Star Citizen Live: The Ships of Gavin Rothery

10 July 202000:56:291,766 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hello everybody welcome to another episode of st star citizen live i almost forgot the name of the show that time uh uh the ships of gavin rothery i'm your host jared huckabee now uh very rarely very occasionally we like to change up the format and do something unique and today we are doing something that we haven't we've only done twice before uh we are going to introduce the community to one of our most prolific concept artists for star citizen and basically meet him uh get a sense of who he is and how he works and then go and then cover the breadth of his contribution to star citizen this far we've done this twice before most recently with uh our favorite uh sarah mccullough as she took us through all the ships that she's designed for star citizen and then back in 2018
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we did it uh uh with with uh the legendary uh jim martin uh from star uh from star trek and starship troopers who who has contributed nine ships uh to the star citizen pantheon of spaceships but but today we've got somebody who's rocking at last count i think 14 ships for star citizen so let's go ahead and meet our our panel here uh gav welcome to star citizen live hello thanks for having me uh this is your very first uh this is your very first video for us for star citizen uh uh thank you for taking the time to join us today um let's uh tell us a little bit about who you are and and what you do for star citizen well my name is gavin rothery and i'm
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originally a concept artist i have done some work in the film industry too you might know me from designing film moon in 2009 and i've been working with cig as a freelancer since when was that now six years maybe over six years um working with paul jones creating ships for the verse and paul jones uh you probably need no introduction but we're going to do it anyway because every show is somebody's first show who are you and what do you do for star citizen hi my name is paul jones i am an art director here at cig and basically i work with the concept team or some of the concept team including gav and basically take care of spaceship concepts uh fps concepts weapons that is
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and spaceship weapons so yeah basically the the look of everything spaceship related starts with starts with you and those who work uh with you yeah it does yeah okay so uh so gav since this is the first time the star citizen community is meeting you uh tell us a little bit more about yourself how did you how did you get started as a concept artist well originally i was a i was wanting to be a comic artist so my background is in illustration and graphic design so that was my degree graphic design specializing in illustration and what happened was i originally wanted to be a comic artist and i grew up reading 2018 dread road trooper all that stuff and i graduated in 1996 and around that period the comic industry was really
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starting to kind of um scale itself back because sony launched playstation and games were like cool again and he had things like wipeout and stuff and you know games just got really cool and next year and everything moves to 3d um you know your super nintendo starts look a bit dusty and yeah the game industry was a very natural place for me to to sort of roll into because all of the skills that i've learned wanting to draw for 2008 were super applicable to the games industry all the design skills all that stuff was it fit really well with the games industry so i kind of um fell into it basically um and sort of never left it really i've been in the games industry yes since 96. so i've worked on all kinds of things i've been around the block a little bit and you know right now where i'm in my career right now
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star citizens like when i look back it kind of inevitably kind of pointed me in that direction because it's like all my kind of favorite things combining so i feel very fortunate i think i've got very lucky along the way but yeah this big job basically uh and maybe there's a question for for you and paul here how did you get your start with star citizen how did that come about that's a good question yeah yeah i think it was wasn't it yeah you were out of the blue i think you were with the la office wasn't it i think it was i was sat home with a pregnant wife about to make a child going oh my god i've got to get my life together yeah i've been working i've been working in the advertising industry for a few years
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after moon i spent three years in an ad agency and then i left that to get back to my where my heart was which was science fiction and i wasn't exactly sure what i was going to do and honestly um star citizen just kind of appeared like destiny manifest it was it was awesome what was it was it was it ship components and then was there something no that was that it was the gladius the first thing it was was the gladius was it yeah we started straightening with the ship well let's jump into it we've only got we've only got an hour with you today uh you started with the gladius so uh tell us the story of working on the glass and i understand you may you might have some imagery to share i do yeah i'm just gonna do a share screen then i'll show you a few bits and pieces so yeah this was the first ship that i did um working together with mr jones so what you see on your screen now is like one of the earliest attempts at
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what a gladius might be so obviously it looks a bit kind of hacky looking at it now i got got to say as well this is what six seven years old paul yeah this is this is pre-metric pre-pre pre-everything really i mean when we started yeah we had we had none of that stuff nailed down did we it was a wild west it was just figure it out as we go forward pre pre pre-knowledge we were just discussing where we was just like i i thought i knew spaceships because i'd built some previously but i really knew nothing about spaceship design at all so it was a real for me it was a real trial by fire but chris was just like yeah you need a you need a ship for squadron like just go just get one built like a you know like a i think it was okay was it a medium fighter light fighter the gladius uh gab we're only getting half the uh
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image right now okay sorry about that is that better there you go there we go okay cool yeah so you see it quite quickly starts to get refined as we're working together and it you can see even right back at the beginning is the gladius you know it had a certain manifest kind of destiny right from the beginning but you can see the you know you can see the shape coming together quite quickly i think one of the things i always loved about working with you paul particularly is that whenever we get our teeth into something we we get a lot of progress quite quickly it feels like like we move when we work and i always really appreciate that this is where we are yeah i mean i think we have a we have a good uh we have a good understanding now basically so it's like a support system yeah you know gaff does a lot you know obviously gaff does most of the heavy lifting
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and i and i sort of come in and just sort of judge it along in places i think it's a little more than that but you know it's a little more than that this whole thing was um pre-concept piece too so when we were doing this we weren't doing promo pieces it was just to get a look at the ship so my deliverable i mean it still is but back then my deliverable was these two images this one and this one to get a look at the ship these look so bad and old now um i gotta apologize i feel like i've grown a lot over the last six years it's just the where isn't it we don't do well like that anymore no i'd deliver this and also the 3d concept mesh for the build team so they had a because all this comes from a 3d model um but this is back before we did promo pieces right so this is just let me just see this yeah no i mean i took this piece and um
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i'm because there was a point that we did need to do some promo for it and but i think we did i did like two two images it was almost like a sort of old um like like war piece you know like a collectible you'd find on a desk and it would be worn it's got a coffee stain on it and stuff like that um i think that was probably the probably the start of the promo i actually have that i just found that if you want to have a little quick cheap that was that was yeah that was a studio's first ship i mean that you know that ship had a lot of like once it got built once it got put into production that had like a lot of love there was at least it was either six to nine months on that ship right well i think this is one of the things about it that bugs me too the end result in the game came out so beautifully that i don't feel like my concept top
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shows that off so you know i'd love to be able to go yeah look i've got my gladius work it's so awesome and i've just got a couple of really cool scrappy little images to show and the end ship's like beautiful and the build team finished with it was gorgeous and yeah now from the from the gladius you moved on to another big fan favorite uh the f8 lightning so so the the gladius was aegis and now you've got to move to the f8 lightning which is a whole different manufacturer in anvil so what are your recollections about the development the early development of the f8 at this point that was i'll just show you a couple of i'm just going to keep showing images or something absolutely absolutely again off same same kind of thing i just mentioned the gladius these
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are almost the same images for a different shape they look so old and rough now when i look at them um there's a lot of techniques that i use now in my work that i developed through working with paul and working on star citizen so if i was going to do these images again now they'd look completely different obviously and like you know 100 times better um but it was the same deliverable at the time it was two inches of ship and a 3d mesh yeah i mean i guess we had the what ships did we have in anvil at that point i guess it was the gladiator gladiator the hornet the at the time that this was developed not necessarily and that's a big difference there's the time this was developed and then there was the time this was revealed to people uh but there was a big gap there as well yeah so we we had a couple hornet ships maybe maybe four or five at this point uh when you when you when you had started that um
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what was what was it hard to switch from aegis to anvil it was at first because i didn't really i was picking it all up as i went along i mean to be fair there's been a lot of that on star citizen i mean it's such an ambitious project it's by far the most ambitious thing i've ever worked on and it's constantly growing and developing and evolving and just getting better and just blooming like a big tree so excuse me there's always a lot of there's always been a lot of um additional information to take on and kind of get through it's one of the things about this stuff that i enjoy so much like i got to do a crusader ship towards the end of last year excuse me and it was just you know i've seen the brand and i've been busting to do a crusader ship so when i got the chance you know those those kind of things just brighten your day up you know
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well we'll get to your crusader ship in a bit but after the you started with the gladius then you went to the f8 and then so you went ages to anvil and then your next one uh is was probably for a lot of people the most iconic of aegis ships like this has been a this this has been an incredibly popular ship since the moment it was introduced at citizencon 2015. uh and that's the sabre yeah right that was uh that was a fun one the server i think this is where i started to feel like i was sort of coming into myself a little bit now because the saber was the first one where myself and paul like properly went for key it's what we did proper promo pieces for right i'm going to take your word on that it was because this what i'm showing you now this was me in
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key shot doing my very first promo piece playing with light and going through differently yeah and this is where we ended up with it and i really enjoyed doing this because it was like i was making a proper little scene and just kind of playing with lights and stuff and it was just a really good um exercise for me to be able to like level up it was really fun to do this is the first one where we properly embraced the the promo artwork piece though yeah yeah it was a good image i really i like that was a good sell yeah it came together really nice it was a i don't know it was it was one of those really um i mean to be honest all these ships have been really fun to do it's i haven't done anything i haven't done any work for star citizen that's really gone into the the kind of grind that you think of when you sort of think negatively in the game
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industry because gaming just freaking put you through grind and i understand being on the concept side of things i'm on the kind of lighter side of that anyway as far as the general spectrum of development goes but just being able to um you know get from work on this stuff in the morning it's just it's always been awesome even after like over six years and i think we've like i said we've we've developed a good relationship and it's always kind of been a point of mind to sort of work with concept artists rather than make it right you need to deliver this piece of work and it's either correct or it's not correct and it's this binary situation and you're either happy or you're unhappy and you you hire them again or you don't hire them again um you know there are people who work like that but um that's that's just not the way i like to
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go and like god was saying star citizen is is so complex and it is evolving and it's kind of like it is like it's almost like you know the car industry you know as the project's going even our own brands are developing and we're sort of you know the early stuff we're just you know dropping off the back and we're like no we don't want to incorporate that anymore and everything is just slowly moving along so it can make it doubly difficult because you're like well which which era of this brand are we going for right no it's i it's a point that i make quite often when when folks see a new ship from a particular brand like oh that doesn't look like aegis or that doesn't look like drake or whatever i'm like i'm like look at ford over just a 50-year span you know and then look at just the
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mustang look at the mustang of the 60s versus the mustang of like the 90s versus the mustang you know today and that's the same make and model of car and they're drastically different and that's just within 50 years and star citizen's history covers uh hundreds and hundreds of years so it makes sense that these brands would change up and try new things over time now at this point gav you've done three ships that could all probably be described as airplanes in space they all have they'll have wings they're they all look aerodynamic your your next ship uh issued all of that and i'm not i'm not embarrassed to say that when i first saw this concept i did not enjoy it i did not enjoy it like like when i first saw this like i had a visceral reaction
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i was like oh oh i do not like this and then it just don't tell me that no no no no no but no but then but then just over time it grew on me and i began to understand it and i began to really see what was tremendous about it and i had it's been my biggest come around and that's why i wanted to mention it and that's the uh anvil terrapin oh right the terrapin right so what did you think what did you think he was gonna say girl i got the prospector open on my screen because that was actually the order we did them in but i probably gave you the wrong order jared ah that's all right we'll talk about the tariff and then we'll backtrack to the prospector then yeah yeah no that was that was my mistake yeah um okay sorry about that sorry um yeah well this is um again the terrapin this goes back from an art perspective this is where it started to get really fun for me because on top of what
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i was already doing because again it's making scenes you know it's it's promo pieces with actual moments of narrative in there like you know here we've got like um a crew about to board and it's just this is nice putting those little things in this was a fun ship too to put the the side ramp in i remember paul we had a bit of a big chat about the boarding for this right because the side ramp was new at this point i mean there was a lot of new stuff that um went into this ship really wasn't i mean it was it was like jared was saying it was the the first of its type but um there was a lot of good a lot of good ideas that you'd put in here and it was but yeah it was you know it was was it one of those difficult births i'm not i'm not i think it was maybe like a give it like a five out of ten as a
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as a birth score i think we went backwards and forwards a little at the beginning because we were originally thinking about something akin to an eagle transporter from space 1999 yes that's right yes so i did love this this is one of my big passions is doing cutwares i love a cutaway so i was always really happy with the way this piece came out because it was the first time i'd done like a really a cut away that i was like really really happy with and this will look back from my art perspective this will look back to what we do next with a prospector but um yeah i really enjoy i really enjoy a nice cutaway i thought the terrapin came out really nice but jared what you just said then about i'm having to come around on it i get what you were saying and i thought you were talking about the prospector originally i was like well i thought it was quite a pretty ship it's like a little silver you know no it's i i i don't know no it's like i i i couldn't begin to
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explain it like i couldn't explain it's just you know any anything like the worst thing that can happen with a piece of art is everybody just kind of goes yeah it's all right i mean i mean i mean the best art creates a vis a visceral reaction in folks and and i always appreciated it for that because when i first saw it i was just like i'm like what the hell is this it had such a it made such a reaction to me in me and i never understood why or whatever i i i still don't to this point but but as a as i started seeing it realized and and come to life and i i'd go by uh uh ariel's desk and uh and and and the folks who were working on it it was built in our last year so i got to see it when it was built and as i would see them as the 2d and the 3d like you know they got your your concept there and if they're building here and they're going
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i'm like i started to really appreciate i'm like oh there's so much there's so much going on here that i didn't appreciate for so it was it was it was a transformative experience for me and realizing that that that sometimes the uh the things are worth revisiting and looking at from different perspectives in this case it was just 3d for me to see to see all the magic that was involved so let's go back now since since i skipped it here and let's talk about the prospector now the prospector um built uh builds on a lot of what uh we've already we've seen from misk in the past with the freelancer and takes it in some exciting new directions yeah i mean i was really happy with the way this piece came out i was being a bit bold with the orange but i thought um it came together quite nicely um this ship
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again i think what would you give it at the start though oh it was difficult give it like an eight initially because um remember that yeah because we followed yeah we had quiet it was it seemed like quite a strict design brief initially and because it was a new you know with all these new ships and new you know new functions and behaviors and stuff um we were following it quite quite closely and when chris first store it he was i guess you could say was not happy with what i was showing him that would have been this stuff right this kind of sikorsky slightly looking yeah yeah now see i i i i see this and one of the questions that was in the chat is
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have any ships come out of the concept or design of other ships now i look at this and i see a proto argo here is what i see yeah i see a lot of proto-argo stuff here i mean we do occasionally i mean i think really whenever we start a ship it is pretty much um we yeah we've never gone back into previous versions of things and just gone right that one and just kind of dragged it forward so that's never happened but we do experiment quite a bit don't we paul at the beginning of a ship like yeah now that we've got our groove on now we'll do quite a lot of versions of things yeah yeah definitely and you know it's part of the process now um and you know chris that's like the expectation from chris is that he wants to see those variants and he wants
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and my job and and gav's job is to basically provide provide variety and then some year some you know he might really dislike some bits he might really like then he'll sort of pick a bit of a bit of c bit of d um and and then we sort of move forward but yeah when it's when it's the when it's the new function it's kind of i don't know i find it at the scariest time because i'm just like i don't know what i don't know what chris is expecting with the killer were they here it was like how does that work yeah now see i look at this image i look at this image that you've got here on the screen now gav and i see this like this is the next evolution of of miss ships you know uh uh uh most missed ships were
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designed by jim martin who we who we uh discussed earlier and i see this is like okay miss going okay how do we update our our our look uh you know for a new generation you can see that in the cockpit you know with especially with the visibility it starts it has the same wrap around from the freelancer and other miss ships but now uh expanded and evolved the the vtols expanded and involved uh i really see the evolution here and i well there's another thing about this ship in particular which i got into which was this which was my first cutaway so this is like a significant image from paul paul about me upon this because i keep banging on about cut aways because i just love doing them as part of promoting i was always like yeah can we do a cut away for this one please this was the first one i ever did and the reason why this stuff sort of um
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reaches me so much is when i was a kid my dad used to work on oil tankers so i grew up on all time because like every time he'd come in support as a kid my mum would get me and my sisters out of school and can't stay on the ship and excuse me we he used to get me these old navigation charts and i remember my first experience as a drawing i must have been like three or something like really little i was drawing with an old fountain pen and my mum gave me it felt really nice drawing on this big cartridge paper on the back of these navigation charts and i used to draw cutwaster spaceships this lights had drawn massive spaceships and it was all inspired by the term and trade authority books i'd draw like a big ship another story yeah yeah exactly yeah all that stuff i i the town trade authority books had the cutaway drawings in them
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and yeah they were the first things i can remember drawing and i used to love doing these just 2d you know orthographic cutaways with all these little rooms and ships where all the weapons are stored and where the people sleep and all that so where the engines are and it's it's just super cool to be able to get to do that at this level now on a project like star citizen i'm going to send you a picture afterwards my uh the room over there is decorated in scans from the taren trade authorities books the great space great great space battles and stuff like that and then and then blown up and then blown up uh biggest posters so i i'm right with you with those books um next in your in your path through the ships of star citizen um is your first alien ship am i right yes okay so
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your first alien ship uh th this was one that we actually actually had a really neat contest for this one during one of our it was either the anniversary streams or holiday streams i don't remember which one where we asked uh we we released the idea of it which was the tavarian prowler and we asked our community to submit their ideas uh for what they thought it would look like we presented them during the live stream it was a lot of fun and then we revealed uh the tavarn prowler and uh it blew a lot of folks away so tell us tell us about the development of this one your first alien ship at this point yeah this one really sits for me because i was going on my girlfriend's australian and i was about to go on like one of those massive cool big holidays i've only ever had one of in my life this one well so i was about to go to australia so when i delivered this i basically dropped this and like jumped in a taxi
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and like was off to heathrow um so i've always got really visceral memories of finishing this ship plus when we when we did this ship actually let me just do a screenshot when we finish this i um i recall this was there was some i'm not quite sure what was happening but i remember i took a break after this we we kind of we had like a little break from each other paul remember no then a three-week i was kind of as a freelancer you're kind of terrified about taking holidays because you're like don't repeat me don't forget about me you know it was a pretty intense ship this one though because um because because because uh there was quite a few i threw quite a few concept people on this not not in so much a shotgun approach
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but just working with different strengths because um because it was just so new and so alien the very first ship of an entirely new alien race yeah yeah definitely so there was there was just a lot of there was a lot of stuff to figure out wasn't there and it was complex as well like all of all the things that had to shift out of the way and move and just brand new art style brand new interior um but yeah this is without the cockpit as well right because it's got a metal yeah the one-way glass yeah and so yeah this is one of i think this is one of this is one of this has got to be one of the top sort of images like sort of stand out images for me this is like the only image of
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the power that i did i remember i put the mesh together got all the mesh work done fired that over and i did one of the interior that wasn't even it wasn't quite finished i think i remember i passed it over remember yeah oh yeah that's right yes yeah yeah so we brought it in house and we and um continued with the promo in-house so basically everyone had had a bite of the cherry right at the end yeah well like most things of video game development it's a collaborative effort between multiple departments and you know multiple resources so after the prowler uh after stretching out furthest from where you started with with with the first ship of an entirely new alien race you then came back to a manufacturer that that you started with aegis
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uh working on the eclipse yeah um this was another good one remember the reveal paul yeah yeah so i asked cody not cody corey um to to do some fabric work before we got just across them yeah that was cool but yeah that's another that's another cool shot the previous one again the i love putting together little hanger scenes and stuff it's really fun it kind of tickles my little sci-fi architecture itches where you can just sort of block out all these like sort of crazy shapes and just kind of play a little bit and play with the light a little bit yeah it's it's real easy to see the dna of the saber
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here is there anything of the gladius in this there's a little bit i guess from the coke page remember paulie we went backwards and forwards over these angles and lines on this ship didn't would you remember just to get first round the engine intakes really complicated chips but i guess there's not so much not so much of the gladius in there i guess it was more saber i guess it was sort of heading in that territory but then you know it's it's stealth bomber so um that was heavily heavily influencing as an art director paul does a stealth ship have to be black question especially in space right right right now i suppose it's more effective
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in a spaceship than it is in a you know yeah i mean why why are they black uh in our universe in the real universe probably gaff knows this but yeah the radar reflective pain just of that generation worked better in that color just curious what you were saying all right so from from from that if i'm not mistaken you went to your first ground vehicle see now question i thought i had the order down and and then they told me i didn't so so if i understand right the next one was the ground vehicle correct that's right that was the tumblr cyclone timbrel cyclone this was a good one paul wanted this yeah i think this is this is definitely my i don't know how many well we've done sort of levitating vehicles as well but i have all those sort of vehicles i think this is my favorite one so the cyclone here is the another first for a
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brand new manufacturer at this point yeah um i mean and if you know about paul but you know his his whole um sort of background has got a lot to do with vehicles right paul bikes and stuff yeah all my references poor guy was just does this bit off this motorcycle and then there's this rear swing arm and then there's this bit here there's this bit of ducati or mv or whatever it is uh yeah this was uh it was fun that's getting into some ground vehicles right just um pulling all those references apart and just um having a bit of time to refine the shapes of it yeah and just how do you know like how did you it's like how to make something new like it's quite difficult these days like there is so much content on the
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internet you know there's everything there are times where it feels like everything's been done so uh you know i was kind of really i was really happy with where this ended like it's you know it's it's probably recognizable where did the wheels come from you just made them up from the madness of gap's mind yeah it was one of those things where i remember when we were designing the the the the vehicle in its entirety polaroid we started with the chassis didn't we we were trying to take the proper automotive approach to the sort of design engineering approach and we spent quite a bit of time on the chassis and then kind of the wheels kind of we just had like blocked out cylinders for wheels for quite a long and i always just wanted to put some i don't know i just wanted to do some
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signature stuff that just stood out a bit and looked cool yeah i mean you did quite a few as far as i can remember on that i think he did like four different types um but that they definitely were the coolest we've got the cyclone here uh small ground vehicle now you're gonna go to you've got you've now done your smallest vehicle and you're about to jump to your largest vehicle uh with another return to aegis and the hammerhead so when when you first heard about the were you intimidated by the size and scope of this or did you just like give it to me let's go no at this point i think me and paul had been around the block enough to just get into things you know it's one of the things that is cool about doing the bigger ships is they tend to have quite different interiors like there's a lot more going
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on in in the interiors and one of the things that um i always appreciated about being able to create these ships for star cities and it's the level of detail we get to go into so with something like hammerhead the interior was like a whole um a whole run around you know it's almost like a level of a like a traditional like first person shooter kind of things interlocking corridors and stuff so yeah i like a bigger ship and i really like to get into the kind of guts of the interior got some you got something to show us yeah okay so these are some images for the this is the interdiction image paul right it was good doing the promos for these actually they were really we were trying to kind of level up a bit paul remember yes now i i do remember this i remember yeah because basically we'd had a lot of sort of feedback about
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interiors and sort of just um you know the team wanted something that was where they would have to sort of make less changes when it went into production and by this time we've got a kit a good kit of parts especially for the interior and um so we were sort of more i guess this was at least in my mind it was the start of us becoming a lot more methodical i don't know if you've i don't know if you agree with that gav maybe you well no we did i remember we had to because the ships were just getting bigger and we had to get some process down because otherwise it would just taken such a long time to get anywhere to get any progress because one of the things about me and paul it's like these ships take they take a while but we're not like messing around well for working like we
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we do get things together like pretty quickly i think it's just that there's just a lot to do okay and it's the knock-on as well isn't it you know you move like there needs to be addition or a subtraction or this room's not big enough and then it's just okay well now i need to edit 15 other spaces particularly towards the end of the concept definitely uh the overwhelmingly predominant question from the chat regarding the hammerhead is what's up with the hole in the center where did that come from that was i think that was me that was that was the rule of cool there wasn't even it wasn't even the do you know what it is i really it's really funny actually it's basically you know a claw hammer you look at that in silhouette and it's
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basically just two claw hammers joined together so it creates a double hammer head and then you've got two shafts it was as simple as that and i guess it's you know like we were talking about before there's always that drive to create something interesting and like i don't like i don't like doing stuff that's already been done i remember the early thing with this paul i thought i'd nailed it straight away i was like yep they basically they're after the um blockade runner from star wars so i did i'm not even sharing my screen sorry i'm talking like you know what i'm looking at i'm just cycling the thing on my computer okay so this is the um the sort of first version i did which was like the kind of um star citizen corellian blockade runner basically you've seen this yeah
00:35:10
yeah yeah um and so straight away off the bat i was like i've got this this is going to be the quickest one ever like i know exactly exactly what you're after and i put this together and then i remember we chatted about it paul didn't we and paul just went far too obvious [Laughter] i don't know i'm not even sure i showed chris you got to come to things uh like that space in the center uh holistically well we quite quickly yesterday i'll just show you the next version we've got quite quickly absolutely nothing from gavin just just whenever i've had so this was a sort of a somewhat of a compromising version you can see the dna warping from one to another over these um yeah yeah that yeah that's right and then basically chris was like um
00:35:59
he basically wanted all the guns to be able to fire on one point so that was that was then that that shape change that happened i did an image i have to do like a little sketchbook whilst i'm working and i did this working for this little sketchbook image i just thought it was lovely and moody it's when i'm when i'm sort of working on a model i'll just move it around and take renders there's something about that piece that just really really sort of does it for me yeah i think it's because you've got the depth of field on and everything it just feels like something you can just pick up off your desk yeah it's got that kind of fling that flinty black and white always does something for me as well i always just add through the level of there'll be requests for that to be released it's right here on my hard drive all right and credit where credit do i stole that pun that gavin ignored from don steeler in the chat so if you want to hate somebody
00:36:48
all right uh uh we've got aegis ships we got anvil ships uh you you've done you've done foreign ships you've done the cyclone uh at this point you you you come back you come back to uh it's another citizencon reveal ship at this point and it's the the valkyrie if i remember you you worked on the valkyrie uh which we just revealed time blurs is it two years ago now um i honestly couldn't tell it wasn't last year was it was the year before that no last year was a kraken no it wasn't that was the year before i know they're they're all blind but it must have been three years ago okay we'll we'll go on when none of us are calendars let's talk about the valkyrie uh there's a i there there's there's a lot from the from the uh from the i'll be the drop
00:37:36
ship exactly there's there's a lot from the um terrapin here i i see and the and the hornet you see a lot of hornet dna in here there was a kind of i was kind of sneaking a little bit of thunderbird too in there as well yeah yeah you know just a little bit of it i mean this is a i was really happy the way this ship came out but it was one of those examples of um a ship which is largely dictated by its own design in that it needed four big potted vetos so straight away you've got a big engine in each corner so no matter what you're trying to do with the design you you know you you've got this consideration and one of the things about star citizen that's always a big challenge is we always have engines and thrusters or maneuvering mechanisms and flight surfaces that have to be in there and so straight
00:38:25
away from the beginning we've got a whole bunch of um design constraints to work inside um but yeah that's a challenge right it's just making that work so if you look at if you look at this ship here the immediate design constraints are podded vetoes um we've got the weapons which need to have certain amounts of coverage so they're going to have to be like quite far out you've always got your pilot visibility that's always a and something that is going to be inherent in the design too and when you take all those things and factor them in um you've got to really sort of think around sometimes to be able to get something decent looking at the other end of it because if you let the constraints if you worry about the constraints too much and let that cloud the rest of your thinking every ship is just going to be like a rectangle basically with a guy sitting up front so i mean essentially that's what this
00:39:12
is i mean i guess it's kind of a i guess that's kind of what this is but it's all about how to how to get that rectangle and hide the facts it's i think i tried that once that rectangle with engines on it and chris chris told me we've made the ugliest ugliest ship in the history of star citizen oh they could be cool though i mean ugly i mean this is it's not a beautiful ship i mean i like it but it's not beautiful like you know beautiful but it's i like it it's all functional it's our function it's got its thing i think i've got some yeah i've got some early versions of this too and you can see the rougher shapes as we're putting this just working out the vetos and stuff so i mean you can really see it's basically in the early version it is pretty much a big rectangle so so there's a lot of a lot of times a subtlety
00:40:00
is what matters in these things because if you go from this to the end result it's not like a quantum leap from one to the other but you've just got to be able to put that kind of um you gotta be able to just refine things and again going back to what paul was saying about how it's quite similar to things that you see in the automotive industry you know the in the in the way that like you know just a line running down a vehicle can kind of make or kill a design those are the kind of constraints that we find ourselves working in a lot of time as well right paul yeah yeah it's always a there's always a stage where um we do some backwards and forwards of 3d in 2d and just you know massaging it basically because like gav says yeah you can you can have a line that if it's if it's just not right you just like oh that's that's not it that's not you know we just need to nudge it
00:40:48
so there comes a point in the project where it's just all about death by a thousand cuts it's just tweaking this treatment move this and it's all just i actually think this is where we um where we work really well together paul because you know like a lot of artists have got like they'll have like an extra power like a plus one you're one of your well you've got a few but one of your plus ones that's really apparent is seeing those lines and because i'll be like really focused and in the middle of it all and i've just got like all this like jumbled shapes everywhere and it's hard for me to step back and see those lines sometimes and paul will just come in and look at a render and they'll sort of look at it and go hmm and straight away the designs just cleaned up in a way that i'd need to probably step away for a couple of days from my computer and come back and look at it
00:41:35
cold to be able to see that and i think that's probably so it's one of the main reasons why i really appreciate um working with you on that level the speed that we can get things done our brains seem to mesh in such a way that you can bring that level of clarity to things and then see it immediately but i don't need to go away for two days and come back and look at it cold to be able to get that and i think it's always been um because i'm aware of you know it's it's time as money right and also you've got that and then you've also got i want to keep you know i want to keep jeff happy so i want to you know i want to keep him on the project so that's why it's this two of us i didn't realize that was a thing yeah actually you know i actually
00:42:22
consider like how i actually work with people and that relationship and so uh it's just it you know it's nice it's just you know and i don't you know i don't like us to hang around basically so you know there was a point when i had seven ships i think eight ships on at one point that was pretty hefty um it's less now it so it's night i prefer it now because i i am definitely more hands-on and making stronger decisions and so definitely i think from uh probably the hammerhead like i said probably from that point on we just became a stronger team and so it's just yeah that's not right fix that do this and we just we just keep motoring yeah so with the valkyrie that was your tenth ship
00:43:11
uh you you did you did some work uh so uh some finished work on the on the starfarer but as far as ships that were yours from beginning to end this is your tenth complete ship uh making you the artist who's done more ships for star citizen than anyone at this point you're not the next prize win your your next ship the thing that you win now is the biggest shift free coffee and perhaps the most it may be the most complex ship that you've had to do you alluded to it earlier the kraken yeah you're not changing it up you're going to drake you're going to something at a scale here too untried uh you know for you at this point tell us about the kraken this was a big one wasn't it paul what was this like four and a half months or five months or something we spent on this thing yeah yeah it's a long time it was it was hefty
00:43:59
have you have you got some early stuff there i can't even remember what what the early stuff was like i feel like you hit it oh i remember this process here i do have some earlier stuff here let me just bring this up so these are some this you're gonna see some early krakens here try and see some early dragons but there's the funny story right remember the little crappy sketch i gave you yeah oh i don't have that image i was on the board was it was that even an image or was that just an image with a lot of doodles over it it was um because i'd actually show it because i i used i use real world reference which then sort of like half half drew over but basically it was a it was a ship it was a boat that i put on its side and then drew some it was just a top view wasn't
00:44:48
it so i drew in the shadows like as if there was a really strong sunlight so you could see like the sort of the verticality of it and then put some just put some um i was quite like landing pads i thought this had some promise but yeah i was working towards all this stuff and then paul comes in with this thing and ruins my day so i was sort of working for a more abstract point of view of uh you know sort of looking at it for like a kraken essentially so having eight eight paddles of some sort like there was you know some vague representation of a cracking creature um and that's what the landing pads were and so gav was gav was trying all these ideas and they just had this little
00:45:35
one little image just sat waiting on the board and so he went he went through his process and i was like we should just let's just try this one let's just you know let's just give it a go and that just ended up being the thing didn't it and i think there was there was a bit of feedback from chris at the about a certain look that he was looking for and then we were both like oh okay yeah sometimes these things get quite conversational don't then we'll we'll kind of have a steer kind of later on and we've already started and we're already exploring some things and then it's like oh actually can we kind of bring it towards this and all of a sudden it'll just click and it used to be i mean i guess in the early days it used to be part you know you know used to scare the hell out of me because i'm just like oh you know
00:46:22
what i don't know what chris is going to say but now it's just like we're just going to give him cool stuff and then just see what you know we just see what he says there's always that difficulty when you don't you're not hitting it and he's just like no no no and then you really got to put on put on your dancing shoes and do your pivot and just do the 180 and figure it out one of the things that always impresses me about concept artists is is a big part of the job not not all of a sudden but at least a part of the job is is pulling ideas out of other people's heads it's it's it's you know it's sometimes i'm amazed that you don't spend half your time just screaming just tell me what you want just tell me what you want please please tell me what you want tell me what we'll do to make this work
00:47:11
exactly it's fun um we are we're almost at the end now the next ship uh at this point uh you've touched a whole bunch of different brands you're now going to touch another brand that's going to be new for you and that's the argo mole right yeah this was this was a cool one a multi-operator mining extractor this came out this came out nicest one i think yeah again first argos did but yeah it was fun this one paul wasn't working out all the mechanisms and stuff i'm not sure i'm not sure you'd call it fun at the time for you but it was it was one of those bold new frontier things i always kind of enjoy it where we're doing something on the ship and there's new tech involved it's like we've got these side pods and the extracts and all this stuff is there's
00:47:59
no other ships doing that so we're kind of trying to work it out in a kind of design friendly way through the concept yeah i mean there were so many things to figure out weren't there yeah remember mr tickle wait wait wait wait wait where we were there was one which i nicknamed mr tickle um because we were we were just experimenting with reach basically how how far could the mining lasers uh like what was their range of motion basically and so we had one that actually just went right over the top yeah it could reach everywhere yeah it could uh it could kind of do all of this so i you know i did i did a draw on the real-time board of like mr tickle's arms just like
00:48:48
just tickling away at rocks and stuff and then yeah i'm going to take it i'm going to ask that you not show that one let me get going it's just paul's subtle way of demoralizing me keeping me in line uh sorry kev yeah i just ignore i just ignore all gabs you know like weeks of hard work and i just like draw a little on it one of the things i loved about this too is this piece in particular because i did this 8k right this is an 8k cutaway and it's just got all this detail in it that was just super cool to do like you can go writing on it all yeah see the whole thing it's really nice um yeah this is when it comes to showing off interiors for ships i'm all about this so i'm always trying to get paul to do cut aways for the promo because i loved it stuff like this but you could like blow this up to a
00:49:35
billboard and it'd look nice you know it's got so much resolution in there there was a lot of you know there was a lot of new stuff in here so that's you know that was the that was the challenge on this one it was you know um how to because we spent we spent time on just sort of visual flow as well how it sort of flows from left to right top to bottom um and so yeah there was there was there was a lot but i mean i mean gav's just you know he's uh he's outdone himself on this one with the amount of detail in this is where i just stay up late get a cup of tea put some music on and just go down a hole it's like i can just sit on this well that's what i do i'll just work all night and just push and poke at it and that's me like in my happy place basically all right now your your last ship that
00:50:23
the public is currently aware of that's been revealed uh certainly not your last work for star citizen but but where we're gonna wrap up today uh you went to yet another new manufacturer uh with crusader and the aries starfighter yeah i've been i've been wanting to do a crusader ship um since i saw what was the one that sarah did sarah did that awesome one star runner yeah mercury yeah i just thought you guys did such a cool job putting that thing together and uh sarah's working that was awesome and i just yeah you know it's the kind of stuff as an artist you want in your portfolio so to get the chance to do one was just great it was funny this one though wasn't it because there was a lot of backwards and forwards in terms of gun position gun size well there's so much there's so
00:51:12
much to consider right because the gun itself like the weapon comes inside a bounding box and that bounding box has to fit inside the ship so it's not just like shoving a gun in a ship it needs to be able to be swapped out with other types of weapon and still work so what you're actually doing is creating like a void space which is basically a rectangle and what we had to do here was design a starship take a pretty big rectangle cut that clean rectangular shape hole out of it and still have it look cool and that's not easy like doing that stuff there's a trick to it no there was a lot of backwards or forwards but uh the end result i think came out really nice i was really happy with this one yeah definitely i did i think because you know people who know me know
00:52:00
that i do some of the promo shots as well so i kind of some of my favorite shots with this ship i've kind of really i really enjoyed it yeah so typically what we do in the in the workflow is i'll create a 3d model in maya then i'll take that into keyshot and sometimes it's got textures on it um and then i'll hand all that stuff over to paul and then quite often we'll you know just roll our sleeves adobe and just kind of get through it together really yeah because sometimes there's sometimes you just sort of you're cutting it close like there's you know they've been you know there's just lots of things that have just chipped away at the time and then it's like right we've eaten into our promo time it's it's all right let's get paul on it or you know
00:52:46
we'll just figure out who does what and so again i'll try and you know i'll try and give gav i give gav the pick of the litter essentially so you know hopefully he gets to do the shots that he likes and then i'll i'll pick up whatever's left or whatever needs filling in after marketing of course you can always keep me happy with the cut-away poll just uh so so gav at this point at this point you've got uh we've talked uh 14 ships maybe 13 ships that have been revealed uh you've got two at least two more on the way that we're not we're not allowed to talk about today all things in their time of the ones that that we've discussed today do you do you have a favorite is there something that that you're you're either most proud of
00:53:35
or or just has the best memory for you or i think they change when i look at them i mean i don't have a constant favorite i mean one of the ships that we've got um that we can't talk about just came out so nicely and yeah you know i mean you'll see i mean yeah nobody's nobody nobody knows what this is but it's something you haven't seen yet let's just say that come on jared help us out here all right that's all we got time for i'd like to thank you but don't we don't we have like some something you want to talk about doesn't gav have something coming out what doesn't gav like have a movie or something coming out that's that's right all right all right
00:54:23
sure why not we got we got one minute we should talk about you you you've got a movie yeah i've just made a movie i've just written and directed a movie and production designed so yeah if you like my artwork watch archive which has just been it releases in the united states north america yes yeah video on demand i want to be very clear that that was a that was a serendipitous scheduling thing and not the reason we're here today it was one of the things like we're doing our pre-production and it's like it's like oh by the way oh by the way i i i'm just in this other call i'm like oh anything important i'm like yeah just a movie i'm like what so yeah uh yeah you've got a movie that comes out uh i guess today in the u.s so today yeah so archive so so check that out um all right but gab's still doing stuff for us right
00:55:11
we're keeping hold of him yeah i'm not going to kind of like yeah all right so uh for for as we are want to do we are going to throw the host on to another star citizen streamer uh so that should start any minute now when you see when you see the uh when you see the raid go up you can be sure you opt in uh today's streamer is ari neo who if i remember correctly uh is is a a fluent english and spanish speaking streamer they do a lot of our translations for the spanish speaking community which we always appreciate and yeah so check that out and uh when you get there tell them tell them gav says hi and uh for star citizen live uh i'm jared uh that's this direction that's that was gavin over there that's paul down below
00:55:58
take care everybody and uh we'll see you back here next week

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