Star Citizen Live Q&A: Character Customizer

22 March 202401:05:301,639 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hi everybody Welcome to Star Citizen live the character customizer in Alpha 323 I'm your host Jared hucke and if you've never seen the show before it's where we take about an hour out of the end of our week invite some of our esteemed Star Citizen developers onto the show and we uh we ask them questions provided by you the Star Citizen uh a connoisseur uh and make them answer him live um so we have a lot of questions that have a lot of in-depth answers so we're going to jump right into it we're going to avoid the normal um dumb assery that I do at the beginning I kind of just ran into it trying to avoid it didn't I let's get to the introductions shall we uh joining us from Studios from around the world via Zoom uh we've got
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Forest Stefan from Los Angeles Forest say hi tell everybody who you are and what you do hi uh Forest St principal technical artist thanks for having me thanks for having me happy to be here uh from our friends in the great white North Montreal we've got Andre Andre tell everybody who you are and what you do for Star Citizen hey so I'm a lead artist uh here at uh cig uh and basically I take care of all the art related to to the hair the creation and the placement of the all the hairs on our heads okay uh Jacob I forgot to think about what studio you're in Jacob tell everybody who you are and what you do hey I'm Jacob Manchester you're just in the other corner just AC cross away from you um yeah I'm a gameplay programmer on a squadron 42 feature team here in
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Manchester and I take care of the sort of main front end implementation of the character customizer yeah it's just like the reason I blocked it because you're in a portion of our office we haven't shown yet we made you blur your background yeah secret secret office location okay uh Gabriel also here in Manchester tell everybody who you are and what you do for Star Citizen so I'm a systems designer uh for the core game play design here design team here in Manchester and yeah I'm also in a secret location CH yeah we've been seeing a lot more of you in the in the in the recent weeks and in the coming weeks uh you're involved in several of the new features that are coming online with Alpha 323 so uh uh when they said you were moving over from Squadron to Star Citizen did
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you know how many videos you'd have to do no I did not but yeah I'm settling in I guess I I made sure to put my nicest shirt on here this is in homage to last week in his honk shirt uh so I hope that someone next week will carry on this trend make sure that we're referencing someone's shirt from this week for sure in two weeks next week's a holiday because uh comany holiday because of a Easter EG stuff so and then last but certainly not least uh from Frankfurt Andreas tell everybody who you are and what you do hey I'm Andreas I'm a principal technical Artist as well like Forest I'm actually working in the tech animation team so I'm probably rather a technical animator than a technical artist and I work on the DNA back end on
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the facial pipeline uh on everything to do with like making our characters look realistic and especially move and deform realistically in our games gotcha uh Jordan in the chat says everybody tell Jared we need a studio tour long overdue uh it's it's almost right there there's there there's a few little things that Chris wants to finish up in the studio and he doesn't want to he doesn't want to show you guys everything until until it's all done so in case you wonder why whenever we film in the office we're always like pointing the cameras out the windows and stuff uh we promised them we would we would package it all in a nice thing so we're almost there this year hopefully all right we're going to jump into the questions now uh we got a bunch of questions coming in that were submitted by you the Star Citizen uh backer on our on uh Spectrum which is our BPO
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communication platform available at robertsspaceindustries.com uh we're going to jump right into it uh the first group of questions here are all sort of focused on how we how the Character Creator is or customizer is used by people so first question will all the heads from the existing character creator be included in the new version how much of this is new new new and how much of it is built on what we currently have uh so go ahead no go ahead gel do you want to take it me no I think I think Andreas oh my God okay yes so all the heads that have been in the Pu previously um are going to be in the in the new one there are actually going to be some in the background that you don't see but you can access through one of
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the customization modes they're like partially activated because we're still polishing their face rigs so we haven't fully activated them and we're obviously like I think at citizen con we've mentioned like Forest mentioned that we're working on adding 60 more heads total to to the customizer and we're we're still working on that um but they will come in the future when when when they're ready gotcha so then and then go go ahead first um and then uh just to uh uh kind of follow up on that not only did we um you know we have the heads that you know previously existed all the heads that previous existed but what we've also done is we've given them a visual face look uh facelift as well like we've calibrated their skin tones we've increased skin detail we've you know balanced Maps specular Maps gloss
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Maps um and so uh not only are we you know uh kind of improving the pool and all this stuff but um we're also giving everything that existed the a great facelift so I think it'll be awesome cool yeah that's been really great it's been uh uh cool to see everything that Forest has been able to achieve with the old skins and see the difference that it really makes to give these updates to getting the correct that we can use this new col biter system to allow the players to pick just from from there not not making it overly complex I hear that um and and this means that we can also um now apply any skin tone on top of any set of skin textures so you know if you don't like the positions and stuff of
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the wrinkles and one skin texture from a previous character customizer but you like the skin tone then you can mix and match out a bit better uh so all the function so will all the function so all the functionality of the existing character creator uh will carry over to the new one and the next question is act is the whole the head blending is also still in the new version as well yeah so part of the new blending UI we uh we have made it so that you have this full list of heads now instead of just blending from one to the other you get a list where you can easily just click anywhere so you can click on for example someone's nose and just drag on the nose and that turns into this slider where you immediately get more and more of the DNA from that nose and for that
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full head blending we have made it so that when you hover just on the outside of the head then you will see that the whole thing gets hovered and then you can get all all of the DNA from the full head so all of the existing functionality plus all the new sculpting and stuff and then makeup and all that stuff yeah yeah but we I guess some of the functional will be different in that as you hopefully heard Jacob say last week it's it's doing the kind of same things but in a nicer way where it's like we have C Pickers Etc it's just way easier to s hopefully all of the it covers everything but it's better gotta can I quick quickly reiterate on the on the blending mode versus uh sculpting mode so um like previously we've had a
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version of blending but that was actually rather tedious to use like just you always had to go from the slider to one of select one of the regions go back to the slider change change the head like your Source head and right now you have the list of heads and you can like as Gabriel mentioned you can click right on the feature right on the nose and start dragging it in and you see it being Blended in you can drag it back you have like undo redo functionality in there so even even the existing mode is going to be much more convenient to use and it has its own strengths and yeah I guess like Gabriel can talk more on the new sculpting mode don't take anything away from that um so all the existing faces are in there all are all the existing hairs uh moving over to or are we losing some
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hairs in G gaining some others we are gaining some others and the the other ones that were there uh are still there so the new ones we just released uh on the last update they're there and now we have a few more that are going to come uh it's also amazing to see like that the way the sculpting works with the hairs because the goes seamlessly uh with the head that that you're changing so um it's a very great job that uh that I think the character customizer team did on that I was really surprised see the hair just just blend with the with the face as well yeah very very good result uh so next question is where where do we use the character customizer is it strictly outside the verse or will it be things like barber shops or salons and major Landing zones so for this iteration of the character like it's obviously a full
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character customized service so you wouldn't go to the barber and go like oh I want a new nose as as well right so this is going to be a thing in the future we're hopefully going to get kopy machines as they are know these character custom iers in the verse so you'll be able to go to Landing zones and find your Ciy machine there pay a fee for getting your new look as it were and you'll have the full full deal like everything that you see in the character customizer you can change your character to be that okay so on the front end and then eventually with these machines that are scattered throughout the verse yeah and obviously right now we do get the possibility to change your character every time you loog into the game you can go into character customization and that's going to be true for uh the foreseeable future but
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down the line it's going to be more you make your character that's who you are and then you can go to the KY machines in game to remake it gotcha that makes perfect sense right I mean if you're changing if you're playing a roleplay game you you shouldn't be committed to just the style that you selected on the first day that you created your character the next day you might be a minor and in two weeks you might be a captain in a in a Admiral Ship or something and you want your character to change and to and to do stuff to it so it's uh obviously it's important that we get this this ability to change your character as we go not just at the beginning of your of your your game right oh yeah I mean you look at I mean I just when when Sean made that uh challenge to people or whatever I put
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up a picture of I went and found a quick picture of myself for the 11 years I've worked here and whatever even that was just like geez okay I've changed quite a bit but but there are people I know people in this office who you know every two weeks they've got a new hairstyle in real life so you extrapolate that out nearly a thousand years in the future yeah you should be able to just change your appearance whenever you want um see more questions about how it's used how does the load and save functionality behave after major updates and wipes uh can some saved presets become incompatible with newer updates and will we be required to redo them them or is it safe to say that when we create our character they will always be available for use in the game no matter what updates may come out so there's sort of two sides to save and load right so there's um the saving is in when you
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save your character to our servers our persistence database and then that's the one that loads in every time you enter the Pu and what we're also introducing is um long-term persistance for that uh character so that should also be able to be maintained between wipes um then the other side of save and load what we've added with the new character customizer is the ability to save out custom head files so that's a single file that contains everything you need to build your character so that's your uh your gender your DNA string your hair your eyebrows your beard if you want one um and bring you fers also all the custom materials that we have so backwards compatibility is being a huge part of developing that and something that we really
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um keying on keeping with every patch so the dream is that we should be able to load in any custom head file from any previous patch into the current patch now I can't really make any promises yes about if uh something becomes problematic and we have to remove that feature or how that feature Works entirely or do a massive overhaul so for example if we for some reason have to completely change how makeup works in the future then that part of the character we might have to discard from older files or run some sort of conversion which is a preferred way of do it doing it some non-destructive conversion on that part of the file so when you load it in you might not get exactly the same makeup but you'll be able to get EX like as close as possible
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um so I guess the short answer is yes these files are intended to be backwards compatible and we're going to do everything in our power to make sure that from 323 onwards every you you'll be able to um load any file saved now in any future patch good answer I think that also goes uh for kind of the art side too you know um it may not look exactly the same but that Pro that might also mean that we've made improvements to something maybe we've kind of fine-tuned the way the makeup Works after seeing people use it or maybe you know we've you know adjusted the way that you know I don't know I I guess just makeup an hairstyle as well yeah yeah yeah there you go yeah so it's conceivable we might alter or update an individual hairstyle and you
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would just put the newer version of the hairstyle as opposed to the old one correct um some folks in uh some questions in the chat about uh editing the that save file offline um my understanding when I when I looked at the save file that you exported for me the other day uh it was encrypted and stuff so this isn't the kind of thing that folks can go in with a text editor yeah right now so the save file is encrypted and compressed binary file it's um not an easy thing to read it's um designed to be as as small as possible and is just designed to be specifically read by our systems so right now um the only things that can read the file are the character customizer and the um actor systems that actually Implement that file onto a
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character so um we've got no plans to actually roll out anything to aid for community and reading with files yeah but you said that right now this is a very industrious community and don't take that as a challenge but if you want to also Jacob is being humble he could read binary well well it's encrypted binary it's not just straight binary um so what's the lore behind the character uh Creator uh there was some was there some kind of company there was some kind of company named in the background if I remember correctly I'm reading the question it was biotic Corp right yeah so biotic Corp in the Star Citizen Universe they are this massive Medical Technology giant so they really try to be at a Forefront of All
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Tech progress when it comes to just anything medical and this machine is called the kopy machine so kopy is one of the Greek muses apparently they these Muses would all be incredibly beautiful right so the idea of the C machine that you can achieve the unattainable beauty of one of the uses really uh so yeah that that's the the a short version of the background I'm sure you can find more biotic for info online if you're really interested I think they have a that they have uh uh I I had a practice saying kopy like for 30 minutes before this call because I just could not read that word
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now it it is the same Lauren Squadron too right the biotech with KY and all that stuff it all seamlessly has continuity right yeah yeah for sure a chat is going off about whether it's copi or copi or there's several pronunciations being drawn into chat and I'm going to say it like everybody else says it's a tomato tomato thing it all depends on what region of whatever you come from they're both right they're all right and they're all individual to whoever's named it so uh okay next question will we be able to change the facial expressions uh scene settings and Lighting in the review tab uh using character creators in general I often find myself creating a beautiful tune just to learn how ugly it looks once it's placed into the actual game uh I'll start off with um a
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disclaimer no promises is is it technically doable yes it's technically doable one thing that we do like to do internally especially with the physical based rendering engine is we like to look at our Assets in multiple lighting conditions just to even review them um because whenever you do something physically accurate it should theoretically work in any lighting condition that you put it in and um that is a way that we do reviews and we are using the Tool uh the Character Creator internally to also create characters and stuff so I could see how that could be something that we would also want internally you know and again technically possible but uh you know no promises I just want to throw that disclaimer out there uh and go ahead no go ahead and for the facial animations we
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uh we will keep the faceover IP functionality that we've seen in the old character customizer as well so that's one way of seeing other facial expressions than what's just a default animation uh but we also have just when you finish making your character and move on to the review page you will see that they make they they do a little animations you will see a little bit of Personality on them there as well and but as Forest said we do we do have some dreams of what could be done here for sure I I remember me and Forest discussing some some things back in the day I don't even want to mention them because I don't want to se any seats of Hope to anyone we had some we had some some stupid
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ideas some fun some if I may I'd like to add one one thing regarding like facial animation or the face breaking afterwards uh or looking different afterwards so so one of the I think quite important things and the things we are quite proud of regarding our face RS is that they they animate properly so in certain single player games uh we make they need to show up right next to uh a actors so every face can animate in a way that will allow you to to lip sync now with FIP obviously that doesn't always come through that way it can produce less than optimal results so at some point that's got to be Revisited as well we're quite aware of that that results are sometimes a bit uh involuntarily funny
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but theoretically uh the face can emote uh just fine outside of the customizer um obviously the lighting quality in the levels is not as welld designed as it is in in the customizer right we've had like light lighting artists really perfect the the lighting in there and in some parts of the level it may look super great as well in others may look more average but yeah it's that's expected that's real life yeah um all right so uh I feel like Andre's been sitting quietly and patiently and so well behaved uh while we wait while we get to some hair questions let's jump into some hair questions here um does Star Hair work with beards uh I.E do do they have any physics or
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movement or are they static no they have physics for sure um I'm probably not the best guy to talk about the physics about it I'm sure Andreas and uh and Forest can can tell a bit more about this but yeah that we we currently use the bendless system which uh Star Hair it's what we're aiming for uh and right now we're using a intermediary way of of of basically simulating um the uh the hair so uh but yes in short the the beers will have and the facial hairs will have the same type of physics applied than the hairs do so yeah definitely you want to add to that Andreas yeah especially like the the full beards like the large ones will have some degree of like motion and and collision with a chest I guess um using
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like Andre said the kind of Legacy pendulum system that still gives like good results ultimately we're aiming to to implement star cloth on everything because it's going to look better but that that is still like in like R&D phase we still need to flesh it out together with uh yeah star cloth Star Hair it's pretty much the same uh group of physical solvers um they're like backend the solver itself is already quite powerful we need to do a lot of tooling around those so we can we can efficiently Implement dozens and dozens of assets with them at some point and that's always like a a long longer process so initially you make a prototype you you get the um the core solver for instance up to a certain
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state that you can show I can reach this and that quality but then it's always an extra step to develop tools pipelines um to allow artists and Technical artists to work with that efficiently and and Achieve good results in a reasonable uh amount of time yeah and I can add to that by saying that even the the the construction of the hair itself uh needs to be done in a different manner if if you're if you're looking into using uh the star cloth the star hair and star cloth that we're that we're aiming for so uh it works well with the pendum right now um it is made that way it's optimized that way but if we wanted to really push the simulation uh the hairs itself needs to be constructed in a artistically in a different manner it's basically can I just say how cool it is when you rotate your character and you
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see the heads in the sidebar with even those hairs are all moving so you have like so many different heads with so many different simulations happening sure yeah it's something we're actually qu pretty proud of um something we do that other customizers don't is that we update the small heads on the side to match your own appearance so so the heads that show the hairstyles uh should all like match the appearance of the main head that you've customized so you already get a preview the real time thumbnail right yeah exactly I mean exactly it's not just a picture it's a full a real head fully simulating I mean it's impressive um chat I see your
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question uh can we have long hairs below shoulders and still be able to hide it while wearing a helmet or is there some sort of technical limitation is there going to be a consideration made for longer hairstyles to be fully displayed from underneath hats I can get that so um basically um we would have as a game we would have to to limit the hair at some point okay uh the limitation that we currently impose on ourselves was to do it up to the shoulder and this is an agreement that we've uh that we've done in order to minimize clipping and and in order to function with all the things that the character needs to to work with of course now um it's not that we technically could not do the hair longer or that we could not simulate it longer or whatever but at some point we would
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have to limit it I mean how long would it go would it be if we had up to the shoulders or a bit up to the shoulders would you like it up to the waist and if we do it to the waist would you like it up to the feet so at some point we would have to draw the line and and right now it's where the draw is is drawn where where the line is drawn basically uh and that's it for the size that that we are achieving right now that we want to deliver right now um though um head hairs and mask hairs uh right now uh it's I think I can safely say this that by 323 you're going to be able to basically uh choose a long hair put a hat on and the hair will just adapt to it it's not actually an adaptation of the hair to it it's actually replacing the asset that's what we did we created a specific asset for for the heads and for the for the masks uh so basically uh to answer your
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question yes uh from 3.23 onwards if you choose a long hair you basically put your mask or your hat and you'll see your hairstyle not just something else you see your hairstyle deformed to that specific airstyle and that's uh and with physics and all and and so everything still works it's just compressed uh on whatever the that object is tightening you basically yeah I saw this the other week and I was Blown Away it looks so good I'm I'm so happy to see on stuff every time it's just a joy might be worth adding that be worth adding that even even just the variation that that Andre described kind of multiplies the number of assets that each department has to deal with so Andre's department and Tech art maybe
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they start out with um I don't know 30 hairs or 40 hairs then they need to conform them like let's say they groom them on the on the on the male what we call the male standard protos head uh they need to conform that to the female head then they need to like that doubles the number of assets then they need to create the the head hair variance that again doubles that number of assets and uh so you can imagine like how that number like exponentially would grow if we didn't apply like very strict rule sets to where the hats are allowed to sit and where the volumes are yeah what what the restrictions are we have to limit those otherwise it's like unbounded and unbounded amount of work Andreas just just to confirm what you're saying basically uh each air asset that we create you can multiply it by four
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it's basically that it needs to go on the male the female the Hat hair or by four no by more because you have female hat hair and male hat hair so it's just each hairstyle just gets multiplied by a lot so it's this is what um is actually taking a bit more time we wanted to include this stuff uh so we can create hair styles really fast now but now each airstyle needs to just go with all this stuff that in order to be implemented correctly and to deliver uh everything because we want you guys to use the um your hairstyle and then you put your hat and and suddenly you see your hairstyle with the hat and you remove it and you get back to your hairstyle so this is a a very cool achievement that that we just got yeah it is it's it's amazing I know technical our team worked with Andre and uh basically we have templates and within those templates you know it will
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represent a hat and then the hair needs to be you know kind of adjusted based on these templates but every time you have a new template for a new type of hat or whatever that's an an additional asset right so um you know they could definitely stack up quite a bit soos for you know supporting all of these um variations of outfits you know it's cool uh Zid in the chat says are you going to stop adding features uh no uh I encourage you to check out the most recent letter for the chairman and how MMO games continue to just develop hopefully for years and years and years they're still adding stuff to World of Warcraft for pet sake so no uh will we be able to diey a specific strain of hair or or is it or will it be possible to change hair and beard colors
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as separate entities or are they always going to be changed simultaneously so the separate strand of hair I think it's not going to be possible so what we're doing with the hair dye and maybe Forest can correct me if I'm wrong here but it is essentially a randomization so we're not letting you pick that oh I want this part to be this other shade uh but but we do allow the player to obviously do some pretty funky stuff with the hair uh so so but it won't be that in depth at this point no oh yeah uh oh no I was gonna say Andre if you want to talk a little more about that go ahead go ahead if you want to say something I was actually gonna pass it over to you maybe about the masking and stuff like that and the way
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that we can control the location and all that stuff yeah I was at citizen con and I showed them hair Al died U orange and Al died Blu so this might have caused a bit of confusion so I I did mention at sidcon that what we were showing is the tools that we have so um just like you said before a little disclaimer can we do it do we have the technology to do it yes but I I can immediately ask you guys here like there's an amount of problems that comes up with trying to get just a specific of the hair specific part of the hair painted which would be like uh um would we allow the players to paint directly um on the on the hair like we do with the sculpting by pulling parts would they be able to just I just want my dy over here and that would just uh go go to the hair and get and get assigned to your character or would we
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have preset masks that we say like Al way or or patterns or whatever or would allow the players to upload um uh their own masks to to to do their die thing so all this in technology-wise tool wise it is possible but it's it's not just doable to do it um out of nowhere you know we there's a lot of imp implications with this which is um all the textures that would need to be um added to the game and and and everything that happens in an MMO with every everyone running around and all all the memory we would occupy and all that so uh all these questions um need to be answered before we we come up with a system that would allow people to customize the die even further for now uh and looking back six months of where we were uh and where where we are now in terms of hair I think everyone in the
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community should be really happy with having the DI like that being able to actually having a gradient that goes up and down choosing the color that you want uh and having it work the way it is it's already such a great progress uh over the last six months so uh we never know what's what's going to bring in time uh we have the tools to do bepoke characters like this imagine if there if there was an NPC that was very specific at at this air style we wanted to do something crazy about his hair yeah but why because I could paint a mask for him specifically for that but uh it's just not something that it's doable in a very short time to to to add to the players and say listen guys you can now do whatever you want to do with the die so um yeah not in our agenda right now uh who knows in the future basically no yeah and it's also compounds just like a
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a ux problem where when you get too many features in there it's going to be really hard to make that a good user experience to just try and make your own character here's like a billion different things uh but but of course it's it's more of a technical question at this point I think you underestimate people gab you there are people who spend five hours just in the character creators alone it's like I know I know those are games of themselves my friend I know and that's really what we tried to make here something that you can spend a lot of time in but not because it's hard to use like this this UI should be sleek and nice and I think the UI team has done an awesome job of making it so really uh everybody's happy to hear all that
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except for ech in the chat who says why would anyone want to use resources on hair when there's way more important things in such a large scale game even talking about hair for this long is troubling well ech in a in a company of 1300 people across five Studios across four countries uh there's literally Andre and the people here who are working on this right now so it's a pretty small dedicated team who are who are spending 20 minutes out of one afternoon talking about it so I think when you put it in perspective it's not so bad if we had no hair we would have really good no I'm just kidding you did well there was a version of star SE when we had no hair remember back in the hanger module days all right yeah and I sorry I'd also like to emphasize on that
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like that this tool was developed obviously for the backers primarily but was also developed in a way with some extra debug UI things you can activate as a developer like on top of of the UI the backers get so so we as as as devs can uh customize NPCs with this system for uh both both the Pu and and Squadron and and that's why it it's it's an important tool for us and and the fact that it's so powerful is enabling us to to make NPCs quickly that that look unique and look uh look special and and high quality and there's yeah it's a point that was that that was somewhat glossed over in the show but this is literally the same tool that we're using internally to make NPCs for both Squadron 42 and star citizens so this is
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this has worked not just for the play it's work for us for the game that we can share players and developers are way way more demanding than we players as well yeah tell about yeah for squadron you know that's the other thing is we got hair and the hair needs to look great and and Andre is making up some great hair and that hair you know goes into Squadron and then we also like we said wanted to get everything propagated to um Star Citizen so it's like why not put it in Star Citizen we already need it for squadron let's double our wins and get it over to SC you know yeah so so so one last question about hair before we move on another topics so that ech can relax a bit um what's next for hair uh at citizen con we showed a number of uh uh culturally diverse and representative hairstyles some of which were deemed uh game ready uh but they're
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still not uh in 323 things like the Mohawk and stuff like that um what can you tell us about our the future of herab beond 323 well uh first thing is uh there's going to be a lot more variety that's the first thing so all the questions that were in Spectrum relating are we going to get this are we going to get that the dreadlocks this and that all that uh the answer is yes you you are going to get all that there I have no doubt about it um because that's that's the direction everything is going some of these assets are already done as well so um that's predictable for you guys uh and and and very easy for me to to to say yes they're going to come the the idea is is basically to U release these as well um themed with with the updates that we're getting so imagine I I'd
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imagine when we do when pyro actually comes to the vers and goes live uh you're going to have more Mohawks and you're going to have dreadlocks and urban style and grungy hairstyles and when other things which would be more formal then you get more uh you know uh formal air Styles and and clean and slick so uh we're going to try and direct it and team it that way because it just makes sense uh that that you go to another system and then you you get that airstyle and you get new piece of clothing or whatever then you come back to stand then you clearly been somewhere else so that's the the logic of it uh but from there here uh there's also two other big areas that I think that uh that will happen at sometime uh one of them I know it's going to happen sooner than the other but uh which is basically um fur and stuff that will go on in uniforms and clothing and and armors
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which is a possibility and the other one is creatures and animals as well so um hair is going to go into that as well we start we're on in a very early phase of research and development in that uh but it is it is a direction it is going to happen and that's basically the direction the hair is going so basically and resuming uh a lot more hair styles variety allowing you guys to to actually Express yourselves the way you want hairwise for those who want for those who want to keep wearing the helmet just uh fire ahead uh but then we need all this fauna uh to to have uh to have fur to have hair and to have the and to be enounced in this manner as well this is the where the hair artistically is going all right I I I'll do I'll do one more hair hair question just to appease the chat and and and see if I can't take e
00:38:09
tech off a little bit more uh what about an aprura hairstyle the chat's been going on and on about an ace for a hairstyle for the last 30 minutes I'm G to be honest um so when I arrived at cig the mission was to remove those hairstyles and add new ones was the thing I'm also a backer I I played star cities in quite a while and I was actually fed up with the air Styles myself so so being the air artist that was going to change it I felt really proud to remove them but if there is a specific airstyle that you guys want to see back I mean I have no problem in picking it up and trying to and trying to uh to to put it back I mean if there's if there's that will uh to to get it done for sure um can't promise it when but uh I mean I'm I'm pretty sure you guys can make the the enough
00:38:56
pressure for that happen I wouldn't be against it at all all right so for those of you who are watching and and care about such a thing uh if you want Ace F hairstyle that come back uh you can go to uh uh social media jump on uh Twitter or X or whatever it's called and send a message toore John crew saying Ace Ventura haare please uh uh if we get enough messages sent toore JN crew on Twitter Ace ventur ha please uh consider adding Ace fenter hair back great stuff all right let's jump into the more of the the detail stuff uh uh I believe it was already then all righty then all right so um a lot of questions this is just be a lot of
00:39:45
questions combined into one a lot of questions about uh different body types he Heights sizes muscle definition we've had a lot of statements on this before uh in you know star's been in development for a while new technologies have come online stuff so it's a it's a question we tend to revisit uh periodically uh after a while so what can you tell us now as the truth as of 2024 we're in 2024 about different body sizes shapes tall short skinny not skinny uh what can you tell us why yes why no what's the scoop I guess I take that one okay so yeah regarding body customization uh it's simply a super hard problem to solve it's consists mainly of of two problems that I think we can like differentiate
00:40:34
uh one is like body shape customization so that's more about like being able to blend between a skinny type and a like heavy type and maybe like a super on steroids bodybuilder type um these kinds of shapes we could technically do this already with with the way the the DNA system works currently um the question is uh what happens with the attachments and like for the head customization we've developed uh runtime rap deformers we which can like scale helmets which can conform beards to the changing face shapes in a way that that keeps the art like intact and and keeps like the art directors happy no distortions and stuff like that that works on on the face the same deformation Tech applied to to bodies uh would break in in many cases
00:41:25
so um while we can uh already uh morph the body shape we cannot conform the attachments in a in a good way right now so that's the the big problem one of the two big problems we need to solve for that and the other thing is um regarding like body height changes and limb length changes this is another super hard uh thing to do because that affects all animations in the game like if you imagine like a character holding holding like a a pistol or even even holding a mug and and moving moving that to his mouth to drink something um currently in the game we have like tens of thousands of animations that you have been Al authored with so-called like forward kinematic like every every bone in the skeleton defines its rotation over time
00:42:17
and that's how the arm moves towards the mouth and then uh you get the impression that they drink something without spilling anything like imagine we just scaled like the length of the neck for instance or the length of the arm like your mug would end up somewhere else so you need at runtime retarget that animation and while we already use like inverse kinematics in many places characters pushing buttons reaching for things there's like a lot of procedural elements to our animation already like doing that for the entire body and for all animations requires like massive changes to to the like animation back end um but yeah we have all intentions to to tackle those problems uh but personally I I would I
00:43:05
have some good ideas for how how we can fix the first problem about like the confirmation of the attachments and then we have like smart animation programmers uh Evo that I've been on stage with 2018 uh in Austin uh he's somebody that has a knowledge and the brains to to fix that hard uh retarget problem but it's it's going to be a lot of work but it'll be worth it because yeah everybody having the same height is not great but I think as a first step we could for instance tackle the just the shape changes which would already uh give us like some big gains because we kind of already do it with the head right like if if you're you know when we're in the DNA customizer and we make the head larger you're going to in the game you're going
00:43:55
to put a helmet on well that helmet's not going anymore so the technical artists go in there and they mark up these assets um to be able to deform based on the deformation of the DNA head uh but then obviously there's not you know quite limited here and limited movement then you know introduce a whole body set um it's a lot of data that you're going to have to mark up and stuff like that so that's another one of the challenges but I think the head was kind of the first step you know a little bit and now we're moving into the the difficult part right yeah and that's also like body customization immediately has like implic implications on gameplay like when you have a larger character that's going to need like a larger like hit volume right I don't know I hope not all players will then like shrink themselves so maybe you want to balance
00:44:42
that with like larger character the characters can run faster carry more stuff like that but it will affect a lot of systems once once it comes online yeah but like one more thing I'd like to add regarding like what the state of this is so initially like our DNA system which is the the system that allows us to morph the heads and the faces and conform the attachments um that was developed specifically for heads initially that was around 2018 2019 and we've then used it on heads like the system there were have been systems that have been built around that system so the code Mak making use of that that back end grew and grew and grew so at some point uh we already knew like we want to do we want to tackle bodies at some point uh but we
00:45:32
have a system that is very bespoke to faces so I've worked for almost two years not not full-time but like halim on on a refactor of that DNA system with the goal of getting it to into a position where we can actually start tackling the the body customization problem so so that's been that was finished last year and there are other priorities like uh gene pool head extension and and giving us like 60 more heads and the rigging pipeline that needs to be set up and the tools around that in order to to even be able to create fully rigged nicely animating heads that also takes a lot of time so yeah it's it's a resource and priority issue yeah not an issue but sh and and and because you're working on this someone doesn't have their band new merchantmen
00:46:23
no that's for about four people in chat um all right so it sounds like the the the the the the the 10-cent summary version of that is that is that different body shapes are something that we want to do different body shapes are something that we're pursuing part-time on the side in between a whole bunch of other uh higher priorities and stuff uh nobody should expect it soon uh but it's definitely something that is progressing that we're still investigating and something that we very much want to do we want it it's hard that's basically the okay um oh here's another one here's another common thing so uh in the future will the character customizer be able to scan an imported photo of our own face to
00:47:11
generate it into the customizer this would be helpful and quicker to create our own face from scratch there's some uh 2K players in here uh what can you tell us I would say the first thing that I think of when I hear that is first of all awesome um second of all is um solving any of the how you know how to go about solving the issues of what a camera could create so for example when we do our uh uh skin textures and stuff like that there's a lot of like requirements especially again with the physical based rendering like we can't have shadows in the diffus map right we have to uh extrapolate the uh normal information or height information essentially uh you know spec cavity uh specular occlusion stuff like that so the real question is you know let's say you know the camera can take a picture
00:48:00
of your face to eventually bring in as a um texture not going into any additional data that could potentially actually shape ahead or something but um assuming we're just talking about textures um I think that those would be the biggest issues to solve is how do we clean up that data in order to get it game ready um by processing um the textures which we currently um you know artists do and uh clearing go has done for us um so that's just the first thing that pops in my head um when I hear that I would hope sorry Jacob go ahead please no that was me go ahead uh okay so um I think there are some some ways we could go about this I think once we have the all the like 60
00:48:49
heads from our gene pool extension once once they're in and we have their textures together with the skin tone tinting that we we can already do I think we have enough variety uh in terms of the textures I would hope so in terms of the shapes it's going to be a problem of like finding a way to to recognize the features there are already like some sdks out there that we could use to like face detection F itself does that to a degree it shows you where the eyes are where the the mouth Contours are uh so you could leverage that to a degree recognize those features and then try to fit try to find samples in our gene pool that can approximate this um so so we have a vague idea or pretty good idea what what needs doing it would be super cool uh to to for the players to use that even for NPC creation uh you
00:49:39
just you just show a photo and and the software would create that pH or approximate it reasonably closely um but again priorities it's it's not very high up on the list I guess I keep thinking about it now and then even on a simpler turn just with the skin tone itself like you could almost like if you knew what the offset is because what we do with the skin tones now is we calibrate them we balance them to make sure they're accurate to the real life Talent so if you did have you know mid gray or whatever in the shot with you when you're image got taken theoretically we would know what the or some kind of MCB chart obviously that would increase the thing that you would you know whatever but theoretically if you did have some kind of mid-grade or something we would know some offsets on what would actually be happening in your environment to
00:50:28
bring you back to a neutral skin tone color that then could then be uh applied using our Uh current palette at least matching the closest possible so um I don't know it's a it's interesting it's a fun one to think about for sure yeah Andreas mentioned the thing I was thinking about faceware using faceware to not for the textur but to determine the location the spacing of certain things and and ju just to give you a base shape of the face that you could then that that would be somewhat closer to you that you could start with that seemed like a like there's potential there to me um but what do I know I just it's a good idea it's a great idea I mean you got to start somewhere gota start trying things uh I mean one thing we already do is with face sculpting we take a
00:51:16
position of a point and we use that to decide what heads to blend between by the time once you've got the positions of those points through however we want to detect it through the camera then it's actually solving the same problem uh that's a fun that's a fun question I feel like we're actually in a meeting right now uh the the number of things that have come about because of conversations that have happened on this show are plenty like the number of email threads I've had after a show like this like oh we're gonna we talked about this on we talked about this on yeah it it's wouldn't be the first time uh that goes for people who sometimes wonder why we talk about some things uh will we be able to customize the color of our eyes with more vibrant colors Beyond just the natural ones uh they have yeah so in the character customizer
00:52:06
as it's going to be in 323 you're you're going to have pretty much just standard eye colors but we wanted to push it a little bit just so you can get something that feels a bit out there feels like oh maybe something has happened during these 900 years in the future that we are after all uh so you can maybe make up your your own backstory of why your family would have grown to look like that or something along those lines but uh so for the time being we're keeping it more realistic I think it's going to be something that we will revisit in the future to see what we want to do along the lines of like con contact lenses right where you can really just pick any color you want uh but yeah that that's a discussion for later
00:52:57
okay I love that I love that um because we were uh I was talking with um one of our talented Graphics Engineers Nico about eyes and I know me and Gabriel have talked about eyes Jacob and stuff and it's something that right now in the Character Creator the eyes do have um you know um some you know color and all that stuff but we do this is an initial kind of prototype of the eyes we do ex we do plan on expanding the way that the eyes uh currently work to make them better and one of the things that we discussed was different Iris details and stuff like that um which also leads into uh contacts it's funny when we were doing a lot of the balancing of the eye color and looking at the talents photos um we would zoom in and we would see like weird things sometimes and we would
00:53:44
notice like oh I think that's a contact that's actually in there and stuff like that so we were really getting in there to understand how an eye works and and how it renders and stuff like that so we definitely want to you know improve that process give more customization um most what about asymmetric results first like uh yeah so the asymmetric results what we were talking about was so currently you have uh your eyes as a single mesh right and then that has to draw over the screen a draw call if we wanted to do two separate um asymmetrical colors the simplest way to do that is to break them up into separate objects so you could essentially apply one material to one and one material to another um the problem with that is now all of a sudden um and draw calls are really important
00:54:32
in game rendering in regards to Performance is something that we're always trying to minimize as much as possible so what we were talking about was instead of having two objects that we have to render to draw calls um is there a way to do vertex markup or some way to determine in the 3D mesh what is left and what is right you know you can actually grab a vert you can give it a color and with that we could then take that data when we get the measure go where is that color on what vert okay it's on this ey side is red this ey side is colored blue and now that we've in code we know that we have them separated then we can start making the Shader uh support that so then you know Nico for example maybe goes into the Shader and then starts enhancing that to take advantage of the tech artist doing the
00:55:22
vertex coloring on the eye to differentiate what's a left eye and what's a right eye and theoretically with all of that we can start doing additional asymmetrical work with the eyes one contact when not contact one eye color another eye color without paying an additional performance cost on the draw calls you do get a little more Shader cost on the Shader instructions of course but um I think that that is worth it and I think again the draw call is a big one we can keep even a blind eye right you can make a blind ey as well yeah yeah now I don't know how that looks from your firstperson perspective that would probably be somebody else too elaborate on that but it's all about the way you look to the others right yeah exactly exactly yeah um you know we we could cover it with the the the the the visor lens things like that that gives you the restored Vision so it so it
00:56:09
looks dead even though that's giving you it's like it's connected to your optic nerve or something um I look like Danny Devo that's how this question starts I look like Danny De I know where this is going and never feel repes presented how far into cursed territory with the in the sliders can I go I don't know if Danny too's cursed I mean they go as far as the processed head scans will go and already I'm already thinking like because right now you know we just have you know um you know the the group of heads you know uh nine to uh 15 or whatever um that pool is going to explode it is going to get so big and so awesome so soon
00:56:57
um we do I can already think of a head that looks very close to Danny DeVito so I think you're going to be able to represent yourself you know in the near future yeah it's it's funny that that the beer or that this question is asked because like when we started out with this gene pool initiative which is closely Rel related to the DNA system having more variety in there like we've made like a big um like reference Matrix of of heads and different head types that we we wanted represented and most of them have been obviously celebrities uh public figures politicians all kinds of U people that pretty much everybody will will know and recognize and one of them happened to be Danny Danny DeVito uh and yeah like Forest said like we we've scanned
00:57:45
like all kinds of different shapes like I wouldn't want to say extreme but like the DNA system is is uh the most efficient when you when it covers all the all the edge cases and then con interpolate between those so we have like very very slim and skinny and and narrow faces we have super wide and and heavy faces we have very angular faces super super masculine um we have all the all the types you can imagine or various ethnicities um yeah I just need to process them all once that comes in you'll be able to approximate most people pretty well I would say yeah yeah I mean it's amazing what you could already do now and this is nothing compared to what you will be able to do
00:58:33
like in the near future like for sure um most definitely and and Andreas has actually spent a long time um before we even did the scan going through all the heads to ensure that we have the best range possible um so there's just uh you know a massive work went into ensuring that the pool is as diverse as possible because we want to be able to create everyone you know uh so I I feel I feel the need to clarify thato is not part of the project he was not scanned he is not secretly the peap actor for Pico uh any of the things that you see it it it's it's simply it's it's like you see on any any kind of inspo board uh we've done the shows with
00:59:22
Jeremiah in the past where he's making a character he's got a bunch of Ino boards it was it was one of those things we need we we want faces like danand Vitos it's just I don't need an email from Dano's agent to toast and then toast messages me and says what the hell did you say on and I say it's Andreas don't come after me so no I think it's also not the cig stance that Dan deita would be cursed in any way no we love like a yeah that's a pretty harsh statement for weird one anyo Batman yeah um good fight twins okay uh last question here uh we're at time congratulations everybody you made it through to the end um obviously 323 is not the end for the character
01:00:14
customizer we've already had some disc we've already uh talked with some from Andre about different new hairstyles and stuff that we that we want to come up we mention in ISC uh things like tattoos is like scars uh stuff are still on their way lots more faces we've mentioned up to 60 in just this next batch that we're trying to get in there so this um I want to ask you as the people who were working on this and other things if there's one thing you want to add I'm going to ask you to talk to answer this as you you're not a representative of cig it's just you're somebody who works here who puts a lot of time and effort into this what as what thing not currently in the character customizing or do you want to add uh do you hope that you get to add in the future I mean obviously that's your head I mean that's
01:01:03
what I would like to add to the character customizer your head your head Jared anyone else I want to add more randomization right so we've got some pretty basic randomization being rolled out with 323 um but stuff like hair coloring things right now we just sort of randomize a simple natural color but it'll be super cool to have some advanced stuff with d and their own stuff um yeah I like randomization I like hitting that button and I want to see more cool results okay how about you I I think just for uh for the head scan Library it would be awesome to be able to like scan your own face obviously and then maybe have it in the bank like adding to that bank so
01:01:52
someone else could get my disgusting on their face so yeah something but but you bring up a good point Andreas was talking about this in the pre-chat you know scanning the face is only is only one part of the process of getting a face in you there's still a lot of processing work that gets that gets done after the after you sit in the booth and get your stuff done like that but yeah uh Andreas what do you want to add I just like to flesh out the the preview page a bit more like the one where you can see like your full character like the stuff that was mention like applying different animations different lighting scenarios even swapping different outfits or something so you can like see how you end up looking like your fully flashed out character um together with your facial appearance and everything else
01:02:41
that you customized I think that that'll be really cool to have more options there but it's yeah that can be like end near endless um spending resources there all right well cool thank you gentlemen for taking the time out of your Friday to hang out with us and and answer some questions from the chat folks if you haven't seen it uh there was a full ISC dedicated to the character customizer last week you can check that out uh it it is one of the many features slated to come online in Alpha 323 uh for my money it's one of the most exciting ones because anything that gives you more uh uh ownership of your character uh more more connection to your character is a is a good thing for any game uh despite what ech might say just just make him the villain for the show from now on I'm going to pick
01:03:28
one person they're going to become the villain for the show uh every week uh and then of course if you haven't watched yesterday's episode on Two and fro with cargo uh check that out lots of cool stuff coming for the for the player hangers Precision hangers the personal hangers uh all that stuff freight elevator ship elevators um all big changes to uh life in the verse that's really the the whole 323 patch 323 patch is just about just these massive changes to the way you your life in the verse so check that out uh SEO will not be back next week uh there's a 4-day holiday here in UK for I think it's Easter yep yeah uh so we'll be back on in two weeks uh with members from the uh cargo Career Team Chad and them we'll have them on the the show here to answer your
01:04:15
questions again just like you saw today uh and then next week's show uh the next next week's ISC is the return of Team Ken um Ken and ANZ and and and and Gabriel and who's here right now and like this uh back to talk more features uh for coming in 323 updates to the visor the lens uh the Looting screen the new shopping app uh a bunch of stuff that folks who were playing on the uh the evocati or the test Universe already seen being tested right now so uh thank you to Jacob and Forest and Andreas and Andre and Gabriel I got them all uh for for joining us on the show this week uh I'm J hakabe um be sure to spay new to your pets remember Price is Right Bob Barker bye everybody bye
01:05:24
bye

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