Star Citizen Live: Animation Vocation

28 April 202301:03:441,462 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hi everybody welcome to another episode of Star Citizen live uh animation vocation I'm your host uh uh creative uh content lead is that my title creative content lead Jared Huckabee and if you've never seen Star Citizen live animation vocation before uh that's where we take about an hour sometimes a little longer sometimes a little shorter depending on meetings and stuff like at the end of our week and we sit down with some of our incredibly talented uh cig developers and we discuss all aspects of their work their career who they are uh what their favorite episode of Jerry Springer is you know it's it's we're really kind of open to a whole whole host of things um joining us on the show this week is
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one of my favorite people not just favorite employees one of my favorite people a genuine a mensch in the in the best sense of the words lover of tiki drinks and the tiki bars that house them uh animation director Mr Steve Bender Steve thank you Karen thank you for having me you're here I am now you're not just here as a visiting you are the latest in a a small but esteemed group of individuals who have now permanently relocated to Manchester that is there's very true so about uh was that April 20th if the you notice the weather was really nice and everything like that that was that was literally I brought that out from California just for you you moved on
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April 20th I did I moved on April 22nd really yeah I just I just completed my first year of of penance here so we're we're April Buddies oh [Music] so your animation director yes oh my God Eric the nomad's like awkward only for you it was beautiful for me so your animation director because every show is somebody's first and because we haven't had you on the show in in a couple years I know not since before the pandemic I don't I don't think we ever had you on during the pet I can't remember maybe I've done a lot of these yeah
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it's hard to keep them straight uh tell everybody who you are and what you do for Star Citizen yeah so you said my name is Steve Bender I'm the animation director at Cloud Imperium and I oversee the creation of Animation largely for things like the player and for the AI in the game I also shoot motion capture direct motion capture a work with the different designers and design leads in laying out working to to figure out how something's going to to work what animations need to go in there how they combine and things like that so um I'm really lucky in that I have me myself
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I have a great team a great animation team that works on this project so it's not me doing it it's I'm working with these these talented animators you say it's not me doing it but yeah I have seen you inside the the suit with the with the ping pong balls on more than one occasion sometimes it is that is true sometimes late at night I get into the suit and and sort of Dance I mean I mean for work don't oh right yeah yeah yeah of course uh in fact just last week just last week I was I was wearing the I was I was wearing the mocap suit for work for work yeah yeah absolutely if you have seen Steve Bender before on
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one of these shows you already know this is going to be one of those shows so Let's uh today uh obviously uh you know there's nothing that directly applies to being we're not going to talk about the game the current state or and whatnot stuff like that we're going to talk more about animation in general and its role uh in games and in game development um there's a you hit basically three kind of pillars between the player stuff the AI stuff and then the motion capture stuff which can be used for cinematics for for the you know those awesome commercials Jax videos stuff like that so I want to take a kind of one pillar at a time let's just talk about player stuff now there's also facial animations oh there's also Facebook but that is part of gameplay it's part of the player
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and it's part of in fact anything uh we do here that has facial animation that facial animation cruise is also important so let's start from the perspective of the player uh uh obviously our game is a first person Universe it's the it's it's a the player experiences everything uh from the first person but they do also have the option of you know switching out to third person for Cinemax but then every other person sees your character from third person or something like this talk to me about uh what animation does for the player is is there you've had this conversation for years and years your experience goes back to cry Tech and before that stuff but let's talk about what is and is an animation for instance for players
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there's uh I'm jump I've jumped into the game I'm a player character there's all the things I can do from takedowns to firing an mp4 to running around and catching the thing what is animation as what parts of that experience are directly related to animation uh it's the character motions so things like for instance when you're doing those takedowns the the the your hands in the view or if you're kicked out third person or they're seeing you in third person uh the third person animation about the third person view of that happening uh the victim who ends up being quite unfortunate in that that's all character animation as well our guys will Author motion for the view especially in the
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case where they're doing particular action so in the takedowns and stuff like that because one of the things about a first person game uh when you're playing in first person is as compared to a third person game so I'm I'm running around all the time I know who I am I know what things feel like what they're supposed to how they're supposed to play like when I jump I know how far that's supposed to go when you're in a first person game the only thing you have is the camera and then your hands and that's your only real frame of reference I mean you can look down and see your feet but you tend to run into walls right so um all of all of that it's basically all of the the personality or type of character that
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you're playing needs to come through those hands and that camera that's weird so so it's like so so many of the action so you know from running to Jumping to climbing you know like this it's you make a good point that from the first person you have to kind of convey all those things through hands yes are there ever are there some activities where maybe if it was in real life you probably wouldn't see your hands in front of your face but in the Video Game World you kind of you have to because it's the only way to communicate that to the player absolutely so for for those of our our uh viewers who are well versed in firearms and things like that um if you have a firearm in front of you and you're reloading it the best way to
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think of a first person camera at least how I think of it is you put glasses on with like a box on it and that's your field of view and that's what you're gonna see you don't see anything down here right there's no peripheral unless you look down you don't see it so if I'm going to reload and I'm reloading down here so my my view Box is open and I can look around if I show exactly that in the view I'm from from my eyeballs I'm not going to see this action when I reload in real life I'm not looking down to see this I can feel where that button is I can do it down against it oh well I go like this and I pull this mag out and the way that I
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hold that mag when it goes back into into the pistol is it's just it's by feel I can do it in the dark so I don't need to have it in my view that's just one simple example from combat that you know a lot of these different reloads and things like that you need to kind of cheat them up right so that the player can see what is happening what would happen though if if if we were to pursue the ABS the totally 100 diegetic you know you're reloading under it's like you know when you're you're dead eyeing somebody and you you know you know your your kit so well you can pull it out and you you know you do everything by feel like a lot of the professional soldiers can but you wouldn't see that like would I suppose as a player you'd wonder if you were
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actually reloaded it's like have I finished yeah you'd have no idea what your actions are because the other thing is when you do these things in real life you have you understand like I'm sitting in this chair right now I I know my arm is on this chair because I can feel it but if I can't feel it how do I know it's there so in the in the case of that's it's just it's the same concept so there's lots of things that go on as you're moving through your everyday world that you know where things are you know your hand is here it's not just all of a sudden you're going to turn around and hit you in the head right so um but in a first person view in a first person game you don't know where that thing is unless we show you so and the
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the trick is um you know you don't want to be walking around all the time with your hands like this because that's just creepy Nobody Does that Stanton Strangler says is this actually live it seems cut he thinks you're doing a good job David he thinks it's professionally cut she's doing it live um so you have to bring all these things up kind of uh somewhat artificially you know into the view so the first person player can see it how's that played a third person though you know obviously we're building this massive Universe you know with ideally uh hundreds of other players that can be around you are they always when they reload do they always see you bringing the gun up to them well the way that we deal with the first person in
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third person Connection in Star Citizen requires us to sort of I guess split the difference would be a great way of describing that because we don't want to put it here because then it's going to look real it's going to look really weird every player running around like you know like yeah it's gonna look really weird in in third person so we have to kind of go okay there that's about our distance and that's going to look that's going to look decent in first and and third person so every time so every time I mean I know the answer this but every time you're reviewing animation it you have to find this sweet spot between what works for first person what works for third person yes so and if a single
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player game would never have to worry about that and and what I tend to find in because you can you just see everything from the first person I guess and then in a lot of um Battlefield style games and what it's all about speed so much they can sometimes just kind of cut and make it really quick to get you back but in a we're always pushing for that that greater sense of realism whenever we can and and I know there was a lot of work that went into unifying that first and third person stuff talk to me about that work old heads people who have been following the project you're gonna you're gonna already know what this is but there's a lot of people that have never heard us you talk about this process of unifying the first and third person perspectives oh wow that's that's a whole that's an easy thing that was like a week's worth of work right no no no it was not he's got Spirit in the Sky
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like he's going through a Vietnam flashback right now cheers just a moment this is a safe space uh Stephen oh my God you can't nobody can hurt you here um just memories because of of how those the the third person animation so if you just put a third person animation on a character and you have your camera if you want your camera coming from the head uh and you put a third person animation on a character and you move around you are going to be seeing this down here it's not going to look right um and but yet we still need to be able to control certain aspects for the player in sort of the the players the player's space any any move that I
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make in third person and I go like this all of a sudden in first person camera looks like this it's it's enormous so um what we had to do is take that third person animation and then lock it down with sort of like an aim pose if you will on top of it and then add certain actions on top of it so certain motion on top of it which would we could then craft that sort of that sort of control on it yeah you mentioned if you want if you said if you want the first person view to come from the head that skirts the fact that there are many games out there where the first piece of camera is not physically where the head of the person would be on it it's you
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know we never think about it we just kind of accept the reality of the game that we're playing but oftentimes the first person camera it would be located somewhere around the chest you know which is which is how which is the shortcut to keeping hands and everything into in into Facebook but we uh because I don't know we don't know better we put the camera in that we put it like in the eyes you know everybody's played Star Citizen has had that time where the camera gets kind of off centered and you can see the eyeball you can see your own eyeballs you know floating in front like we don't cheat it we put the we put the the camera where the eyes are supposed to be I know that's not traditionally a that's not strictly an animation thing but uh has that made your life easier or or harder that that one choice
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am I allowed to knock no comment this question um right I mean I just did move out to Manchester so um it's been uh there's been a lot of uh creative uh uh technical choices that that we've had to make to be able to um get other technical choices to to work it's a very diplomatic way of saying no feature exists in a vacuum and it's it's one thing you can make this work on its own you can make this work on its own you make this work on its own this workout and then it's when you combine them that bugs are born and that troubles are born and that and that backlogs are born yeah exactly like that
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but uh I mean ultimately it's it's part of the DNA of our process of our project it's it's that would be the easy way and that would be how you know maybe some other game would do it and yeah that's how many other games have done it nothing but we we part of this you know Endeavor we're on and part of what what I really like about working uh for CR is he'll always kind of push what okay so no other game does it that way but is it because they just haven't figured it out that's very true or something so we tend to push you know into things like that and yeah that camera actually being in the eyes is one of those as one of those quintessential Star Citizen things that I really like about the project even with all the headaches and the trauma the clear drama you can't stay on camera but Steve is
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vibrating right now he's got a he's got a low level vibration going on he's bracing himself on the chair but I can tell he's about I'm secretly have you ever like whenever I um whenever I get really nervous about something you know you ever go to the doctor and like they they're gonna give you a shot or something like that what I do is I pinch myself on the other side of the body because that pain right causes my brain to go over here so I don't feel this and I know I caused this so that doesn't hurt at all I have been pinching myself for the past five minutes Jared you're listening to the secrets of the animation directors only at twitch.tv Star Citizen all right so so so obviously animation is absolutely essential to the player I mean it is
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everything that a player does in one way shape or form let's move on to that second pillar you talked about AI yeah uh a lot of people think that everything involved with AI everything in AI does everything in iei says everything every way in AI behaves is the sole purview of AI programmers or AI Engineers but I don't think it's often understood just how much of the AI experience is actually animation based so talk to me about that yeah so we were actually talking about this the other day in that um I hate the word Ai and the reason I hate the word AI is because so from a from a code standpoint
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a entity goes from point A to point B and then it goes here and it goes to point B and then it goes over there and it goes to point you know Point C or whatever um I forgot what letter I wasn't going to point it out you know what's that but I wasn't um but you got there it can do whatever it wants it can it can go down the down the hallway and immediately turn around I mean like this and flip around and go back because it's an entity but human beings don't react that way right there are decisions that you can make from a uh from a code standpoint where you say
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uh my guy is going to strafe to his left he's holding a rifle he's going to strafe to his left and he's going to go up that staircase right anybody who's ever tried to and and if if you if you haven't like like get out of your chair right now and go do it uh trying strafe upstairs while watching while pointing something it doesn't have to be a gun you can go get a spoon or something and concentrate on whatever you're pointing at um and try not to fall up the stairs right that sort of thing it an entity can do it a person can't and the key here is that um the animations job is to
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in each of the animations to look like a real person doing something but then also the animations uh team's job is to work with the AI programmers and the AI designers to talk about how something that's happening is not that's not what a person is going to do like for instance the other day we had an instance where the uh the passing code we noticed had characters going forward and then they would flip and turn around and come all the way back and then they would make these hard right 90 degree turns and it was like okay well but the character was doing this and it was coming back and it
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looked one of the most immersion breaking things it was like what the heck so then we said okay well our job part of our job in animation is to describe what the AI is the AI code is doing um in a way that's believable for performance so why would you go that way and then all of a sudden stop and come directly back you forgot your keys okay right so what we do is then we go okay well let's insert an animation there where your character is walking and came back and when we made that animation and um animation programming injected it into the system all of a sudden what looked like a stupid decision that was
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being made by The Entity looked like a person who like he forgot his keys and he was going back and you bought it it was believable the the AI animation the only reason I I really want to get to this topic I'm glad we're on it right now is that there are many things that contribute to immersion yeah in a game and everybody knows you know one of star Citizen's big uh you know buzzwords is immersion you know having a fantastically drawn environment you know with a fully realized atmosphere and and proper you know lighting that that behaves those are all insanely important but all of all the you know a soundscape you know you know things echoing the way that you expect you expect them to voices coming from the direction they're supposed to come all those things are
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super important but when you see characters and non-player characters do 180 instant you know and then the retract like like unless they're the unless they're the Queen's guard in front of Buckingham Palace you know watching what's up it's one of those things that instantly breaks your immersion yeah it's it's so animation is one of those tools that it doesn't get the it doesn't get the same the same Spotlight that fog and Lighting and Sound does but it's absolutely essential to main to making a place feel alive you mean if a place feel believable it's and it's I mean obviously I can already here I've already seen the YouTube
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comments while I'm talking because a lot of folks perspective is only what's in the Pu right now and of course we know that you know such a big focus is on Squadron 42 at the moment but I'm gonna we're gonna I want to talk a little bit about what I've seen in Squadron 42. the the the the the the life cycles the the the the the the people who roam the Halls the the janitors who who sit there and you know and they mop and then they kind of stop and they think for a second you know exactly that all my lost Keys saying it's like I gotta go back and do this the people in the mess hall who are going down and then they you know they they get this and they get this and they kind of think for a second it's like okay no I'm gonna get this it's those moments just those tiny moments of of I don't know what you call them that that insert that animation insert that consideration or whatever it's the difference between
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a ship that seems pristine and kind of oh that's a nice model and suddenly now it's a place that's lived in it's it's about thought right so um when I when I talk about that I don't I try not to use the word AI a lot and I try and use character or people or Doug Johnson or something like that right it's about keeping in mind that people moving through the entities moving through the world are supposed to be people and uh things in fact we were just talking about it today at someone was using a locker and it was the character goes up
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and the animation stops and then he opens the locker and it was like why is he doing that well because of you know this is the thing about I don't need for you to tell me how many frames or the technical reason why I don't need for you to tell me even the you know why that tell me why he just stopped and stared at that Locker the character's intention exactly and it's like uh get rid of the pause right let's cut that out let's trim that together let's make that that flow we had another example where one of our um one of our animators had said there were people picking up crates and moving them
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and we have to have a technical point in the behavior where the AI needs to check where it's going to go next where it's going to path to next and where they had placed that point with with the Myriad of different fragments that they had that contained animations was after the guy picked up the box and so we picked up the box and stood there like this and then walked off it was it was sort of like you know once you get over the age of 40 if any of your viewers have experienced that you have these moments all the time but um uh but nine we talked about where we could like okay if it needs to happen there you could
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have the box there and go sort of look around where am I supposed to go with this or we could shift it earlier so we come in we acquire the box or we know what box we're going to use we pull out a data pad and as we're doing this the ai's pathfinding to where it needs to go the second it finishes we put the data pad away pick the Box up and move so how do you hide those sort of Choice points or those those pathing issues that you the AI need to make they're not as big of an issue when you have a a game that is local but when you have servers and those those times right that are happening you do need something
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to sort of hide that that answer hasn't come back yet and it needs to look like a performance it needs to look like a thinking person there's there's uh again you know it I'm scared we don't want to talk yeah I don't want spoiling but one of the only other behaviors that I've seen in Squadron reviews anything is like the the weapon vendor kind of thing that that it's like when you're going like okay it's like what can I get for you uh what whatever it's like I'd like uh this whatever and I goes and again does a little nod whether it walks over you know takes a moment to look it doesn't just instantly know where everything is like ah you know you know grabs this you know you know does a little you know doesn't just grab it and put it down and does a little and puts it down and slides it's just those
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moments the those little tiny animation moments are to me where everything wins or loses it it's like that that's where you know you've succeeded it's it's everybody knows the I don't want to you know throw any shame to uh we'll use this as our transition to facial animations here uh the Mass Effect Andromeda that they that famously you know when it came out there was one character who whose facial animation was not it didn't have everything it needed because my face just died like it was tired and it just it wasn't it didn't have those little moments in between and people wrote much of the entire game off of that there's going to be somebody in the chat that's like no that team sucked and I have 50 other reasons I not what we're talking about here but that moment like that just that one
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failed animation like turn the tide on a lot of the reception of that game it's like it's so important uh so let's move into facial animation yep now how important is facial animation to selling the believability of the characters that you're interacting with to telling a story well one of the things that that is really kind of interesting and you can actually test this right now in the game and you can do it as as players to players if you're using the the foip system for instance um is put your helmet on put on an opaque helmet and look at what you're looking at and what you're going to find out is that you're looking at the person in
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general right and you know he's waving or he's doing this or he's pulling out this weapon or whatever he's doing the second he takes that helmet off you're looking at his face everything happens right here so much of our of our understanding and connection with people happens just in this tiny little area that it becomes exceedingly important especially in the case of say cinematics the the work that the facial team has done on the cinematics or on the work that they've done on the marketing stuff it's also important in the case of of the AI so that's another thing that we're going to be coming on with the
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facial team as the body animations and the way that we've had to shoot them uh which is just without often without a head cam at the same time the facial animations start coming onto a character we had a perfect example of that yesterday there was a character sitting on a bunk bed and they were looking at a Moby glass and their their feet were moving a little bit they weren't kicking them back and forth or anything like that but they were like and you're looking at my face right now I can tell you right but right they're doing this and um one of the designers said well we need we need sad we need happy we need
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nervous animations for for this bunk bed and it was like another person on the bunk bed yeah do do you because what if I'm like oh my God yeah that's awesome that's awesome or I'm like oh God oh I don't think we're going to make this or oh you gotta be [ __ ] kidding me that's your one that's my one one market market David that's his one so but that is the uh that's an example of just from a body animation standpoint then you put in on that face and you get you get a uh sort of deeper performance the um so let's
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pull back a little bit mocap versus pcap one of the most common I see the terms used interchangeably when they shouldn't be and it always annoys me when I hear it talk to me about what is mocap and then what is P CAP and the differences between the two yeah they're they're essentially the same exact base uh motion capture and performance capture both use the same old cap suit we use the same markers they use the same cameras they use the same software they use the same uh you know will bring things in from motion builder in and we will uh you know be able to pre-vis or or pre-vis as well in the engine it's it's all the same Hardware same
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technology where performance capture adds a second layer is when you then add the helmet and the um the audio so as well in in fact in in motion capture before um we've had the body suit and the helmet on with the camera on recording but because we weren't recording any audio it wasn't you could sort of like well it's not really performance capture but you are grabbing the facial animation at the same time as the body but the whole point of performance capture is that back in the day what you used to do is you used to capture the body animation
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and then you would capture the face and somewhere else or you would capture the face you'd do the like uh game I worked on ages and ages and ages ago we did the uh audio first so they recorded everything they had all their lines we had to put that together into track View and and line it up along with our block out animations then we went and we pantomized essentially body wise to those audio lines and then after that was done we had a in fact the the current technical vice president here wrote this software uh where we we wrote we had the
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uh we had video and I would in the case of this this character I mimicked the lines that the actor said and also watching the body and we we use that to drive the facial animation so we had to do it in multiple Parts whereas in performance capture he just captured all at once and you can Master the audio from that audio that that you've created that day now that's not to say that there isn't a performance aspect to even mocap I mean we now to get too far into it but even just before the show we you know we were looking at uh some mocap for a particular animation and going you know it's like it's it's we're not going to use any name so we're pretty but it's like oh I I wish the performer had done this better and whatnot it's it's
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so I mean there's still you just like a a mime there's performance even with your body um well I got into the suit we had to do uh I was capturing so right now in in the in the PO can I talk about walk Cycles as anything oh please I've been waiting okay um a lot of the characters are walking they're walking very static like this because of how the the B spaces are authored um and I was like this I can't stand looking at this anymore um so I started going in and capturing long Cycles with other Motion in it so characters looking around and things like that and we started ninja missing
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these things into what was that word ninja Mission ninja Mission yeah it's it's when it's not on the schedule but we're doing it anyway usually it's actually the subject of next week's ISC we'll watch that usually after after hours or at lunch or something like that and like take this thing and put that in um but I had to do uh we wanted like a an injured character and we wanted a tough guy character so I was performing that day I had to get into the role and stuff like that um so I was listening to some heavy metal and stuff like this for the for the tough guy and then for the injured character it didn't really look
00:37:40
it kind of looked fake that I was limping um because you were faking on them yeah so like so I took a screwdriver and I whacked myself repeatedly in the leg like that um and then I'm not saying anything and then we've been on track for like 33 minutes we've been so good so it was it was looking fake when we're rolling back it was looking kind of fake and what did you do what did you actually do I literally took the screwdriver and beat myself in the leg with it until it hurt and then walked across the way decisions and actions of Steve Bender not represent those of cloud Imperium games Robert's Space Industries or its subsidiaries I bleed for you Jared
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um but yeah I mean that that's you can you can come at it from different ways and there's other examples that uh you know we were shooting and trying to establish what is the role of this character or what are they going to be doing say in the persistent Universe you're going to be going there and you're going to see the character shopping right getting into that moment trying to imagine uh you know you're the time I went with my mom to the craft fair right and what did that feel like you know oh well that's I really like how to this is neat I like I like this little bobble head thing you got going on here that's right and just trying to be honest with it so you do have to have that performance no matter what whether
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it's performance capture motion capture combat things like that oh um so a couple questions that we're going to take a break here we've covered a cut we've covered you know a couple of different major disciplines and how animation Works um I want to ask you about an aspect that is so important in all MMOs we talked about it years ago and we were brainstorming some amazing things and whatever emotes yes in the Pu we've sort of had the same emotes for for for for quite a while um I know obviously there are plans to to to you know as as the wheel of development Cycles back around and and resources can come back to that talk to me about your view on umotes and how
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important emotes are and it's really hard to be able to understand how hard how important they are without getting feedback from the community like which emotes are they using the most which ones don't they like which ones do they like I see dancing a lot and stuff like that every MMO right we did do a session of why oh gosh this was pre-pandemic Yeah we actually had some backers do some some emotes with us uh and stuff like that and we've talked about being able to perhaps add emotes related to we have we have some some hard of hearing employees
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and we've talked about adding in more of those sorts of actions and things like that ASL stuff yeah yeah and that you can also then utilize because we we think of language often as this thing that comes out of our mouth right but um if you don't have the ability to make those sounds or whether it's from a physical inability to do it or like if I'm I'm underwater right right and and I need to communicate something to you I'm not going to go hey Jared right and things like this a similar sort of thing who says a similar sort of thing can't
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be true in space so if I see you at a distance right and I need to make some sort of motion or gesture that you can see me from from that here can you do I'm gonna call out an emo I want to say God see if you can do it for him can you do uh can you do root three for me no no because I don't know how they have implemented them as a number but um I can give you a whole bunch of them but I think I've already um exceeded my nastiness uh quota on the on the stream Give me the give me the first rude that comes to your mind this one
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we got uh I don't think I can give you the the finger can I um or this one right that came from uh was inspired by a a movie uh the the other one I have to stand up for yeah yeah I don't I don't know if I can make it uh last question for the break uh give me uh uh your top three if if the the clock is to come around you've got the resources you've got the time there's nothing else to do none of the the thousand of the things that are more important have all been done top three emotes you'd add to the game right now if you could oh God uh
00:43:27
well thinking about the areas that we're well no we have that one I was gonna say oh that stinks but we have that one because you know uh I'm drawing a blank here I'm really drawing a blank here I remember we talked salsa dancing salsa dancing salsa dancing maybe a little Merengue right I'd love to do the one we talked about I remember when I I first got here we were talking about um emotes is our two-person emotion that's what I've been trying I've been trying to lead you into that the tandemic right absolutely that's where I want that that's where Star Citizen can take that step Beyond right you you and I can get into the verse and Tango together Tango
00:44:16
together you know I I do merengue and then it triggers you and it automatically by proximity it goes oh you're doing Merengue B I'm doing Merengue a you know because it sends a product high five yeah yeah we've I've never seen an actual effective Hi-Fi I'm not sure there's something's gonna be like there's one game that does it but I haven't seen it but you know where you high five where one person goes up and and the hand you actually connect I mean these two-person tandem emotes that's where I've been slowly trying to or things like for instance when I um they're a game that I worked on also again a long time ago um had things where you would go up to a character and he would help you up say you know up above an area um something like that where you accept a request from me
00:45:05
so I'm like would you like to salsa and you say yes and then we do a a little spin or something like this yeah yeah people are calling out like Portal 2 has a high five and so I'm talking about an in an MMO though I'm talking about where you can have hundreds and hundreds of people it's got a Target it's got to figure out who the right target is amongst a crowd of people not there's one player and there's another player and it automatically knows who your pair is I'm talking about in an MMO hugging no just just a simple ability to hug you know I'm a I'm a sensitive man I like to hug now hugging is actually a tricky thing in first person in third person it's not a problem but because because you just look at it's just two people hugging but if you really think about how the camera
00:45:53
is working right you end up you end up like like if you really wanted to get up close and personal with what someone is thinking there's no better way than to have your camera go straight through their head look forward to that uh we're going to take a we're going to take a quick break here uh mostly because I got to drink drink uh drink a drink of water we're gonna be back in a minute it's still Steve Bender he's coming back uh stay tuned thank you
00:47:35
everything else water all right uh that was a look at uh the snowy vistas of pyro three uh soon to I shouldn't say soon uh one day arriving at the Pyro system uh uh so Steve yes second half of the show your back is our guest in the second half we talk about personal stuff no more work work is done seven Philadelphia Eagles cheesesteaks bourbon old fashioned geeky drinks I had the worst Cheesesteak at Disneyland Paris oh my God like I I
00:48:26
like you know it's it's usually you can count on Disneyland food to be pretty to be pretty good like you go to Epcot and that stuff's all locally sourced in countries in the in the Pavilion or whatever so I got kind of spoiled by that by Epcot and I thought maybe it would be the same it doesn't no I said that was Earl of Sandwich like a whole place you know dedicated to sandwiches and they had they had a Philly cheesestick on there I'm like and I should have known the problem right away when the only cheese option was Swiss yeah no and I was like I like that should have been the warning right there I mean not that Swiss isn't bad switch is good but it's just if that's the only option for a Philly cheesesteak no it has to it's very specific when when I went to a couple places in La that said they had Philly cheesesteaks
00:49:14
and I hadn't found one and I remember going to this uh this truck sort of taco truck thing and um I'm in line you know ready for just another disappointment and I said uh I said he said uh said to the guy came out I said so what do you think about uh how are the Eagles doing this year and I was expecting him to just give me some sort of answer ah you know and he goes he goes you know I hate that Chip Kelly there's there's another word and I was like I was like okay I'm I'm and and so he's we're
00:50:05
talking about this and someone came up behind and and they were like I'm I'm sorry can can we order um I mean why why aren't you guys we're in Los Angeles why are you guys talking about the Rams and he leaned out and he said we're talking about Philly football here you don't like it get lost and I went okay this has got to be a good cheese steak and I said uh he says so what do you want I said give me one with whiz and he's like all right that was it was it yeah that that's the South Philly experience yeah I know exactly the food truck you're talking about uh for for a couple years anyway uh they would come they would they would park right out in front of Riot yep it would park right out in front of Riot we you know it's just a couple blocks walk and then we go there and it always had a line it was always well appreciated uh but yeah but
00:50:54
whiz wit uh onions without for me because I can't I I'm that like the Constitution but uh no they were they were fantastic classic and they had a do you ever try their this is really not what I expected to talk about the first the second half uh do you ever try the the Californian that they had where they put they put fries in the cheese stick oh I know it sounds like a California Cheesesteak but but it was the same thing everything's the same everything's your standard Philly uh but then they put the fries embedded in the cheesecake but like when they cook it not like they cooked it and then they insert a bunch of rice like no from the moment it goes on the grill it's got the fries in there so they're all soft are the are those fries made of avocados or something no it's fine it's potato why they call it Californian no I have not had that I didn't ask the
00:51:43
question I just put it in my face it was delicious it was only a dollar more I'm like a dollar more and you'll put french fries in my my Philly cheesesteak for for any anybody who's who's asking or questioning though a Philly cheesesteak is either provolone or whiz that's it you got Swiss cheese nah I mean you can put whatever you want on it you're just living in a world of wrong but then just get out of Philadelphia you're just you're just sitting steeped in an aura of incorrectness yeah all right so ask this of everybody here on the second in the same question uh how did you get into video games and why of everything you can do in
00:52:31
video games of every discipline that exists did you pick animation I think I need to answer those backwards okay um so I'm gonna drink some more water uh when I was in High School and I was wanting to go to Art School I was going to go I was going to be a graphic designer and I've been accepted to college for that and we went to the Tyler School of art portfolio day and you know showed my portfolio to a bunch of other colleges while we were there and my mom was like we gotta go we gotta go this one there's there's one in in Florida
00:53:20
and I was like Mom I'm just beat I don't want to do anymore she's like come on just one last one so I went there and talked with them and they said well we we had this new thing we're doing called computer animation this would have been 1948 yeah this this this this this would have been the time when everyone was wearing flannel right so smelling I I was playing I was playing Street Fighter 2 with my friend Brian who if he's watching Brian shout out to Brian um but um and I said to him you know if I get accepted at Ringling then I would go into doing they said why don't you come on down
00:54:13
uh we got the Florida I saw two girls walk past me in Florida attire and um yeah that's how I got into animation and video games Brian right right video games um so uh at a school the the year that I graduated school there were a whole bunch of layoffs in the visual effects industry and it was tough to get a job my first job offer that I got and that was that was firm was a company in Portland Oregon called image Builder and they did things like 2D character and special effects for uh
00:55:04
kids games and stuff like that my first game was called Tonka digging rigs and and it had this this thing that you strapped onto your keyboard and you turned your the wheel like this and it pushed the buttons and everything like that yeah yeah that was my that was my first job and then um just bouncing around the industry until uh one day a recruiter called me and said have you ever thought about living in Germany and I was like who hasn't uh no yeah I went out to to accompany uh in Germany they were in Coburg at the time which is like this really small town in in Germany the the birthplace of of
00:55:53
Prince Albert actually um and um uh had the interview they had some after dinner drinks probably one too many after dinner drinks and I took the job and that's how ultimately I ended up sitting here with you and uh you you have you have you since you joined the game in Australia have you stayed in the game industry pretty consistently you know it's not uncommon for people to come in and then go somewhere else for a while and then find their way back I've moonlighted uh freelance some non-games industry stuff from time to time but almost entirely like as as far as like a resume goes yes and I I
00:56:44
started I started with blizzard you know during the World of Warcraft days and then I was like yeah I need something a little more mature than this and I wouldn't taught High School so so yeah so it's not uncommon to come in and go out and like this but yeah so you've been you've been in the industry pretty consistently then for for over two decades at least now it sounds like 1998 1998. man uh and uh I'm not going to ask you if something is prosaic as your favorite or the best or whatever but when you think about your history when you think about the things you've worked on not so I said before Star Citizen and Squadron like this uh and I asked for a highlight something that you're particularly proud of uh what what comes to mind the crisis series Crisis hands down because
00:57:35
there was there's a lot of similarities that I I feel at times that here at cig um with that because um I remember we didn't know what we couldn't do so we just sort of did it right um and it was it was always it was always we want to do this better every the animation in particular and the the the cinematics and the performances in particular on the crisis series get better as you go you know number one Warhead two and three
00:58:26
just the the quality of the animation the things little little details and stuff like that that someone said to me just the other day it was yesterday I think uh was asking me about crisis three and they said that they remember playing the game and when they were switching suit modes and reloading that the actual animation of reloading the weapon was different in every suit mode so you've had this sort of Empower mode he'd slam that right thing for in and in speed mode it was like and in stealth it was pulling it back very quietly pushing it Forward yeah it
00:59:16
was sort of like riding it in a way uh and stuff like that and that that he sort of felt like that that created this experience that really tied him more into the um into the suit mode and and what he was trying to do and that's that just goes Loops right back to what we talked about this morning uh this morning just just like half an hour ago on the first person view and those those hands and how that your hands and what you do convey your character and their emotion in in the first person view that's really cool I know you're I mean it's weird to say that I wanted to say you're absolutely right like you could be wrong picking something you're proud of but I'm like yes it's it's those are those those
01:00:05
reload animations are exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about those little those things that don't seem super obvious they're not in your face but those little interstitial moments that make all the difference between something feeling tangible and and believable and immersive if we can say that that's that I think that's one thing though that it's about when it comes especially in first person uh and we have a lot of work still to do on our first person animations and our first person feel to really dial that down and craft it down to something that feels solid it's not I I like to say that it's not about necessarily what you're doing it's about the feel of it especially in the camera right when the way that the
01:00:53
camera moves if you're if you're a game that that does that sort of thing um the way that the camera moves can really make an effect on how the player perceives what's going on around them with that we're out of time you fulfilled the full hour Brian congratulations did you just call me Brian because you were saying Brian you put it in my you put it in my head you are Steve shout out to to my friend my my friend Brian if you're watching here's one for you this is Water by the way uh uh and special shout out to Boone's Bonin who said it several times during the show this talk is really useless thanks for watching
01:01:41
all right so that was animation director Mr I was gonna say Steve Bender uh there we go I'm Jared Huckabee is that it that's it for this episode of Star Citizen live the animation vocation uh thanks for watching thanks for hanging out uh uh be sure to check out the robinspacecenters.com website and information for for more on you know Xeno thread and and everything else that's going on uh I think Xylo put up put up a thing last night it's time zones are different I don't know exactly when it was but I woke up this morning and it was there so check that out uh yeah and we'll be back next week uh we'll start with inside Star Citizen and Star Citizen live uh as for what's going to be on it uh it's actually in flux right now so uh we had a couple options we'll so stay tuned you'll find out when
01:02:29
you watch it uh take care everybody be nice to each other uh and and and if you haven't gotten enough of me today uh in a couple hours uh Beacon the Belgian uh Star Citizen fan run convention is having a 24-hour live stream that starts at like 6 00 p.m it starts in like an hour or two and uh I'm a guest I'm actually going to be on your on the other side of the thing just answering questions uh uh in like a couple hours uh you can check that out I think it's twitch.tv slash Beacon under events uh I don't know it Belgian Star Citizen fan convention put that into Google and you'll find what you need uh so yeah take care and we'll see you next week everybody 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.