you know into that kind of material cuz it's kind of this like rough varnish that never really was painted or anything it wasle mhm this the specular really determines the shape of the object that's why cars are essentially just mirrors and that's what the curves of the cars are how the cars uh show and warp reflection and that's what actually makes them beautiful polished aluminum is kind of dented you know it's not yeah it's not like a fiber blast so you get some really interesting Reflections in there but Chrome is a good question

31. 00:24:17

    though because Chrome is it's the most reflective right it is the most reflective it is the most reflective thing so uh with that though we get into kind of that comes a a thing about art Tech and how much it hurts and then how much it adds because like we were talking about we were having difficulty recently we've seen some things with very very high reflectance they're harder to minimize the amount of uh aliasing so you get a lot of alien issues with super reflective materials said alien issues aliasing issues but it's appropriate Al it's Star Citizen tons of alien issues as well but yeah like that kind of tech like when we were doing that it's uh is it is it for like a little small piece on a guy right so it'll either you'll see from far away and

32. 00:25:04

    it'll start sizzling or what if we make it more like a like a painted more like a military metal and it's not going to Alias and is that really pained is that piece of chrome really adding to it probably not but with a ship the shinier it gets the the worse it looks in the engine sometimes without proper without with the aliasing that we have in real time is is quite difficult I have a trivia question we know what the most reflective material is what is the least reflective type of surface or object in real life are you asking I'm asking you me this question do you guys know the answer the least reflective material i' assume the black hole would be the least least would be the least least reflective it's a thing you can hold it in your hand you

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    can hold it in your hand uh if you're if you're bad you get it co that's right oh okay yeah interesting I don't know if that's true or not but I'm pretty sure it is great no I think it is it is in the game Cole is the least reflective pretty sure yeah if you're wrong they're just going to make fun of you going to be it's actually this like super Hightech polyurethane that actually doesn't reflect any light at all it absorbs all light in our documentation it says it is okay that I wrote um great hope it's I hope it's right um but fully Chrome ship I don't know I mean full Chrome ship like Ryan's churches ship in Cosmos yeah I don't as a designer I wouldn't

34. 00:26:41

    think that was cool but did you say R ship is not cool it'ses no I'm not saying his ship isn't cool I'm not comenting on his ship but when I don't play me I mean when I'm playing like GTA or something and they have that Chrome option you have Emil on your inbox right now oh jeez I'm fired is this live uh yeah but I mean you we could it'd be a sizz ship uh I wouldn't do it I wouldn't do it either um just for art but I guess I mean you could just wouldn't be the cool wouldn't be the best well yeah we'll try it little be Chrome bits okay last question is Mr Oprah opra oax oax it's definitely not Oprah oh I think all like French like oh yeah yeah opr

35. 00:27:30

    o yeah and he's going to be like it's Opex I'm covering your face okay there we go that's all right we got a camera over there says hello hello I want to ask if asteroids and objects in space will move and rotate now the game looks Frozen yeah so the reason that they don't currently do that is because it's very heavy on the uh physics networking code so there needs to be a lot of optimizations before we can do that we did have it locally and we had them all move and rotate and all that stuff and we were flying around and and it's awesome and we are going to do it but uh there's a lot of um code support that needs to go into that because that's a lot of objects um transforming um moving animations it's like matrices or something matrices or something last question with the huge

36. 00:28:18

    range of scale of Star Citizen how do you keep your textures from being recognizable patterns at a distance this has been a Hot Topic lately um while we have ways to make things not as recognizable at distances we do a lot of blending between multiple textures so at a distance you can't really tell it's like similar approaches to what um games have been using for train um for years uh but kind of the big challenges that we have now is uh working on the capital ships uh the further you get away from those things you know it gets uh challenging to keep the scale looking correct and to keep the detail uh looking you know like it's there right um a lot of it isn't even like it's just design right so we know at this distance it starts to look like it's a repeating tile right

37. 00:29:07

    and then so when you start reaching that range you probably want to break up the ship in some sort of design where it changes material or does something or something distracts it you know it's it's just a being being clever because you know your limitations you know it's eventually going to look like it's t there's just no way around it if you're teling entire [ __ ] yeah absolutely it's all about being clever um and you you know you have your and you know you LOD too so you have like geometry up close and you get further away then LOD starts kind of you know geometry popping out level of detail okay you thought it was going to say distance no I thought it was level of display did you really think it was l no one ever told me everyone just calls him LS really cuz like I'm sitting over here and he said LOD and I was like wonder what that is and I go level of detail it just made sense to me well it didn't make sense to

38. 00:29:57

    me I don't do lods that's not my job my job isn't to know that information well it kind of is now but we'll see deal with that later you know your next task is oh concepting lods at a recognizable pattern in a distance thank you guys all for watching and a special thanks to the subscribers for making this episode possible and thanks to all the uh backers for making Star Citizen possible yeah absolutely thank you very much and uh Forest you do know that coal is not the least reflective material I just remembered not via Google that silica nanor rods there's no way you knew that I did there's no way 100% And I said natural

39. 00:30:44

    material could you cut that in there whoever natural did you say natural material if you didn't say natural material oh yeah we're recording yeah what was it again silic rods thanks everybody [Applause] woo hey guys thanks for watching um temp for the chairman uh if you guys would like to uh see more episodes go here if you guys would like to subscribe to our YouTube channel and always keep up to date with all our video content go here and uh if you guys would like to watch episodes around the verse go here please and I will see you in the verse on