Star Citizen Live: Gamedev - Concepting Ship Weapons

4 October 201901:03:011,428 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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Hey everybody. Welcome to another edition of Star Citizen Live. This week is a game dev segment concepting ship weapons. I'm your host Jared Huckaby and joining us on the show this week is somebody new to Star Citizen Live. Actually somebody new to eight ATV ISC. I don't know if we've ever had you on anything before Alex. Tell us who you are and what you do for Star Citizen. Hi, I'm a I'm a concept artist here in Wilmslow office in UK and currently I'm mostly doing all the hard surface tasks, weapons, ships. Nothing organic just mechanical cold space stuff. The cold mechanical space stuff. Yeah. What so you're you're a concept artist. We have a number of in-house concept artists. We have a number of outsourced
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concept artists. Yep. As one of our in-house what are some of the things that you've worked on in the past? So starting 3 years ago with the barriers, mop buckets, fruit and slowly moving into the weapons and ship weapons and eventually working on on ships first being the vulture and then the Xi'an ship and many others. What was what was that Xi'an ship called? It's Santok'yai I believe. It's a medium fighter yeah. That's always a challenge to see who can pronounce the Santok'yai and who can't. It took me a month before Sherry was finally proud of me for saying it. Yeah, it's it's not easy it's not easy. Right. So today's segment is one of our game dev segments. We're going to follow you
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through the process of creating a couple things over the next hour. What are we creating today? So we're going to look into into what concept art is cuz I think a lot of people think that we just make pretty images or marketing shots or beautiful shapes, but in reality concept art is communicating someone's vision to the rest of the team and to the project and taking someone's description of anything and making a visual out of it so that we can put it in game and present it to everyone. So today we're going to look into some weapon designs. Maybe we'll do some world building and just like very early stage of very very early stage of concept art process which is my favorite stage where you can really
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explore different ideas and just come up with cool stuff. Not too technical, but really focused on the essence of the craft. Sure. Well, you've got everything going. I'm just going to sit here along for the ride, chime in as the peanut gallery, take some questions from the backers along the way. If you are watching live, you can submit your questions in either the Twitch chat or the Spectrum chat by prefacing your question with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets. Remember that Alex here is a concept artist. So if your question is how will this work or when will we get this or any of those other real popular topics, Alex is not the person who's going to be able to provide those answers. Today's show is about the creative process, the considerations put into making concept art, and
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you should try to tailor your questions towards that if you want a chance of them actually being addressed. So Alex, without further ado, I'm going to sit back. I got my drink. I'm going to put kick kick my feet up. Take it away. Perfect. All right. Let's do the I think I was actually going to put my feet up. Yeah, why not? There we go. All right. So I've prepared a So, we're going to explore some world building. Uh something something very exotic, something more mechanical in the context of uh let's say ship weapons, weapons, or maybe even a quick ship sketch. So, I prepared eight possible
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sort of art directions. Uh very often in uh I would get a brief from an art director or uh really anyone like from narrative team. And they would describe something to me, and then I have to put it into the image. Uh so, in this case, I'm my own art director, so I chose eight topics. One will be bones. So, we're going to try and make a weapon based on bones. We have some ornate relics. That should be interesting for the weapon. Maybe it's like a ancient alien civil- civilization or something. We have a African masks. That should be very interesting. Porous rocks. Uh uh Just standard military weapon. Toxic sense. Maybe energy weapon. And a question mark uh if we get to it. It's going to be something
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weird and exotic. I like your ambition, Alex. Let's get to it. Yeah. Uh I don't know for how many we will go, but I will try to go through as many as I can. and I guess we can just uh we can just start here. We can uh take a little skull and uh see what we can come up with. So, just do just doodle something. Um Often like designing anything needs some sort of the sort of background, I guess. And in the case of the the skull guy, it's uh it's going to be a civilization that possibly they maybe they They everything that they use, including their weapons. Like so.
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Like Cobra law from GI Joe the movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like you have they can't manufacture. They they evolved in a way where they just they just really grow everything. They grow their ships, they grow their weapons, they grow their maybe even possibly buildings. Mhm. And the planet that they live on it happens to be a bone planet. Maybe the entire planet is slowly growing with them. That could be a very interesting uh thing to explore. So right now I'm just going to just going to put down something. It's always very intimidating to start with the empty canvas. So having anything uh is better than having nothing. Uh related to this as as I I missed your name snow something uh asked if if you prefer to have a
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background story behind a task such as the history of function and or or or what do you think when given a task for a concept? Uh yes, I do prefer to have it if possible because then it makes my life easier because often times uh people just people people sometimes can uh use one word to describe what they need. Something as abstract as like oh it's very powerful and then I have to somehow visualize what is powerful. Uh so the more the more background information I can have uh the easier the easier my job is to translate it into the into the images. Yep. Uh another question in the chat is was about metrics. Uh uh often times you mean you know a gun has to
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apply to many many different ships not to one thing specific. So you have to work within metrics. Do you find metrics to help you or to limit your creativity? in well, it obviously limits my creativity cuz our metric system if I'll draw it right now, uh cuz all ship weapons, they kind of follow this this rough bounding box, so the mounting point and the gun itself, and then it has components that generally located in the in the same spots, so we can put them on all the ships. So, within that bounding box uh I can design whatever I want or whatever the art direction requires, but generally it uh I wouldn't say it's too restricting, but if there was no bounding box, for example, we could concept something that maybe
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I don't know, maybe the mount is at the front and the big bulk of the weapon is at the back or something like that, but we can't do that. Yeah, but that Yeah, but it would limit the number of ships that it could be placed on. Yes. Yeah, it it it's it's one of those unfortunate restrictions. You you need to have metrics so that you can get the most versatility uh out of out of what you create out of what you create. Yeah, that's true. All right. Okay, so we're getting something here. I do want to use teeth because it's uh it's uh it's bones. We use teeth. Um So, generally in my workflow, I tend to not sketch that much nowadays. Uh so, what we normally do for like the subject like the same in this case like bones
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we probably use the photo references and we do I'd say do we have an internal library of like licensed photos that we can use for marketing or for the concept art. Uh so, that's something I'm going to do in right now and it's a very fast and very very efficient way to uh create designs because like we're not I'm not really an artist and what we do here is not really an art. We focus we're designers. And we focus on shape, form, purpose, um aesthetic. So, the technique, the actual technique of how we create art, at least to me, it really doesn't matter. Like, if it's if it's faster doing with photos, I'll do it with photos. If it's faster to do it with the
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3D, I'll do it with 3D. And often, actually not often, most of the concept art here, at least that I do, is is 3D. Uh but we're not going to touch it today, cuz that's too time-consuming. Yeah, it's it's it's important it's an important consideration because concepts uh concept artists, concept designers uh have to do often times dozens and dozens of iterations. If uh if you're if you're a subscriber in that and you're watch you're watching the show right now, uh you may be familiar with our subscriber vault, which is a section of the website that's often times full of alternate concepts that are created throughout the course of a of a ship creation or weapon creation that are not used in the final uh in in the final creation of the product,
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but are used to cover the process. It's a process of discovering what we want. You have to make many things that you don't want to discover the thing that you do want quite often. And when you have to make that many iterations, uh having a library, uh you know, an officially licensed library of materials that you that you can pull from, uh really helps to expedite that process. Yeah, that's very true, yeah. Cuz if we if I would have to draw or model everything uh or like work in a very specific workflow, uh it would be extremely limiting. And I think it's going to be evident by the end of this stream, where if we're going to get through quite a few guns. Even right now, we're getting something that looks quite abstract, but normally uh even this, something like that, is a good conversation starter uh for me and
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the art director and the rest of the team where they can look at it uh and they might not yet understand what that is. So, in this case, like, oh yeah, it's a it's a bone shaped into the gun. But, it sparks a lot of the conversations that are useful for the production. So, the feedback that I might get is like, okay, the metrics work, but maybe like aesthetics are too like again, too abstract and we need to make it more recognizable or maybe it's way too organic and we need to add mechanical elements. So, that's something we could get. But, even at this super super fast rough stage, this is already something interesting and I think we're going to do we're going to do another one for the bones. And maybe then we'll do the third one that will uh flesh out a bit further. Let me just pull some stuff.
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Uh this guy looks interesting. Let's see and see what we can extract. Also, one thing I love about using photo reference is it gives me interesting textures. Like, there's no way I would paint or draw this texture. Mhm. That's just uh that's just too time-consuming. And in in concept art, you have to be fast. That's why it's called concept. Folks in chat are already discussing the gameplay applications of a weapon made of bone and how they would maintain it and stuff like that. Luckily, that's not something you as a concept artist have to worry about. no, not really, but as a creative person,
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I'd love to chime in into that. Like, if there's a discussion on how this weapon would be maintained, maybe we can come up with some suggestions as well. Bone grafts. Uh I was thinking for this guy is the way they shoot, this this like this bone structure, it grows projectiles inside of it. So, it's a very slow-firing weapon cuz maybe you need a day to grow a new projectile, but it's very devastating. So, you have to be smart when you use it. That's true. If it's There's nothing to say that alien bones can't continue to grow like long after they've been disassociated from whatever the creature they were part of like like kind of the ways that fingernails still grow after you die and stuff like that. Maybe maybe the bones of this creature still continue to grow after they're
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dead. That would make coffin shopping really difficult, though. And now we're going to forget about the bounding box and just go a little bit crazy and see what we can what we can come up with here. Yes, I know fingernails don't actually continue to grow, but I'm saying that that concept exists in the in the in the world. The the concept of things growing after you die is something that's been considered and exists in storytelling. That's what I'm referring to, folks. Again, this stuff is very abstract and very alien, but that's what's
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interesting about it because often times when you see like a super polished image or a super polished concept or anything, there is no uh there is no way for your brain to like come up with stuff. It's like when you read a book and the images come to you, it's the same with this stuff. When we're in meeting rooms and we look at this stuff, people see everybody sees something different. And uh there's a certain beauty in that. I think this guy would work. And this way. So this this one doesn't really work.
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Sometimes it doesn't work, but we'll still keep it here. Now what now why doesn't that work cuz I was just thinking that I like that one more than the first one. For me so the first one is a bit easier to sell as a weapon because it's got uh a very obvious second. Like this reads as a barrel and this reads as a body. So this is very easy to identify. Whereas this guy where it could be interesting like right now I'm starting to fiddle with it. And generally if I start fiddling with something and if it doesn't work I just move on onto the next one or maybe maybe I just don't feel the design cuz not every design you make actually works or is good.
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That's part of the sketching. And uh generally if I if something doesn't work I don't spend time on it. I just move on onto the next thing and I try it again and in in return it just saves time down the line. Looks like kind of looks like you inadvertently made a the anvil hawk just out of bone. Yeah, there we go. And silhouettes your silhouette reads are one of the one of the most difficult parts of concepting. It's trying to find a silhouette that hasn't been used. Uh let me just try and grab this this formation is very interesting. Oh yeah. And we're going to try and extract something out of it but this time
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thinking maybe So there is already like this metal part from in museum that they used to keep the bones together for the display. So, I thought what if What if this civilization, maybe they don't they don't grow everything and they still have sort of like mechanical parts. And in this case, maybe they have like barrels that are encased in bones. And that they put it on like the ships also would have a metal core. Or like a metal structure and then the the armor is the bone plating around it. That could be interesting. Yeah, where the where the bone is more ornamental than It's Yeah, or or it's just purely
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protective material. Like like the like the turtle shells in Enemy Mine. I'm just dropping all the really obscure 1980s movie references today. Oh, it's going to be hard for me. I didn't watch them. GI Joe the movie. I I know you've been very good at just saying, "Oh, yes, of course." Like you knew what I was talking about. I really appreciate the way you've not made me feel like a weirdo today, Alex. You're very polite. I really appreciate I'm really bad with old sci-fi movies. I get in a lot of trouble for that. I think this one is really successful. This one that you're doing right here. Yeah, it's we're getting somewhere and normally if I start sort of feeling the
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design, don't know how better to explain it. It's just like you look at it and you're like, "Okay, okay, this works. This works." I just tend to push it further or often times I will run it past the like the rest of the team members. Any feedback is a good feedback, even if it's negative and there was a lot of cases where we solved complicated design problems as a team here. Uh so, that's always fun. That's what's one of one of the perks of working in-house where very talented people especially here that can help you grow and learn new things. Sub Zero One says something interesting chat. He says, "I would think concept art is all based off existing lore, but it seems like new lore is created along with concepting." Sometimes it's both. Sometimes it's one.
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Sometimes it's it's the other. I can think of a number of times in the five years that I've been here at least where you know we'll start out with a specific lore an idea you know an idea for a thing and then through the concept process through the exploration of ideas we'll actually stumble into something that we like more than what our original intention was and then lore will go back and adjust the lore if you you know if you find something that's really cool if you find something that's truly unique and interesting and inspiring it would be a shame to throw it away because you were too beholden to your original idea. That's actually one of the things that I like most about Star Citizen as a project is that we're never quite we're never too afraid to to follow the the better idea.
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I'm looking for something here but I can't find it. Oh, never mind. I was about to do like a quick environment sketch for what the bone world could be but I think it's better if we move to the to the next one. But so here we have free so free if we hardly knew you. free sketches and so the middle one normally if it's something I don't like I don't show it. So we're not going to show it. And these two I think quite interesting and they could be pushed uh further. It's very raw. But at this stage is where you have the most fun because you you really explore all these ideas and later it actually gets very very technical where you have to model it or animate or figure out the matrix and it becomes very constrained.
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just a part of the normal production pipeline, but at this stage, this is um this is why concept art is the the best discipline is because you have a lot of fun. process question. Are you you're obviously using a tablet of some kind? Are you using one of the Cintiqs where you draw on the screen or you have a an external tablet? Yeah, it's a I use the the this guy. It's the the one on the table, just a normal one. Got you. And I I I know some artists prefer to draw directly on the screen and they have the big yeah, screen tablets and some people prefer to have it, you know, down at like mouse level and you know, just draw off the screen. Cuz originally when I joined I had the the big screen, but I just found it
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for me it didn't work. My hand was in my in my face and it was big and I just switched to just a normal tablet. Okay, I'm just looking for some reference to kick off the the ornate gun and I already found something interesting that we can start uh playing with. Again, using existing reference because drawing all of this stuff is just possible but incredibly time-consuming and again, concept art is all about that ideation. Boom, done. Okay. Okay, there's another thing here. So, the idea for this guy, maybe this
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civilization is all about time. Everything is based on time. So, even their guns maybe you can only fire them at a certain time. I'm I'm I'm just going to sit quietly and watch the Twitch chat for the next 5 minutes. This this looks like something out of I don't know. When I see this, I I instantly think of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. his the in most interpretations of his most interpretations of his machine, it's very ornate and uh you know,
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classic like this. And of course, the big clock doesn't hurt. I'm thinking we can go for different silhouette for this guy, so it's not standard tapered weapon, which is just very safe and easy design. And for this guy, let's just try Oh, this is interesting. Of course, if you did have a weapon that could only fire at certain times, you you it already comes with your built-in one-liner, you know, right before you shoot somebody. It's time to die. I thought I was going to say It's a cannon. I thought I was going to say JJ Abrams on that one. He didn't, though. There he goes.
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Is this guy working? I'm not sure. Again, very abstract, but could be elaborated into very, very interesting ideas. You know, the cannon idea is really interesting because, you know, just in I don't know. I associate the ornateness, the the austerity here with you know, 19th century, 18th century stuff. That's that's my personal association. So, making it a big cannon also fits in with that kind of mental association that I've got going on. Cuz what's what I also love is that one of the best ways to come up with ideas is to mix things that are unrelated. So, let's say 19th century
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ornate cannon. Maybe we can mix it with the like with the spaceship. So, we're going to move this guy down. Captain Richard says, "It's the concierge cannon." What is this guy here? Oh, this is interesting. No, I have a feeling this is not this is not going to work. All right, this guy does not want to work. It's my one. Maybe maybe the way this gun works is that by shooting an enemy, you don't harm them,
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but you take their time away. And when they shoot you, they take your time away. It's a debuff instead of a damage. Yeah. Or maybe you can help your buddies and give them more time. I'm thinking maybe it's it works like like the traditional clock inner workings. Where there's a lot of gears. There you go. And that could be interesting. So like in this case, I'm not really using photos and just just drawing of what I think could be interesting. And there's a mounting point to keep it in line with metrics. Gold gun.
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And all of these like guns or art styles that I've chosen, they might be they might seem very random. Like why would you do the rocks or why would you use any of these weird objects or scenarios? And it's because as a concept designer, you should be able to work in in any style, in any any direction, uh any sort of time period, whether it's sci-fi, medieval, or or any other timeline that we don't know about. And you know, somebody in the chat was suggesting that even if it's not something specifically time-related, with your gears in there, it could be something it could be a weapon that you have to wind up as opposed to as opposed to like an energy
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charge. You can sit there and have to wind it up just like you would a watch. Watch all the gears turn, you know, click into place, and then release. Uh well, the fact that people mentioned that, that means I'm doing my job right, and it inspires them to come up with their own their own ways to see this. And this is actually what's happening in a lot of meetings where people just like, "Oh, yeah, it would be cool to do this or to do that." So yeah, great. Let's turn it into an actual mentioned rifle. Draugr. Draugr goes, "Oh oh oh a a gun that adds more quantum travel time to your ship." Oh, there we go. That would be interesting, yeah. I'm
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bringing that to John Crew. If that happens, everybody blame Draugar. And there's a All right, that's interesting. Uh Should we move Should we move on to the Sure, we're about halfway We're about halfway through the show right now. Cuz I don't know, maybe people want to see like a specific thing being done, and uh I'm I'm I'm happy to jump over into anything. Or if they If somebody wants to see it being more finished, then we can do that as well. Yeah, why don't you go ahead and move on to the to the next one, cuz I was I was really interested in seeing the next one, personally. And then folks in the chat, go ahead and uh you don't necessarily need to follow the
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options that are here on the screen, but go ahead and start suggesting a type of ship weapon you'd like to see, and I'll pull one that I think is interesting. We don't have a vote set up, so I'll be the adjudicator here. Okay, let's go on to the masks, and this one will be the most difficult one. So, often times some tasks are extremely abstract and extremely broad-ranged. So, in this case, like, "Oh, hey, it's a ship weapon that based on like uh traditional African artifacts or masks, and how does that tie up into into like a space theme?" So, we're going to try and uh maybe come up with something.
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Cuz drawing drawing uh like a standard hard surface weapons is fairly easy. Wouldn't say it's super easy, but it's not that hard, but coming up with the new stuff that is maybe somewhat weird, but still believable and plausible. That's that's hard. I like this. This looks like a wiring part. Once it's cast metal, but I kind of like it use that as a barrel
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texture. That could be very interesting. Mhm. Nope. It's going to be a wooden space gun. Be protected from EMP. God damn it. Oh. Actually Looks like a melee weapon. I'm going to stick to the guns.
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Interesting textures. Try this guy. Ooh. Yeah, I really like these beans being used. So, this is going to be probably the most non-sci-fi weapon, but we're going to get to the sci-fi weapons. What could that be? What could that be? I'm thinking maybe
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there is a sort of mounting point here on this side. And then, the way we would attach this guy, it would be on a manned turret. Right. Good. Just cuz your mount is on the side of the weapon instead of the top, so. Yeah, so I'm thinking cuz it doesn't I'm not really feeling it as a normal gun, so we're going to do quick viz dev for the for the possible turret. And again, for those of you who have just joined us, may not have been here from the beginning of the of the show. Uh we're we're here today with uh Alex from our uh concept team in Whimsical. And he's going through the process of creating a number of uh
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various ship weapons in different styles. Uh when you have to create dozens and dozens and dozens of concepts uh to find the right look and feel for just any individual item, uh it's important that you can iterate very quickly. And one of the ways that we do that is by utilizing a licensed library of various images to get us started along a path. So that you don't wait waste a bunch of time creating textures for something that ultimately you're not even going to you're not going to use. Obviously if any one of these were to go into production, that's the point where we'd start creating our own bespoke textures and you know start flushing it out with you know with
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more detailed work. Yeah, this is super early stage. Just This is the best stage. This is This might look like the roughest stage, but honestly this is the best stage cuz then It's pure exploration. Yeah, after this I take I can take something as raw as like this sketch and just go into 3D and start figuring out how that would sort of fit onto the ship. Or if it even works. All right. I I want a ship with a giant mask of Anubis on top now. That'll be awesome. We've We've kind of stretched from African to a little bit of Egyptian influence here. Although they Although Egypt is in Africa so I'm assuming that's still appropriate. We could make like a pyramid ships.
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No no sci-fi franchises ever used pyramid ships before? No. Again, here's a Like I do I do a lot of Like this looks horrible, this is majority of the concept art that we actually do that's never been seen and it's really the the most important part. It's the exploration and everybody here goes for it and it's not pretty. it's the most valuable part. Sometimes it does not even make sense to anybody other than me.
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And that's the that's sort of the point. Boom. There are any concept artists out there that will agree with me. Done. All right, let's uh Let's leave the masks alone for now and let's jump into something more uh something more traditional, I guess. So, we'll take the the AR 15 here and we'll just make a just like a very generic sci-fi ballistic weapon. Cuz often
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often we just need something that just looks like a like a gun and doesn't have any sort of crazy art direction behind it or crazy style or maybe it's a just a just a human manufacturer that's been around for centuries and they just sort of stuck with the uh with more traditional designs. You got to go with what you know. So, we're just going to extract all of our information from just this one picture. See what we can come up with. Like a chain thing. Looks like a machine gun.
00:38:32
So, maybe we will do flat barrels always look sci-fi. Hm, this this kind of starts looking like a
00:39:21
like a Hurston weapon. So, why don't we make it a bit more Hurston? You know, that's always a a a matter of opinion with folks. We we we hear that a lot. That looks like Aegis, that looks like Anvil, that doesn't look like you you you know, Crusader or whatever. Uh what You just mentioned Hurston. What about this meant Hurston to you? so, for me it's this under barrel part that I added. the reason why I added there is probably just subconsciously because I did design quite a few Hurston weapons. So, I naturally sort of I guess uh
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I went towards that style and uh I decided right now to roll with it, and why not? And then uh the flat barrel also Hurston guns have flat barrels. And they have flat copper barrels. So, I thought maybe we can turn this into like a very, very primitive, like it's it's one of like the first Hurston guns. Like ultra low-tech, almost a relic. Mhm. That you cannot even fit on ships because it's just incompatible, it's that old. But it still has similar aesthetics, so if if it were to be in game, and people see it and they'll be like, "Oh, yeah, it's a it's a it's a old Hurston gun." Hopefully. Uh so, right now there's a bit of
00:41:05
balance issues. It's it's very thin and all the parts uh are equal, so one of the things we try to avoid as a general art rule is keeping stuff same size. So, right now this guy here is nearly it's exactly the same the same size, and they visually they're competing, and it's not that pleasant to look at. So, we either need lengthen or shorten this guy, which in my case I'll lengthen it. Or maybe we need to rebalance uh this part here. And now now we have another intentional misbalance here, where the barrel is way too long and thin compared to the body, so easy solution is to
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scale it up. And it instantly looks good, and it took me few seconds to do that, but if I would, let's say if I would go with the with this design, and I would take it into 3D, and I would start to block it out, and it wouldn't work in 3D, it would take a lot of time to sort of fix. So, solving as many problems as possible in this stage is really the key. Maybe a bit negative space here. I do like this texture here, but I would like it to be maybe more frequent. Maybe that's a a good calling unit.
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Yeah, there's another good plug if you're watching the show and you're a subscriber, you can check out the subscriber vault, uh which is a gallery of images published every week, uh going back all the way to 2012, I think. Uh December 2012 is when we started. Uh and it's full of uh it's full of alternate concept art. So, you can see the exploration of of you see this type of exploration on uh great many of our ships, uh ship weapons, FPS weapons, uh planet environments, stuff like that. It's always uh we we are seeing the earliest steps in this process, which is uh for lack of a better term, kind of a kit bashing of various ideas to to discover a silhouette, to discover a shape language, to discover uh just an
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overall theme of what works before we waste anybody's time actually building something out in more detail. Yeah, that's actually a very good ex- explanation because concept art, that's where you waste time. That's That's why we're here. It's I don't remember. I think it was Paul who said it or somebody said it in the office. We're here to waste time, so the rest of the production don't have to cuz we are at the beginning of the production, like very, very early stage. So, we are the guys to waste time. I'll let them go by. We have a We have character concept artist Jeremiah in the studio and he he'll often you know it's I'll often tease him because most of what he works on will never be seen or used in the game. He's like, "Yeah, I'm making another version. We we
00:44:19
want we want to see what that looks like like this." And you know, chances are it won't be what we're looking for either. But that's what that's what concepting is. It's finding all the things you don't want until you find the thing that you do. Yep, that's true. So Let's put these guys aside and let's move on on to the kind of have an idea for this this barrel. So the image of this barrel and I thought it's awesome. Barrels are awesome. This is going to be our toxic gun.
00:45:10
Maybe it melts the ship's hulls. Like it like it shoots sludge instead of Okay. That was actually one of the ideas we had in the chat earlier when we were taking ideas. So it's basically maybe maybe it's almost like a pirate or griefing weapon or something that's mass-produced and not really durable or well put together, hence the use of this this tape. Like the barrel is actually taped to the rest of the to like the upper receiver. So once you use it, there's a high chance that you know, the thing will actually fall apart and damage your ship rather than doing anything to any other ships.
00:46:01
Uh so That's actually That's That's a very interesting idea here and um A date cable, you said it. I didn't say I want to I want to have a big pipe. Pipes are Is this working? No. Maybe it's like it wraps around and then sort of connects on the other side. Yeah, we need some like tubing or something to get the But it's It's really It's really uh low-tech, so let's let's just let's just quickly stop here and take this guy and then we will take the same idea,
00:46:53
but we'll make it a bit quick iteration on how it could be a high-tech. Like, what if it's not mass-produced? What if it's actually well-built and what if it's Pardon me. What if it always works? So, maybe the tank would be in this enclosure and then the components So, like this this pipe here, it's inside and it's enclosed. So, everything's really nice and durable. And I like the idea of having the frames around it. That could be a visual hook and could define like maybe define the
00:47:44
manufacturer. So, like the art direction for this manufacturer would be like free Free stepping stones would be They use the dark color. They use the yellow color. And then they use framing. So, they go that's the art direction for this manufacturer. And then based on that, we can create uh more variations. Here's like a more high-tech version, but I still like the non-durable one. I'm going to push it a bit more. It's very makeshift. The tank could be full of like toxic
00:48:40
waste. Cuz there's We need to find a way to repurpose all this toxic waste we're creating from whatever other industry Hurston's involved in. I just decided Could possibly be a I just decided it was Hurston. Who else would make a weapon that pumped out toxic waste? Maybe originally like this this part here was actually a Maybe they took it for the from the water treatment plant. Let's say the ship would have Let's say if the ship has a water treatment plant. It's like I don't know, a sci-fi component that processes uh like the water for it.
00:49:30
Or like a pump. Maybe it's a pump. So, they two They maybe they salvaged these pumps from the ships. And then they salvaged like the Maybe the container or like this this liquid tank thing is just a just a normal prop barrel from some planet, and they put these all components together, and that's how they make these weapons. And each of them is complete like not completely but slightly different than the previous one because it's all makeshift. So, you never have two two of the same. They just use the normal tube. It's not even well integrated. It's just a just a pipe. Maybe they stole the pipe from like an outpost. They ripped it out.
00:50:17
They use this for a gun. It could be interesting. I used to live next to a water treatment plant. It was a wonderful smell. Can imagine having this gun on the ship wouldn't be nice. I live two blocks north was a water treatment plant, and two blocks south was a dairy farm. That area smelled wonderful. So, I just want to quickly see where we at with our
00:51:11
weapons manufacturing here going on. Get rid of this guy. It's not good. Oh, I like the new turret. Oh, sorry. Too late. General rule for the concept between concept artists, if you don't like something, don't show it because there's a chance that it's going to get picked, and then you have to finish. That is a a That's a story I can't tell. But uh often times there's a philosophy
00:51:58
that's sometimes used where you'll you'll show three things you you'll you'll include something that's obviously bad so that the person who approves will have something very easy to say no to. Uh that's that's true. So that so that you'll get the thing that you want and uh when that backfires and the person picks the thing that you included that was supposed to be the obvious no. Someday when I write my memoirs I'll tell some stories. I'm just going to quickly do just a very generic weapon based on this uh I believe it's a uh
00:52:46
the power generator from the car or But I'm going to do like a quick quick gun out of it. Alternator? Maybe. I'm not I'm not sure, but I like the cutaway and I like the colors. That's why I picked it. Uh yeah, that looks like a cutaway of a pistol. So if we take this guy Oh, actually if we take this whole part and I'm following that. This thing is chunky. Mm, okay.
00:53:42
So, in less than an hour we came up with a interesting variety of sort of sort of where various styles and various very raw designs none of them are really finished or really maybe even plausible. Uh, but uh, for 1 hour I think it's not bad and at this point you can pull in the the rest of the team or the art director or whoever else is involved and uh even at this stage people can look at it and be like, "Oh, you know what? I like the I like the makeshift gun. Like, this is an interesting direction for let's say a new manufacturer." Uh, let's let's let's take it further and from there I can take this guy and
00:54:30
maybe block it out and make it nice and more finished or maybe they will pick uh this guy and be like, "Yeah, you know what? We we like the to add like this gun to the Hurston family. So, let's go with this one uh, because we already have the manufacturer or maybe it will inspire people to create something bone-based. It's the these these sketches really are just conversation starters and almost every concept has them and this is where people generally are the most enthusiastic enthusiastic about the the design because nothing is set in stone. Everything is open to interpretation and it's like a reading a book. People see this stuff and they create their own stories or they see their own things and they uh, sort of add it
00:55:18
to the design and it's always awesome to see and hear what people have to say about these. All right, so we've only got about 5 minutes left. I don't know if we have enough time, but there was one idea from the from the chat that I wanted to present to you. Uh, it it it's it's it's it's one line and I want to you take it where this one line sends you. Something that punches above its weight class. Mhm, something that punches above its above its weight class. I think Mhm, yeah, actually. Let me see. Let me I'm looking for a
00:56:08
Do I have it? I think I can do something with it. Yeah, definitely. How would that work? Okay. Let me just quickly sketch out a spaceship here. I don't remember the tail how the tail
00:56:59
looks like. No. So, there we go. There's this guy. Then you probably need bunch of them. To maybe take on the on the big ship. This is something we do very often here.
00:57:50
People come up with random ideas and then I have to draw them. And we have many, many, many pages of of these guys that nobody will ever see. these things keep us sane. Actually, no. It's a Let me scale this guy up. So, the way it would work is that you got to fly in to the bigger ship. Like closer. And then this leg would It's not long enough.
00:58:38
Just What's going on here? Then you can you can kick the ships, see? That would be my my solution for that. But in all seriousness, for the guns like with descriptions like that, it would probably have to be something visually something that is on a small ship, but generally if I would get that task, it would be like a very, very big barrel. Like if let's say it's S1 gun, but when you look at it,
00:59:27
the barrel is very prominent. So, it's a small gun with very, very, very big barrel. Or maybe there's multiple barrels. So, visually, that would be the solution for that sort of problem. And we shall call it the ship kicker. The ship kicker, yeah. So, maybe So, I can totally see like this guy in the context of the person would be something really, really bulky.
01:00:26
It's often a very, very difficult to design something that's Oh, it's very small, but it has to be very powerful, or it's very big, but it has to be extremely weak. Uh those ones visually are definitely harder to solve. but yeah, that'll be that'll be my solution, big barrel. Well, all right. Uh thank you so much, Alex. You can stop the screen share now. that's it. Thank you for taking time to out of your Friday at the end of our week to to sit here and take us through your process. Um concepting is not something I think we get to show enough process of every
01:01:14
almost everything starts with with with a concept much like the way that you saw, whether it's a spaceship or a character or ship weapon or prop, or or anything that populates the entire persistent universe. And I wanted it was a it was a good chance to show how the generation of ideas begins before these things go off to 3D artists, or even other 2D artists to to develop in more fuller fully realized ideas. Um That's it. So, Alex, thank you so much for your Thank you, yeah. In case anybody is watching that hasn't hasn't heard the news, Alpha 3.7 is currently in wave one PTU. So, if you are in wave one PTU, you can download that and jump in now and help us bang on the pipes, as it were. Keep
01:02:02
your eye out over the next couple days. I've got no timeline for this, so when it's ready, it'll extend past into additional waves, and then eventually make its way into the hands of everybody when it goes live. So, we have four for Alex. I'm Jared. Thanks for watching Star Citizen Live. Remember, we're also still on hiatus for Inside Star Citizen. We'll be back on October 23rd, so keep an eye out for that, and take care. We'll see you next week. All right, thanks, guys. Bye-bye. Thanks for watching. For the latest and greatest in Star Citizen and Squadron 42, you can subscribe to our channel, or you can check out some of the other shows, and you can also head to our
01:02:49
website at www.robertsspaceindustries.com. Thank you very much for watching.

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