Star Citizen: CitizenCon 2949 - Armor Archetypes

3 December 201900:51:021,337 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Applause] hello hello how's everybody doing like are you guys not tired cuz I'm tired okay yeah we're just gonna get started right away I'm I'm fine but good okay good no we're doing great you're doing aesthetic so I'm just gonna start right away welcome everybody to the character armor archetypes panel we'll be talking about a lot of stuff today and especially gameplay we've been doing a lot of
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things I think for the past couple years we've talked a lot about well this is how the armors made and here's some pretty rare maps and we'll be doing a little bit of that as always but we have a special guest with us today and I think you guys will get a kick out of it so just to go over the speakers today it's myself Jeremiah Lee I'm the lead concept artist at the LA studio club Hyrum games and to my I love you too we also have Richard Tyler he's our lead FPS systems designer some of you guys have already seen in the theaters of war and also for Shane Hustler he's our senior character artist and also locate Hallman our lead character technical artist here with me today and so if you guys haven't read the the brochure or online today's conversation is gonna be a in-depth conversation of how armor will be
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categorized and set up for star citizen topics will cover how gameplay mechanics would play a role for certain armor types and also we'll discuss about how armor are executed from design all the way into in-game implementation what you guys care about so first of all this is kind of a brief run-through of what we're gonna talk because one cover today current state of FPS FPS weapons current state of FPS armor where we like to go in the future with it classes play style climate control and temperature and then we move on from design to character art which is the concept building armor from the concept and the challenges that we have to fit building these things and also last but not least one of the most important part which is the tech art right so we need the tech to make these beautiful things move and so gage we'll be talking a lot
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about the research and development and last but not least the in-game implementation so we're gonna start this off with design and for the first time ever would you please go a lot a loud round of applause for Richard tirer thank you so hey guys so as jeremiah said my name is richard tyra i'm the lead FPS systems designer at cloud imperium and i basically deal with everything that is FPS or character gameplay and all of that kind of thing so what we're going to talk about today so first off we're going to talk about the state of FPS weapons so we've got a variety of unique and like diverse weapons across the verse but first off the first kind of weapons that we added to the pu were kind of like the base
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weaponry in terms of like your shotguns your SMG the sniper rifles basically what you'd expect from a modern-day military shooter now obviously because we're a sci-fi game then we've also got the more exotic weaponry so you know in the last patch we added the salvo which is actually actually freezes the bullet in a firing mode and provides a fragmentation fire then you've got things like the Devastator which they charged mode and then you have a custodian which is more like a charged burst mode so we've got kind of these exotic weapons and also the standard base weapons and together they give us kind of a diverse range of weapons but what we wanted to do when we come to the weapons is we wanted to make sure that each individual weapon has a reason for it to exist you know they are the audio the animations the gameplay they're all
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singing off the same hymn sheet they're all giving you that feel to say okay this is why it exists this is why this weapon why you want to choose this weapon in the pu so one of those things is what we've tried to do and actually what we've been really pushing forward going forward is this manufacturer identity so you know you look at bearing bearing is kind of like what the military would use that's like all about efficiency all about functionality they're the ones that are going to actually do the job then you've got say Gemini they're all about absolute high-velocity weaponry they're about getting the bullet to the target as absolutely fast as possible then you've got say Klaus and Verner which is more specialist in laser technology and then sake a stack which is all about charged weapons and multiple barrels so they're all about alpha strike you know they see a target they absolutely unload everything they've got and then they
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hope they've hit and then you've got the lightning bolt company which is a new company that we're going to be bringing in three eight and they're gonna be all about electron damage so I'll touch on a bit of that in further but you can see that that gives us kind of this unique identity when you're selecting that weapon that manufacturer you know what you're gonna get and then in terms of the art in terms of the gameplay like I said there's a reason for why that weapon exists and then you've got attachments now attachments kind of sit on top they're the things that allow you to either further specialize or diversify you want to put a two to three times holo on a shotgun great that means you've got a bit more range a bit more accuracy you want to put a red dot sight on a sniper rifle sure you can do you might you know you'll lose out in terms of the long range but it allow you to
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use it more short range and that attachments allow you to provide a bit more specialty that we've added the last couple of patches and then when you take into account say a variety of damage types that we have in terms of the physical weaponry in terms of ballistics and we've got energy distortion and chemical and they're all kind of broken down again so energy has the laser weaponry so lasers really more a quick quick firing but lower damaging links a to ballistics plasma is gonna have damage over time effect and leave behind a damage so that you know it can be area of a denial then you've got so electron damage which is the lightning bolt company specialist that's going to provide electromagnetic damage and also reach stun damage which will tie into the Mele system that we're bringing live and then you've got say tachyon which is going to be obviously faster than light
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and then you're looking at the more really specialists in terms of distortion which is obviously really relevant more relevant for ships but we're actually as you'll see throughout this talk it'll become more relevant for FPS as well and then you've got the chemical which will be adding the gamma as a future edition but also that includes things like more environmental damage as well so when you look at the weapons and the reason why I wanted to give you an idea of the weapons is kind of where we're going with the armor so in terms of the armor we really have only got the the light medium and heavy armor classes you know they have what you'd expect from a light medium heavy you know the heavy the really big heavy guys got the highest damage mitigation but he's the slowest and then you've got the light guy who's more agile but can't take as much damage so other than that there's no real difference between the
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manufacturer you know really when you look at heavy once you've decided that you're like okay which one looks the nicest you know and really we want to give you more choice we want to make you know we want to have that ability for you to go actually this armor has Wayne all these differences that I really like compared to this armor so there's no real difference at the moment but 3:7 was a step in the right direction so first off we added the personal commodity in the tree now it's a commodity the fact that's kind of only really temporary what we really want is a full item inventory and that will be working on coming up so that means that you'll be able to put in you know ammo magazines or grenades or small weaponry you want to put a pistol in there or smaller some Jean and the size of your backpack in terms of the physical eyes inventory
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that will all be represented going forward so that's something that is kind of the first toe in the water shall we say for personal commodity inventory and then we also did a rebalancing on the stanley usage so the stamina usage was two crushed so again there wasn't really a main difference in terms of the gameplay in terms of the light medium or heavy so you know when you're looking at say a 50 second sprint in light now is only a 30 second sprint and heavy and when you're playing safe it's a war or whether you're playing you know you're running in combat that's a big difference 20 seconds might be the difference between you surviving and not surviving but really that's just the foundation so you know if you compare it to weapons you know it's not really comparable so where do we want to go so I want you to go and look at an armor and look at it like you're buying a new ship and we
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want armor to be almost like your own personal ship when you're walking around the verse we want absolute meaningful differences between that light medium and heavy armor class and so where does that start first off it starts off by giving it all power so you can have different power ratings then we have different signatures in terms of e/m in terms of IR that tie into FPS stealth then you've got inventory now inventory is like you said it's going you know you've got a physicalized backpack but it goes more than that that backpack is going to be modular you'll be able to attach different sizes of backpack and they will only go on two different different pieces of armor so you'll have to make meaningful choices and then you've got life support which you know how much oxygen can I carry what's the climate control in this system what temperature can it survive and temperatures something I'll be going on again further on but again then you
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look at say for example the next layer is its subcomponents now as I took through the weapons you look at attachment allows you to further specialize or further diversify that's what sub components are gonna be you want a you know heavy armor on but you want to add more armor plating or you want you know emission dampeners or you want further utility and gadgets that we release in the future you know that's where sub components come in but really that's just the armor classes themselves that's the light medium and heavy armor classes and that's kind of like just the base foundation kind of how I was saying in the weapons you know you've got your base classes now we want where's the exotic gameplay so that's when we're looking at say the classes and playstyles so we want to support the player careers so in the pu you know you want to be a minor you want to be a
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bounty hunter you want to be a fighter you want to be an explorer we want to support those on the ship side but we also want to support them on the FPS side you know we want you to choose equipment on the FPS that ties into what you're flying that ties into the play style and how you want to play in the pu because the p use not an average game it's a sandbox it's star citizen it's what you make it so we want the equipment to tie into that and so when you're looking at say player choice what we did is we broke it down in between combat and utilitarian and that's where we kind of broke down and matrix so you can see this is kind of like all of the armors kind of in the PU at the moment or all like scattered around but really what I want you to take from this screen is these four kind of pillars we've got
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the combat fighter the combat specialist the utilitarian adventurer and the utilitarian support now when you look at those four pillars you might be saying well what do they do you know how do they tie in so if you're looking at say combat fighters that would have light medium and heavy is in there but that's the armor that you want if you're going into combat that's the one that is the absolute specialist that's what with the military would use it's got the most damage mitigation it's got the most item ports for magazines it's the most throw ball so the grenades it's all about absolute combat powerhouse and then you look at say the combat specialist well that's when you're coming into where you want more niche more special forces more special ops now they're still good at combat but they might have they're giving up some of their combat effectiveness to provide more utility so if you want to be a
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bounty hunter and you want the absolute best in class radar for finding people to track down your target to take them in then maybe you'll pick the heavy combat specialist and so and then you look on the other side of the road the you looking at say the utilitarian now utilitarian adventurer that's kind of like best-in-class climate control so if you're going into these harsh environments that's extreme cold extreme heat or you're going into these you know really where it's got acid rain that's when you want this this pillar and this pillar also includes where it's got like best-in-class inventory so if you're going down mining and you you know you won't say I want to do one trip I want to get everything and while I'm there you know you're still going to be combat worthy you're still going to be able to compete in combat but you're giving up some things to get other benefits and
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then the utilitarian support is that's worth more about consumer so when we start doing healing gameplay in terms of medic game for healing your part party providing more support and giving you these unique roles when you're playing and so that you can actually hone down in terms of what you want and so when you actually add all that together and then you're looking at say the damage types that we've already talked about in the weapons well everything we add to the game needs a counter because otherwise what's the point so when you're looking at say the physical energy distortion and chemical there needs to be a counteract so you know we're going to need armor that has different resistances to provide different encounters so if you want the combat armor maybe that's best in class in terms of physical but maybe in terms of the utilitarian adventurer that's best in class in terms of energy damage
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or chemical because you're going into these harsh environments and so what we want to do is we want to have these meaningful choices where you're going to these you know going to buy armor and you're having the same decision-making going okay should I get should I get that one well that gives me all this stuff and okay maybe I'll get that one and then you go care maybe I'm gonna get both but then in the world of physicalized imagery you're like well I can't just get onto the planet and have twenty armors you know you're gonna have to make real decisions and that's where it really ties in to the gameplay but before I go on too long I'll pass over to my esteemed colleague Jeremiah and he will continue on some of the visuals thank you so now that we heard that design so what the character team has
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done was we've been in close contact with design and we were like okay we have a blood ton of armor right we need to place them somewhere and as you guys have seen in the matrix there was a lot on the combat size what we started doing was if you look in the next slide we took existing armors and we categorize them into archetypes right and so instead of having a light medium heavy just for combat if you look to the very left you can see that it's the heavy marine that we all have been running around in for a couple years now but then what the cost of team have done was I think we showed this in a sneak peak before we started designing armor that serve a specific purpose and visually communicate that gameplay so no longer are we designing cool-looking armor now we want to make armor that a stealth person would wear now we want to make
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concept armor that a bounty hunter with a specific class would wear and so this is kind of military stuff and I know we've seen a lot of shooty shooty stuff but I want to move on to the next important thing which excites me is the utilitarian play style so these are some new concepts that we haven't shown yet is the first time you guys are seeing some of these if you look to the very left is something a utilitarian support class so as you can see in the back it's got a little bit of backpacks so we have more consumables more utility slots so these you would expect to see these guys in battle but then I would probably see them behind supporting that your teammates right so you have your assault guy running around and this guy will be like you need some grenades brew or like you know you got you need some magazines bro but like we need we wanted to diversify the play style so no longer
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will you in the future be wearing I want to wear ceadeus armor because it looks cool it'll be more of like for this specific situation I want to wear the best armor right so we want to move in the direction of gameplay and not just pretty stuff but if we go to the next two images which is something like sex excited me the most is the utilitarian adventure style right so we saw the carrot commercial today and what the concept team the character what we really want to do was really sell that exploration right like what would you wear if you're going to a random system and you don't know what the hazards are you do a reading oh it's really hot in there you'd pick one of these bad boys up right you wouldn't wear a CVS heavy marine armor and be like alright we're going in right you would wear the suit that's perfect for
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that certain type of environment and so if you look in the middle the concept for this was for a heavy exploration kind of a cold weather cold resistance type of suit and if you look to the very right we did a concept that was based off of that but a little bit mixing on to the black metallic armors has got a little bit more ballistic resistance so even amongst even in the pillars that rich was talking about there will be some slight variance as well so we can try to cater to multiple situations but speaking of utilitarian adventure as we kind of teased in the very beginning there is gameplay for climate control and temperature and I'm going to toss it back to my esteemed colleague Richard tire
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so as Jeremiah touched on you know temperature the thing and really this is the beginning of the player status system this is the beginning of survival in the pu so that you know you're not just going to these planets and going yeah great I'm just gonna take everything and just gonna put whatever armor on and do whatever I want this is where you're going okay and go into a harsh climate like I've gone on an Arctic expedition and I'd have to actually choose the correct a Parral so before I get into temperature in detail the first thing I want to introduce is basically how which has been live for a long time it's the room system now the room system is basically a way for us to basically mark up areas and it's kind of like an environment container it allows us to add what temperature it is it allows us to add the humidity it allows
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us to say okay is it breathable and this kind of what it does it kind of contains the environment to say what is the game play within this space from a actor status point or player status point of view and so the thing that we take from it is what's called the apparent temperature now the apparent temperature is you might not have heard of that terminology but you probably know what it is if you've ever heard of them you know weatherman or watch The Weather Channel II go okay it's 10 degrees outside but it feels like 5 that's basically apparent temperature it's an amalgamation of atmospheric temperature wind speed and in humidity and in star citizen style we take all of those in and we feed it in to create what is the correct apparent temperature so if it's really windy and it's really cold it's going to be really cold and if it's
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really humid and really hot it's going to be extremely hot and so what we do is that we we have this apparent temperature and we basically take that out of the room system and we go okay that's the value that we on the player side have to play with and we go okay well what do we do is that well first off we say what's the the minimum and maximum threshold that somebody can survive in and that's what we call say an operating window so that operating window takes into account this range that says okay if you're within this range in that apparent temperature then great you don't have to do anything you can survive indefinitely and that's fine but if you're not then bad things will start to happen but we didn't just want to go okay this is the operating temperature you know gosh we wanted to take into account well actually the human body is
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it's all split up into lots of different scenarios and so you know the body has a higher surface area and you know it has a high density of blood vessels underneath the skin and you need the heads got a high density of that so in terms of in terms of heat loss or heat gain these different body types in terms of or should I say these different areas on the body lose and gain heat at different rates so if you've got something on your you know your torso that's gonna give you a greater benefit then say for example if you just put gloves on and so that's when we've got some examples here so if you've got say the guy on the Left who's basically just you know naked here's his threshold it's like okay if it's minimum four degrees maximum thirty five degrees you know what he'd be okay but then you see the guy in the second
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right he's put ease put basically if a jumper on a coat and that coat is basically giving him it's pushing that threshold down so that threshold now as you can see is minus five to twenty eight but because that's such a large surface area on the body that's actually giving him a greater benefit than if he'd just put on shoes or a hat and then you can see the guy in the middle he's got full clothes on so he's got shoes he's got trousers he's got a hat and gloves and all of that is basically working towards saying okay this is the operating temperature so when you actually go into these environments and your HUD is gonna say okay or when you're looking at the starmap say okay what is the temperature in these planets is it days at night where am I going you're gonna you have to choose which kind of clothing that you want to go for and when you look at armor it's the same thing because in the PU you know you can
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put on a mixture of different armor types so you're not just we can't just treat armor as a singular individual item it has to be treated that you can mix and match and then we look at the furthest on the right which is basically a full armor now a full sealed armor is basically evade a room in an hour itself so if you think of like your car and you're driving around and you've got the heater on it's keeping you nice and warm and if that was in within the operating window of that that apparent temperature that your car is then great it would be fine but then if you broke down then basically the apparent temperature of outside would start to equalize with the temperature on the inside and you start to get cold and over time that temperature would be equalized and that's basically how a sealed armor would work so as a touchdown when we have armor in terms of a powered
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essentially if you're outside of its operating window or from what it's been designed what the manufacturers chosen to design it for then it will start to fail and that's when that room system inside will start to equalize and so it they are when you have a sealed suit it kind of gives you a buffer and so when you look at what happens inside the operating window what kind of nothing happens because you're good but what happens when it's outside the operating window and how does it affect the gameplay other than you being you know having to be more prepared well that's when we start to come in in terms of the actor status or player status in terms of actually the status effects that your characters are gonna undergo so if you start to get really really cold or you start to get really really hot then you Scott you're gonna start to suffer hypothermia or hyperthermia and you know Wiggly that
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will it will come negative effects so you'll start to you know in hypothermia you'll start to get muffled audio the screen will start to white out as you start to blow and become more sensitive to the light as you're basically body is starting to shut down frost will start to come on to the visor so to say okay it's getting really cold inside now you'll start to physically shiver so when you're shooting you know you you know the bullet is coming from the barrel you know it's gonna affect your rain you know your heart rates gonna raise so it's gonna affect your stamina and when you tie all this together that's what creates an actual status on the player and so really hypothermia and hypothermia at just the beginning in terms of the statuses but there's so many more that we're going to be adding in terms of eating and drinking whether you starve you know whether you starving whether you're gonna be dehydrated whether you gonna
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become tired and all of those things that are going to be coming are gonna tie together to allow you to have meaningful reasons for why you choose your equipment and talking about choosing equipment then that's when we come into specialists cold and heat gear and when you're looking at specialist cold gear there's nothing better than the caldera sea [Music] big shoutouts to Daniel co-founding for
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designing the Institute we have and thank goodness all this for wearing the suit thanks Daniel more fans than wearing the suit for around 10 hours today he was backstage for probably an hour waiting to come on so how long's beneift okay all right thank you thank you so that was the caldera suit and this will be shown in this isn't condemn oh and so I want to briefly go over kind of like what the process was what how we implemented the design that we spoke about earlier into the suit in particular so no armor will go without
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going through concept and that's where I work kind of this is kind of like my expertise I would say so for the caldera suit in general the brief that we were received was just to make sure that this suit was heroic in appearance and had to have non-combat focused armor and also had to look like it had enough insulation and something that can kind of take a punch because we want to look heroic but mainly focusing on withstanding cold hazardous cold environments Jesus English I can't speak today and so that was a brief that we were given so the concept we had our concept artist Michael Broussard he did a bunch of sketches for us with multiple different color passes and the cool thing about this suit compared to our
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previous armor sets if you look very closely in the cross plate itself and also the image on your screen is we tried the diving bell helmet the giant astronaut helmet that we have never seen a star citizen right most of our helmets are really snug to the face or we've got a little bit of a fishbowl but we really wanted that giant diving bell going to like the most extreme hazardous environments type of suit and so we also buffed up the silhouette and because we wanted to look very heroic and then we we got this from multiple iterations and we found the colors and found the the type of armor that we wanted and we pushed it down which caused actually a lot of challenges for yeah many many challenges to finish any challenges I I caused a lot of problems for the next
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table below yeah which they will discuss but then Shane Hester was actually the character Cena character artists who built this model and is in the game and so he'll briefly go over the mess that I have created yeah Thank You Jeremiah oh you're welcome everyone I'm Shane has their senior characters at CI G so today I'm going to be talking about character art and the process it kind of took to bring the Caldera suit to life from concept all the way to a fleshed out character in game like Jeremiah was saying when it comes to concept art the goal is to kind of sell an idea for a suit to be approved and then moved on into character art and you know with character or concept art what you really
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want is like to sell the idea you want a big heroic character to kind of give you a good feel for the suit but also sell the idea of an aesthetic that you know feels good and looks badass but with concept art you know in order to make it look good you have very heroic stylized proportions so that kind of includes something that might be scaled up like eight heads tall and maybe maybe for the caldera suit like eight heads wide so he's really big if I want to gauge with a character that I kind of create to try to match a concept as realistic and close as possible usually the goal of character art is to mimic and design a character to almost reflect concept art one to one but when it comes to game art we kind of have to follow these rules of
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design and function to make a more realistic and anatomical proportion of a character so if I went to gauge with a character that was eight feet tall super broad shoulders gage would look at me and be like please no looks great but uh shame this guy is eight feet eight feet tall and the character in our games more close to six I said I was sorry Shay yeah but those are some of the challenges like with concept art and making characters right so when we receive concept we want to like understand the design and you know why it looks so cool and how we can carry and translate these ideas all the way to the game so before starting and spending tons of time on trying to create characters for the game I have to talk to gage engage and I have to have a more realistic approach on the concept
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because this guy has to be able to move around as if he was wearing any other suit in the game because we have one male base for our game they all wear the same or a different armor but have to move away or move around in the same way that you would in a bathing suit to a full piece of armor like the caldera suit essentially translating the beautiful things that Jeremiah draws up to work in the game so some of the things that help with that because a lot of times with concept art you'll get really rough quick sketches almost just get an idea across on how the the reference where the concept art will look and then translate that into 3d luckily Michael Bussard rendered out this beautiful concept art for us to kind of give us details down to like the smallest bolt on the suit so it was really nice too as far as reference goes if you're given a quick sketch you kind
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of have to garrett gather inspiration and references to kind of fill in the gaps of how suits kind of are built together almost concept in later on in like the 3d character up phase to kind of almost design a little bit further past concept so one of the things I'd like to do as far as building out these really complex suits is almost start from like a foundation or a base of art where you can kind of start from because as far as like rendered concepts go it's always a bad idea even in traditional drawing to render right off the bat and try to get into details before you kind of get an understanding of how things are broken up proportion form shape language these are all things that make more sense when you kind of start from the first read so you know primary form secondary forms
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and like most of most of all like most important is like the silhouette or the read of a character so some of the things that kind of help with that are kind of identifying shapes of the suit that kind of help identify the movement and mobility of the suit because after talking to tech art we kind of get ideas of okay this guy's in the full suit of you know very hard surface design but he has to be able to rotate his body have a lot of movement around the shoulders and arms twist bends all that great stuff that allows you to traverse and navigate through the world of star citizen so breaking that up in smaller pieces always kind of helps the idea and kind of like the start of what we get into which is the high poly phase so what high poly is for 3d especially in character for the calderas suit is digital sculpting almost as if you would do it in clay it's the same foundation
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same techniques as you would with real clay but this is like the digital form of that and the best way to take something that's from concept art that's very stylized and you know heroic is to kind of bring it down to what we have in the game which is our male base mesh so taking that body duplicating it allows us to kind of extract information build something that's more realistic and proportional to something that's closer to like an in-game character we still have to like I said before like carry the design the concept through something more realistic but the same time bring as much out of the heroic nature of the concept and put it into the game so this kind of helps us match for the joints are like shoulder pads elbows wrists get the anatomy of the suit down but also
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fit it within the scale that can work in the game and once we have something that's sculpted out a little rough this is definitely not a phase where we're trying to get to an end point that allows us to translate something into 3d or a very low poly form of 3d just to get a good idea of base form and break up from but from that we kind of rebuild this stage usually after high poly we try to reach apologize it to kind of give it a more machine built look because with hard surface sci-fi always looks great because everything is clean forms flow with each other they're lined they look machine-made so with rebuilding the high poly we want to retouch eyes that which is a form of you know 3d modeling so essentially the
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foundation of modeling is polygamy aligned and when we have the high poly mesh the best way to clean that up and refine it into something that's more hard surface and sci-fi is to RIT apologize it so once we have our high poly base it's everything that's going to drive the detail into the game but one of the best ways to translate that like I was saying previously is reach apology so we go through a process of decimation and what does decimation is is it takes the surface detail of a mesh and as the surface flattens out the detail is kind of removed so we have you know assets there are millions of polygons you know a asset like this or a little piece can go from a million
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polygons up to five million something that's a little bigger like a torso you can go from five million to 12 million so in order to actually go from a robust program like ZBrush which were digitally sculpting we have to decimate it get down to something more reasonable like in the thousands seven 15k and greets apologize it in Maya and the tool we do that or use that in Maya with is a Quadra so what Quadra allows us to do is place points on the surface using the decimated mesh rebuild it to something that's more optimized and game friendly yeah and so like I was saying before with the high poly things have to be clean they have to almost appeal to be you know hand or machine made so a little bit sorry reat apologizing is
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usually a very you know labor-intensive task rebuilding something from scratch is like very time consuming but the alternative is to kind of go back to our high poly stage which is made up of subdivision levels at the lowest subdivision level we kind of have over base which would kind of translate into something more low poly something that would almost go into the game and with subdividing that we can take it up to something from 13,000 polygons is something that's more around you know 12 minutes to get the detail but to save the time on the game asset what we can do with the high poly is drop it down to the lowest form which is sub d1 so instead of starting from scratch we can kind of start from a point where it's almost 70 to 80% done and kind of save time and then also you know speed up the
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process for something that's you know production friendly so once the low poly is done has great form it matches like the concepts as close as possible at this stage we kind of want to flatten everything out it's almost similar to taxidermy you have a mesh but you want to be able to cut it up lay it out flat and project textures and what texture your Maps allow us to do is assign you know where dirt immune occlusion and normal Maps so what normal Maps do is kind of it takes the surface and how the light hits it and kind of breaks up the form but it also allows like the definition of the high poly to really show through with the blend Maps carries
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through the color which is the materials of each asset it's almost like an ID map so you have red green and blue each color is gonna assign a new material on it to kind of break up the form and anatomy of the the material where it go so what does that look like in the game so we started with the base mesh which is our low poly and as you can see the normal map will kind of drive the form of the asset on top of that you have the ambient occlusion which kind of creates a self shadowing of the effect the blend map will add actually materials on it and the decals past that will kind of show the different details of that effect and in the game this is what you kind of
00:38:23
see at the end of it with all the components kind of put together and so that's kind of the idea of how you create an asset in the game and I'll pass it over to gage to bring the character to life Thank You Shane so first two I want to think on the team back home especially chris van comprar know who set up the asset on the tech art side they did some amazing work here and they were the ones who actually handled most of the problem-solving that worked with Shane and Jeremiah so great job on them so one of the oh yeah definitely applause for the team so one of the key elements of that armor is the
00:39:16
massive diving Bell helmet and this actually gave us some great opportunities to implement some new tech and features that we wanted to bring to the community for a long time let's take a look at those now an easy feature that can be good and bad is decoupling the helmet now there's a couple ways we can do this the first is rather simple now normally the head or the helmets are as always locked to the head now like Jeremiah pointed out earlier they're super snug they're pretty tight and they kind of always follow you around you don't really get to see much of them but we want to do couple that and give you that more diving bell experience which we got to do with this new armor so what we do is we spread the influence across multiple joints normally it's always on the head joint this time we were able to
00:40:03
spread it across the spine the neck as you can see here you can see the influence values actually 60% to the head which kind of allows you to sort of look around inside this helmet that you're wearing and it gives a pretty interesting first-person experience and it also allows for some extra animation touches too we get some helmet wobble you know just some extra realistic feel but this also brings problems so let's check out a video of kind of what this looks like now you can look around the helmet but this is a little bit too much because it's animating right now as if there were no limitations at all so you're kind of moving as if you have no helmet on like you had to make it head or a tight helmet now we've got to fix that and how do we do this we do it with view limitations and aim limitations now view limitations are the isolated movement of
00:40:53
your head while you're aiming in a certain direction this is what we call free look mode and allows you to move without changing your aim now let's say you're kind of pointing your gun down your sight you want to look to the left look to the right you don't want to like move away from your target that's free look and we use view limitations to sort of limit that slightly to prevent you from turning around too much in this helmet because you are slightly restricted and we don't want to break the immersion there of being this helmet the second is a limitation now these are the actual like literally the aim directions you're moving then and we limit this which gives the effect that you see in this video and it prevents you from clipping fully through your torso and this is kind of the effect of having incredibly bulky armors so while you do get all these advantages there are slight mobility restrictions to sort of balance this out so you're not too overpowered it's not terrible and it kind of gives you a realistic feel so
00:41:41
you know it's actually somewhat of a benefit it's kind of nice now the next thing I want to talk to you about is a feature that we've actually been wanting to bring to you guys for a really long time we teased it years back with the legendary helmet flip but that was originally only for us 42 and then we wanted to create parody with the two systems in the pu by just giving you a seamless experience so sorry it is the helmet equip and unequipped but this brings problems that we are going to solve in a bit and but first I want to show you actually situations that you run into in other games modeled by the beautiful Jeremiah here let's take a look now typically in the engine when you equip an item it will pop under you the graphics are
00:42:35
incredible here that's amazing yeah really good stuff really great job Jeremiah that's what we want that's what we want we want to give you guys that star series so yeah typically these things just pop onto the player and normally this is fine the gameplay aspect is totally fine here but we want to give you you know something better in the best damn space sim ever it's got a feel like it's your helmet right so let's take a look at how we do this oh thank god that's over we can leave a loop in for a while we can go back okay so let's take a look at what I'm talking about here so on this one let's just are from the beginning real quick now like I said showing off the visor effects here it was great work by the VFX team it's kind of nice to get that in but let's go
00:43:23
ahead and get some cover so we can dry off and check out these helmets now right now I'm wearing the light under suit and you can see some other helmets we have a variety in the universe so let's go ahead and pop off this guy take a look and this is just the Odyssey helmet classic and these are some of the new options available to you once you unequip your helmets now we want the helmet to be a more personal experience you want to be able to feel it you wanna be able to place it you wanna be able to throw it around and that's exactly what I'm about to do because I want a new helmet Oh get that out here now the caldera home in front of me I actually cannot equip this because I don't have the bespoke armor that's required to
00:44:10
maintain it so let's go ahead and take and inspect to look real quick he's okay folks yeah so because I can't wear that one let's take a look at a classic over here this one's more my style I want to try out the s42 helmet kind of reminds me of old man you know I like to roleplay a little bit so let's go ahead and put this on take another look at it now a lot the artists especially Shane puts a lot of work into these helmets so you want to be able to inspect them you wanna be able to look around inside them kind of see the detail we put in there for you it's a completely immersive first and third experience so you know even though you see it on the outside you can see it on the inside it's great stuff I'm gonna take this little guy with me got to have a buddy and now
00:45:01
let's take a look so what just happened was I unequipped a helmet from my loadout physicalized it into the verse tossed it aside with persistence and then equipped another helmet that had persistence onto my characters loadout and this is not my helmet as a variety of things you can do it's tough so let's see how we did this now this the system that you're kind of seeing is something we call a state machine or helmet States now what exactly is a state a state can be seen as a list of gameplay options available to you within a certain context now when you play the game you're actually constantly flowing through States whether you realize it or not like for
00:45:49
example I am right now in a sitting state the options available to me are maybe pointed things I cannot aggressively at my co-workers and click this button right here but if I stand up I have a few more states available to me and that's basically what the helmet is going through in this state machine oh and in the example here you can kind of see the mesh format changes that are happening during these state transitions on the Left we have the skin mesh this is the deformable mesh that the tech art is set up it'll move with animation it'll move with your character and this is kind of the main state that you'll almost always see your helmet in it gives you your UI everything's equipped here and then on the right we have the CGF static mesh this is a cheaper mesh for the game and this is what you'll see physicalized in the world it comes with a proxy you can throw it around you could shoot it you
00:46:36
can do whatever you want to it and these are kind of like the two opposite States you'll most often see the helmet in or sorry meshes that you'll see for the helmet and actually what you can see here is that during the removal there is a seamless transition happening between these two meshes to give you kind of that seamless effect now let's take a closer look yeah going through helmet clips RIA clips so state machine flow there's a lot of states right here you can see kind of the two opposite states the settled and the equipped state and then each before they can go to another state have a list of transitions that will bring them to the next day and with these transitions we've animated them essentially that gives you kind of this first-person unified first and third feel that we've added to the verse now even more States so the helmet has all
00:47:27
these available to it carried inspecting settled drops and what's interesting about the dropped and settled while they seem very similar and using the same geometry the dropped is the settled version except actively simulating in the world so let's say you throw something to the ground it is in the drop state because it is actively kind of tumbling trying to find its place to rest and then once it's found its resting state it will then go into the settled state and it gives you even further options that will accompany the animations for like kind of this seamless pickup animation and as you can see in the list - once it's dropped if it actually falls in space it may eternally be in the drop state because it's just kind of floating around you know and you may see this thing just tumbling around you can hit it with your ship and all kinds of things very fun now with these states the visual aspect
00:48:21
of them are you could consider them sub geometries the default geometry you see here is the settled state this is the geometry you see in the world is the helmet that kind of represents just this resting helmet in the world yeah but let's say you want to pick up that helmet you want it to be your helmet or let's say old man wants to pick up this helmet or you know you're playing a female you're playing a male whatever you're playing it's all one unified item and you want to pick up this helmet as soon as you pick it up it goes and gets a tag that is called the held entity and it then enters one of these sub geometry paths that becomes your helmet now so for as long as you're holding it it will be your geometry you can hold it toss it put it on and it's all these same shape so it'll give you that kind of like seamless experience which is really nice and we worked really hard to kind of
00:49:08
work all this out to give you this really smooth system let's go a little bit deeper into this now the male geometry is going to be the skin mesh I'm sorry the head geometry is going to be the skin mesh and then once you take it off put it into your carried State interacting state it'll become a held entity and then there's a further sub geometry that could be considered the display geometry now let's say you want to put it on a rack or a display shelf it may have a custom version and of course you wanted to be your version or the version of that type of character you're playing as and it will then go to that geometry and now looking ahead what do we kind of want to add to this let's go ahead and play that so for the system we want to improve the hand placements we want to improve that you by boot ups
00:49:55
we want smoother interactions and animations and actually a lot of this is already underway and in our current builds we just didn't get it in time for this presentation but these are all well coming along and we're really excited to show it to you and we also want first-person improvements like our designer rich here he'll be improving the first-person experience their aim limitations these are all work in progress things that will keep improving and based on user feedback internal feedback see our feedback all kinds of things and then back to my esteemed colleague Jeremiah also that is it for the character archetype thank you so much for coming before we officially end the panel we actually I'd to give a special thanks to the team not just in Los Angeles but also in the UK and also Germany we have
00:50:42
a list of teams it's not just the three four people here but it's an entire team it's kind of a joint effort and so we've listed those names so if you can I have a round of applause for all these names listed over here who would make applause yeah

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