Holiday Livestream 2015: Ship Pipeline - Part One

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:16

   spaceship is any word more exciting in the English language uh certainly the very basis the heart of Star Citizen is the fantasy that you can own and operate and explore and battle in spaceships so it's incredibly important that we come up with a process for creating these spaceships to a high degree of fidelity both uh how they work in the universe and how they work in our very complex game and uh today we're going to look at how that happens probably the very first thing we do in the process of creating ship is come up with the role that's the absolute most important thing it's about uh taking Chris's Vision along with the information supplied by Ben Lesnik for you know if it's a new ship what its functions are and then from there working with the concept artists and

2. 00:01:05

   fully realizing a ship so basically it works for design it works for the game looks cool fits in with the manufacturer the next step is that we essentially put together a design document how does this ship work here's how it should work here's how many thrusters it has it has you know this checklist of things it needs five Escape pods it needs bunks for six people and the concept artist takes you know our ramblings and turns it into a uh a beautiful concept model who's one of our concept artists um basically we're looking at the javelin uh which is undergoing second pass concept say you know that he sort of fully understands um what's involved for this manufacturer and just taking all that design language um that we've established already and putting it onto

3. 00:01:54

   the javelin so that so basically it's consistent it's good for the uee you know when you see it you're like okay that's an AIS uee ship all the cues are consistent again you can see the sort of level of detail that Dan putting into the work panel lines uh all the decals again you know from you'll see here from this Thruster there's a similarity and this this task will take a couple of weeks and then of course running it past Chris just make sure he's got final sign off so once Paul's done with the concept and pretty much Discovery phase we call it sometimes with his team it then goes into a phase that we call white box um the white box is essentially the very raw Bare Bones of the ship it's not pretty but it's functional and the key

4. 00:02:45

   with the stage of the white box when it comes to larger ships such as the Idis or the javelin is to understand can we make it work um so the design team will flesh out a white box interior for example and and on a given day I may go in and go well is this going to technically work if we stand the player in this corner of the ship and he's drawing the whole ship then that's not going to work we've got the Idis hanger okay the Idis has got a lot of detail inside obviously we can't draw that all the time so we have to set the interior and design the interior around being as efficient as possible as you bring the camera around you'll see that it will actually start streaming in all of that geometry and all of that fog if we take it back it completely does it in reverse the

5. 00:03:34

   advantage of that is that we can throw more detail inside and not worry about the cost of it from outside um and just generally massive improvement with frame rate massive Improvement on memory costs so that's the purpose of the white box is to identify problems before they turn up in the pipeline the next step is that the the high resolution super detailed model that our concept artists come up with is given to our technical designers here at the company gray box is essentially taking the white box to final geometry everything should be identifiable um in its in its current form just with polygons uh this is sta era actually it's uh not been seen by the public yet but it's this is a really good example of um a gray box this is the cargo bay of that ship you'll notice there's no textures there's no shaders

6. 00:04:24

   it's just kind of just gray Checker box um so this is pretty much kind of final geometry now and is is ready to go into production it's taking shape quite nicely so we'll then kind of break this down into various kind of modular elements that we can kind of pull away assign those to the team to kind of crack on with the interior of the ship for me is a map it's a multiplayer map it's certainly bigger than a multiplayer the map and it has to be fun to walk around and you have to be able to navigate it easy and these are all the things that we try to apply very very early on so it goes from gray box here and then it'll go into lot of production here and that's a good a good example to look at right now um she's pretty much done from there that's handed on to Tech design in Tech design we pretty much take all the other areas uh on the

7. 00:05:14

   project and glue them together to make pretty spaceships actually fly and behave as you'd expect we take the the mesh and we split it up how it's going to fall apart in game so the nose will come off body splits here Wings come off so we create the actual hierarchy which is one of the key things animation need so they can get their animations in and as long as that hierarchy stays the same those animations will be fine everything else can change around it when the modelers and artists get to a graybox phase of the ship they hand it off to me and I break out certain geometries set up hierarchies name the different objects and then animate them within Max and this case uh we have the Aegis Vanguard here

8. 00:06:01

   and the wings are able to deploy and retract it's my job to animate all these on the proper axis so nothing Clips in it all works correct mechanically so we animated opening animated closing add some tension in there and then we have back here we've got this cargo bay that opens up and lets you into the interior of the ship in addition to that I'll break out different components like we'll uh take out the seat to where we animate the character entering and exiting the ship any ship interaction he has typically we'll animate all those emotion Boulders and Export that for the character the the next step in the ship process the one that everybody else sees is that it becomes hanger ready it'll pop up in your staris and hanger you know if you have bought that particular ship and you

9. 00:06:49

   get to explore it and see what's inside it takes a lot of work to get the ships in game to the the standard we want and the standard the fans want for them we have backers come around every time they sit with the ship team they're completely blown away by the amount of work that isn't seen in the final product Bon J's animated all the sections of the ship that need animation um landing gears doors anything like that um it's ready then to go to to fine tuning