Star Citizen: Bugsmashers - Helmet Lights

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:16

   Hey, welcome to Bug Hey. No, after you. After you. I You know what? Welcome to Bug Smashers. We have a a new episode today where it is. Just right right over there. We actually don't need him anymore. I'm going to do the Bug Smashers. I'm done. I got a helmet light that we're going to try to fix because see that helmet light. Sir Aiban's too busy with other bugs apparently. He's just smashing too many bugs. So, I'm going to try to smash one or at least try to smash one. Try. Bug Smashers! Uh Mark is so swamped with bugs that I am going to try to help troubleshoot some bugs for him. Um but I'm going to take more of an artist approach at it. So, it should be terrifying and interesting. Uh so, I'm going to go

2. 00:01:03

   ahead and open up a build right now. And what should be happening is the characters should have a light inside of the helmet illuminating their face. Uh but I heard that that's problematic at the moment. So, let's see exactly what's going on. Uh let me jump in the game. And now I'm going to load a character. Let's try player one armor. And let's uh switch the lighting so we can kind of see it. Oh, already looks to be a problem. We have a light spawning at 0 0 0. And let's take a look at the character.

3. 00:01:52

   Oh. Yep, that's definitely a bug. So, it looks like we have a light that's supposed to be spawning on the character's helmet, but it is missing the bone attachment and is going straight to the root of the character at 00. In addition, it's also spawning at 00. So, since it's an entity, I'm going to go ahead and open up Data Forge and take a look exactly what the item is doing and how it's calling the light. All right, it looks like we got Data Forge open. So, let's take a look at this item. So, I'm going to go ahead and navigate to the helmet item entities. SC item. Characters, human.

4. 00:02:43

   Armor. Light. Helmet. Light helmet. And this character is the explorer. So, let's go ahead and open up the components. And let's see what we find. And there we have an effects that's depreciated. If I open up this effects param, we have a light that's enabled. So, it looks like we are switching over to a new system. We were going from the effects system to the entity effects system, which I imagine the entity effects system has more options. It plays better with the other disciplines and the other items in in the scenes. So, probably has a lot of good gameplay um options as a result to this new system. So, I'm going to go ahead and delete the

5. 00:03:30

   old system that's labeled depreciated and let's see if that's what's causing the bug. Let's go ahead and save the change. All right, now let's jump into the game and see if our changes took effect and it fixed our bug. Let's go ahead and get the lighting a little darker so we can see what we got and I am no longer seeing

6. 00:04:21

   a light spawning at 0 0 and I'm no longer seeing a light spawning at world 0 0. So, looks like this has been resolved. Now, I'd imagine that they don't just want the light to be spawning at 0 0 and they don't want the light to be spawning at 0 0 in the world. They want the light on the player's face, on the player's helmet. Uh so, let's go ahead and go back into Dataforge and let's see if we can actually get a light to properly spawn. All right. Now, uh let's go ahead and take a look at the entity and let's see what options we have for this new entity effects component. So, I'm going to go ahead and open this up and there we go. There's a light entity effects and it looks like we can add a new tag and now we have a null bone. So, I think

7. 00:05:10

   the best way to approach this is to uh actually have a slot attachment that is directly tied to a joint location on the helmet. Luckily, we're already prepared for this. So, what we've done is we've created a bone rig that actually shows up on the character, loads in runtime, and then we can attach the light. So, we've created this little rig here. Uh we have a floodlight on the side of the head. We have a floodlight on the front top and we have a light coming from the bottom, which will be our primary uh direct light. Uh then we have two little uh side lights that we can use as like paneling or whatnot. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and see if we can get these things actually working in the game. All right, so

8. 00:05:58

   under the entity slot attachment let's go ahead and select a character bone attachment. And under the character bone attachment let's go ahead and paste one in. So, looking at the diagram here I think a great place to start is this primary light right here, which is bottom light 04. So, attachment 04 is what we named the bone. All right, so let's go ahead and just drop in a temperature. We got a diffuse multiplier. Let's go ahead and give it a name. I'm going to name it the same as this file, so bottom light 04. Cool, cool. Let's go ahead and enable.

9. 00:06:57

   Let's go ahead and save. Now, the beauty of having the actual bone attachment means we've already somewhat rotated the the bone position and already have done the translation for the position, which means that we should just be able to spawn it and it'll pop up approximately exactly where we already want it. So, the editing will be very minimal if any at all. All right, so let's go ahead and jump in and see if we can see a light. And I see something.

10. 00:07:58

    That's a good sign. Hey, check that out. We got a helmet light. So, what's happening right now is the light is actually a point light, which means that it's projecting in six directions. Uh which means that we're going to have to give it a directional. So, let's do try a texture projection, so it only shoots one direction, and then we'll have it kind of this ghostly coming up from the bottom right there. So, let me jump out of game. All right. Let's jump back into data forge. And I'm going to change the point light to a projector light. Open that up. Uh and now we have a texture pass, I'm going to use a mask to have a bit more control over the

11. 00:08:47

    direction that it's going. So, let's do a general spot. Uh we probably don't need a 4-m radius, so let's go ahead and turn that way down to 0.2. Let's give it a nice little viewing frustum, so let's crank this up a little bit. Let's go like 120 140. Um we'll leave the light default for now, and let's turn down the multiplier quite a bit, so let's go I don't know 0.1. Let's go ahead and turn on a shadow caster. And let's give this a try. All right, so let's jump back into game, and let's see if our texture projection

12. 00:09:35

    is working. Get that that night time lighting. Load up our character. And it looks like I'm not seeing the bright light anymore. Rotate around. Hey, look at that. We have a light now coming from the chin. All right, so the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on these two side lights as we see in our example. We got bottom light 05 and bottom light 06, which will kind of be nice. I'll do like kind of a subtle splash. I'm not going to enable shadows. I think that the budget probably only permits for one shadow caster.

13. 00:10:25

    Then maybe we could turn on a nice flood light. So, let's take a look at this. Jump over here. Go ahead and jump out of game. And we have a total of six lights. So, I'm going to go ahead add six. We don't have to use them all, but might as well set up the item in case the artist wants to. And I'm going to go ahead and add all of the and ensure that they're all projectors. And ensure that they're all bone attachments. And then one by one

14. 00:11:13

    I'm going to go ahead and add them all to the scene. All right, now that we got them all set up, let's go ahead and save and see if it worked. All right, we're back in the editor. We have our six light entities set up in data forge and let's see if they can be enabled now.

15. 00:12:04

    Jump in the game. Let's get that nice night time lighting that we like. All right, nothing weird happening. And it looks like all of our lights are indeed working. It looks a little weird right now, but that's just because we need to polish them. And if I jump over here, I get back into data forge. Let's get a little crazy. Let's see if this will actually update

16. 00:12:51

    in real time. Look at that. That is awesome. All right, so I got an idea. Since it updates in real time, we can now actually go on to the lighting polish pass. We got them all on, we got them all working, but it looks super funky. It looks super weird. Uh so now let's actually give the lights some proper settings and dial everything in and then close out this bug. All right, so it looks like someone's picking me up. I'm going to go ahead and run towards it and maybe have this person take me to space so I get a nice dark environment to finish up the helmet lights. All right, now that I'm in, let's go ahead and uh

17. 00:13:40

    I don't know who's that. Hey mystery pilot, can we uh can we take off, please? And while we're taking off, I'm going to go ahead and work on this helmet lighting. All right, let's go ahead and jump over and there's our lighting. Freaking out. Let's go ahead and recalibrate this. There we go. Okay, cool. So, I'm going to go ahead and jump over to Dataforge. And I think what we would like to do go ahead and reinitialize that. All right, so let's start with the bottom light. That seems to be kind of the most

18. 00:14:27

    important. There we go. Uh looks kind of cool. Let's go ahead and put a little bit of radius on there. It's too bad. See if we can do a little bit of rotation. Cool, cool. All right. Now, let's go ahead and turn on some of those fill lights. Let's try the bottom left. All right.

19. 00:15:20

    Let's turn this on. Turn that on. Let's turn those way down. We just want those really subtle. There we go. All right, cool. Let's go ahead and turn on that primary flood. All right, so we've got the side. Let's go ahead and once again turn that way down. Cool. Go ahead and do this. Very nice. Now, I think that this is a little too close, so I'm going to go ahead and back this up here. Just got a splash across the face a

20. 00:16:32

    little bit. Very nice. Cool. And let's go ahead and turn this And we got ourselves some helmet lighting. It's not the best, but you know, it's something. All right. So, uh Who is that edited over in that seat there? I think

21. 00:17:25

    we got ourselves a Marky Mark. One day I'll get a light. Oh, I'm sorry, bud. No lights for you. So, we had a little fun helmet light bug there and Forest, how did it go? Uh what good we I believe we smashed the bug. As we would say. So, the light was spawning at 0 0 on the character's root probably because it wasn't finding the bone attachment and drawing straight down. And then it was also spawning at 0 0 in the world. So, we went into DataForge and we found a depreciated effect system. Remove that right out. Lights were gone. Everything working good. And then we added our new entity effect system. Uh new and revised and awesome. So, we added some lights through that uh system attached them to the helpers for the

22. 00:18:14

    helmet and now the character had lights. We jumped into the client. Tested in multiplayer. But I didn't have lights. But that's another story. That was intentional. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed. Until next time. Thank you, Forest. I think you did a wonderful job. And till next time, guys. See you. Thank you for watching. So, if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest in the Star Citizen and Squadron 42 development, please follow us on our social media channels. See you soon.