CitizenCon 2953: Character Advancement

25 October 202301:09:131,296 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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Hello there. Hey everyone. It's so good to see you all again in person. Thanks for coming out. So I'm Ian. I'm the art director for Star Citizen. We're going to kick off the first ever day two of CitizenCon by talking about some of the awesome work done by the character team. All right. So first let's talk about life in the frontier system like Pyro and how this influences the character designs. So we wanted to create something unique compared to what we've seen in Stanton already. We wanted to get a wider visual palette and a feeling of historical age between the different solar systems. So this chart describes the fashion pillars for humanity. We can see where all suits, armors, and fashion items
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should belong in terms of material use, manufacturing technology, and novelty. So you can see Earth fashion on the left, Terra fashion on the right, and frontier fashion right in the middle with a little bit of overlap of Earth. So essentially, frontier fashion is function over form. They are repurposed and repaired and generally are misfits rather than sets. Outfits are purposeful by having storage solutions. This implies survivability along the frontier. Okay, let's take a look at some of these assets in the game. So
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Okay, awesome. So, hopefully you guys that played prior playground, you will have seen a few of those assets being showcased. So, as we saw from the video, pouches and storage are a key part of the frontier aesthetic. This drives the feeling of survivability. But, from here we thought it'd be really cool to give the functionality, but also some customization options. So, let's take a look at the video we just developed internally, and this is for modular storage items on the player. Pretty cool, right? So, I think this
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will provide loads of customization options in the future. We're super happy about that. So, we also created some extreme weather costumes for Frontier locations, and these also follow the same mismatched and repurposed design aesthetics. Now, we've also been focusing on achieving a higher visual benchmark. So, this is all driven by our new layer blend V2 shader and its texture library. And we focus on more consistent wearing between 0 and 100% values. So, to showcase this, let's look at a quick example asset. So, as we saw in the video, in the
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insides of the helmets are looking fantastic. Now, this is us getting them ready to animate with put on and take off. So, in summary, Frontier Fashion is expanding the visual design palette for humans. Giving a more credible feeling of age and history when you travel across multiple solar systems. All right. Now, let's talk about something different. Now, we're going to talk about some of the gangs in Star Citizen. So, Nine Tails have been one of the main gangs in the game.
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So far, over 105 million have been taken out by you guys. So, you guys have been busy. Great job. All right. So, it was like, all right, now we're going to need to introduce a few more factions to the game, okay? So, the first faction we're going to talk about is Rough and Ready. So, the aesthetic of the gang was to be subtle. They're understated in terms of clothing, and they almost blend into their environment. On closer inspection, you'll notice their tattoos. Uh these signify rank and progression within the gang. Let's take a look at at a quick video. I think they look absolutely fantastic.
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Okay. So, the Rough and Ready can be found in some of the space stations around Pyro. Now, the tattoos, like I said, the tattoos form a progressive design. This illustrates the hierarchy within the gang. As a player, you'll be able to earn these tattoos and apply them to your character. Okay, cool. The next gang we're going to talk about is Head Hunters. So, this gang is also located in Pyro, but offers a completely different More of a wasteland vibe with lots of personality, and this will translate into the behavior types. Now, this gang is currently in production, but let's take a a quick sneak peek.
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Okay, so cosplay competition next year. I can't wait to see what you guys come up with. All right. All right. So they're looking awesome. Now the last gang we want to talk about is Dust Raiders. So Dust Raiders are a criminal gang specializing in mining related crimes. Now internally I loved the the original Desert Nomad armor. You can see him here, right? Now I wanted to use it as a starting point to establish the Dust Raiders design language. So here we can see So here we can see the Dust Raiders gang lineup showing armor leveling and rarity. So as a player you'll have horizontal armor
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progression. This will define your role and play style. Then you'll have vertical progression. This is your progression within that role and play style. For example, a common bounty hunter armor set will be weaker than a legendary and as armor progresses in strength, it's harder to acquire. So harder missions, rarer drops, higher reputation. Now as we're talking a little bit about armor sets, let's recap a little. So the goal is that players should consider which armor to equip based on the role they wish to fill and the scenario they're heading into. There will be also greater differences between the current armor types. So
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light, medium, and heavy and this will be in protection and mobility. New armor categories will be combat specialist utility and support. And these will define the type of items that are quickly available on the slots of the suit. There will also be additional functionality to assist in your chosen role. A matrix of armor type versus category will provide a variety of roles with each providing best-in-class benefits. There will also be hindrances to out-of-role gameplay. For example, if you're wearing a heavy
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armor set and you're trying to fly a a little sniff fighter, you'll have restricted visibility and less vehicle control. So in this scenario, like a flight suit armor type with resistance to milder G forces would be preferred. Okay. So as we saw in Ali's presentation yesterday, hygiene simulates and tracks the accumulated effects of a character going unwashed for any length of time. Poor hygiene can lead to disease, lowered health, and snarky comments. Hygiene decays faster if a character
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becomes dirty or wears dirty clothing or armor, and visual effects are going to be displayed on the character's skin, such as blood, sweat, and dirt. Certain usables, such as a shower, will reset the character's hygiene and clean away all of those dirt effects. So uh let's keep clean. Yeah. Okay, so that covers a quick recap on armor sets and hygiene. Let's get back to a video showcasing the Dust us. Awesome. So, you'll be able to find the
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Dust is scattered around various sterile settlements and wrecks in Stanton. And the Dustders will be available Q4 this year. And with that, I'll hand you over to Sean Tracy. You guys have been awesome. Enjoy the rest of your show. Hello everyone. All right. So I'm Sean Tracy. I'm the senior director of tools and tech content here at Cloud Imperium Games in Los Angeles. So today I want to talk about Star Cloth. And Star Cloth was initially
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unveiled at a previous CitizenCon kind of in an early stage. So it's now rolled into full production and it's used in both Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. So it's going to be seen on more and more assets like some of the great art that you just saw. So what's really cool about it is that it's unified with the physical world, whereas before it wasn't unified and was based completely on character movement. Now it's faster than the previous cloth setups and in the end it just looks a whole lot better. So today I'm going to cover some of the tech, the pipeline, and we'll see some results. So let's get and see it in action. Trench coat. Cloth is hard. Guys have to run
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upstairs. They have to crouch. They have to prone. It's got to collide with the And even more difficult, it needs to hold up in high-end cinematics. I cut that one just before some good spoilers, so Yeah. All right. So, how's it all work?
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Well, cloth uses two meshes, a simulation mesh or cage, and the render mesh itself. So, vertex colors indicate how it's constrained to that cage and thus the simulation. So, for example, black vertex colors indicate a full constraint. Basically, it follows the skinning. White vertex colors indicate unconstrained vertices. So, the movement is determined entirely by the simulation. And then we can do a blend of gray values that is used for fine transitions and blending and falloff in between the fully skinned and fully simulated assets. So, in the end, these meshes are sent to the engine where we bind the cage to the render mesh, and then tech artists can leverage some of the runtime tools. You can see up on the image that the sim cage mesh has about 5,000 triangles, whereas the actual render mesh is about 45,000 triangles. So, it's obviously much more efficient
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to simulate the sim cage mesh versus just the render mesh itself. So, part of the technology is the runtime iteration support, which you can see in the image above me here. Uh that's with all the red spheres. Here we're actually painting the collision radius of every single one of the vertices, and it allows us to fine-tune the simulation without having to add arbitrary collision meshes, although we can. We paint a variety of properties. So, some of these other properties are mass or displacement. In the top right, you can see an example of the old legacy implementation using pendulums. And this uses joint chains and collisions, but assets with multiple layers like the one that you can see there or ones like skirts or gowns, they were really really difficult to do with pendulum simulation, but they are solved with
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Star Cloth. So, I mentioned it's completely unified with the physical world. And what that really means is that wind, impacts, object collisions, thruster backwash, all these kind of things actually react to the or the cloth reacts to these things and so much more. So, it's not just character movement. Now, it's a hyper-efficient simulation and it's several orders of magnitude faster than the legacy implementation that we used before and has a lot of easy-to-control parameters for tech art, which are compression, stretching, and bending. So, as mentioned yesterday by Chris Wren, our senior lead physics programmer, we support soft body tapered capsules, which are twice as fast as our ragdoll capsules. It's also key to solving one of the most important aspects of plausible cloth simulation and that's mitigating the tunneling or the clipping that happens uh uh
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through a character. So, it's very very difficult to solve with pendulums. So, with all this tech in mind, we can do really complicated assets like the duster and the one I want to show you now. So, here you're seeing about five different layers of cloth going on and self-colliding between each other. It's reacting to the planet wind, which is always changing. On the front, there's a big leather apron. So, this one's actually a lot heavier and it moves a lot differently than the cloth on the back. So, he's walking into the wind here.
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And in the end, as I mentioned, it just looks a whole lot better. So with that, I want to hand you off to my friend Andre Peris, who's going to talk about hair. Thank you, man. Hi, hi everyone. So, nice to be here in LA with all you guys. So, I I want to start with a question, okay? How many of you are actually excited that we're getting new hair into the verse? I'm Andre. I'm the lead artist in our recently formed hair department.
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We branched out from the character art team and created this department. And it's a pleasure to be here today with all of you. And tell you that we're damn proud of what we achieved. It's been a long road, but uh definitely worth it, okay? Now, we're going to start by just looking at the most impactful changes that we have in our workflow, okay? A bit of a technicality part. Then you're going to get to look at the benchmark assets we have created, okay? And from there, we're going to take a glimpse into the future of what the hair could be in a with a more diverse hairstyle where we're trying to run away a little bit from the um military look that was driven mostly by what Squadron 42 was, so because we did a lot of work for that
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as well. And and yeah, from there, as a last note, I'll have a special announcement for you guys, okay? Don't want to spoil it, but you stick around, you're going to love what what we have, okay? first thing I want to touch now, very simply, okay? Hair for games is hard. It's really hard. Oh, by the way, did I tell you these are actually game ready assets in the persistent universe? Fully rendered in our engine, okay? Game ready, performant, ready to be shipped, hair is really hard, like I was saying. It is a triple A challenge, basically. You see games that get it, games that don't. Some of them
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get it more or less. Either way, for us the challenge is the same. We're not different, and the challenge is real. With the scope of Star Citizen, like day and night cycles, all these light shafts, all these MMO, people running around with their heads, a lot of motion, a lot of fast-paced movement. Um yeah, it is hard. But, the best thing is we have arrived, And it's Yeah. It It doesn't end here, okay? Yeah. It does not end here, okay? It's the nature of CIG. We just keep pushing the boundaries, but like I said, we're really proud of what we're showing you here today. So, let's dive in what we made all this possible, okay? On a high On a high note, on a high
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level, basically. A successful hair requires three fundamental elements, okay? There's the texture, there's the placement, and there's also the shader. If one of these elements fails, all of them do, okay? So, it's basically You can have a great texture, great placement, if your shader is wrong, no go. Really. Uh and the same if the texture fails or if the the placement fails. So, really vital, really important that that everything works together. But, the good thing is, by breaking down the hair into these three parts, it also allows us to actually go deep into each of them and push the quality up. Or Or like Chris Roberts would say, bring the high fidelity, right? um on the texturing, there was a lot of
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changes. what you see on the top there, the common approach of a triple A game would be to have true black, true white on a transparency map, a bit of taper on the on the tips and roots and and call it a day. That's what happens in 99% of the games. Now, at CIG, we went a bit further than that. We tested all the thicknesses that were actually reasonable to test, of course. And we came to a realization. The hair doesn't need to be thin enough. It just needs to look thin. We do need it to be thicker enough thicker than the real life hair because if you take one of your hairs, you'll see it's it's really thin, right? So, it does need to be uh renderable. That means if it's really thin, it would be subpixel at some point with a motion and all that, we would get
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a lot of artifacts. And so, that would be a no-go. We do need it to be thicker than in real life. But, can we make it look thin? That was the question. So, we came to the realization that from head or from scalp to hair and from hair to the background, so these two points, the transition points, are the most important ones for the hair. So, we aggressively tapered the tips, which is what you see over there, and added a gradient to it. So, no longer true black and true white. Now, this is a lot of technicality. You'll see practical examples of this, but that allowed us to have smooth transitions and basically achieve the result we expected. On the placement side, we came up with hair with hair libraries, basically. Now, I could be here all day talking about
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hair libraries, okay? Because I'm a very technical person, and if you see me around the venue, feel free. I'm Andre. You can just come and talk to me about this. I'm not going to bother you all that for for 1 hour about this, but I'm going to give you very quick example that you all can relate. So, imagine in real life, you have a construction business and you could make one wall, one roof, one one floor, and one window. You make it all work together, and from there, you're not only building your house, you're actually building the whole town, and then the whole state, and then eventually the whole universe. That's what hair libraries are. Obviously, the result, if you could do that, it would be much cheaper, much faster, and above all, you wouldn't have a fruit salad of assets, which was what we had in the
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hair not too long ago. And by fruit salad, I mean several artists working through the years, each one of them applying their own workflow. Everybody's at different levels of quality, of course, different minds, different ways of seeing the same problem. So, at the end of the day, um fruit salad, right? And we wanted uniform quality. So, for that, hair libraries are a great solution. We also decrease the time of production of hairs. So, it was taking us 20 to 40 days to create one hairstyle per artist, okay? Right now, it's going from like 3 to 5 7 days per hairstyle, which is that great news, So, yeah, yeah, that that was major achievement. Cool.
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So, hair libraries are just a thing. We love it. It's not just picking up a texture and putting it there. If you do that, like you need to actually see the the the scope. Luckily, we have some of the best artists in the world on hair working with us. So, uh we managed to achieve these at the scope that we wanted. Now, on the shader on the shader side, there was plenty of changes as well. Some of them are very techy, very very cool as well. I'm going to run through fast Uh some of them so you guys can understand the scope of what we're dealing with, but um let's just understand like at big time. So, big time is prior to run time. Run time is where the game runs. Big time where we're preparing the asset to actually put it in the engine. At big time, we calculate the custom normal and we store it per vertex. So, each vertex gets a custom normal. That makes in a
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practical sense for those who are not too technical. It basically makes the card, the hair card, not look like a card. So, the normals just help with the way the light reflects. We kind of do more smoke and mirrors on it and make it look not like a card by just baking it that way. Now, on the ambient occlusion, we store two baked two baked ambient occlusions onto the color channels of the vertices as well. Now, each vertex on a mesh in any game has a color to it, okay? You might use it or not. Imagine in a car, you have your trunk. You can use it or not. It's up to you. You don't It's not silly to use the car without using the trunk, of course, but if you have a luggage, you can put it there or in the back seat, whatever you want. Now, we decided to use this
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because it was free. The trunk was already there. So, the vertex color was already there and we just decided to store two ambient occlusions on it. These two ambient occlusions work this way. Light hair, like a blonde hair, obviously needs more shadowing or less shadowing than a than a dark hair, And so, we store two. The length of the card is now baked onto the last one and that gives us a metric of where the card starts and ends and allows a lot of cool things you're going to see on the videos I'm about to show. So, one last thing before we can start looking at videos is that and this is really creative. Total credit for the people for the tools programmers. Uh I personally had nothing to do with this. This was already at CIG when I joined. It's absolutely amazing. we have an hairstyle that was ready that
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you can see over there. And we have a hair cap. A hair cap is basically a mesh on top of the character's head, which is invisible, transparent. It is It is just just there. Sometimes we use it for shadowing. That thing has an UV. And so, we project the hair or where the hair starts onto that UV and gives us that image that you see on the middle, And so, we now have a 2D space that relates to a 3D location. Meaning that if I want to have hair like mine, which is white on the sides and dark on the top, I could just paint this part and get it white on one side and then dark on the top, which is an insane advancement if because cards normally are stacked on top of each other. So, when an artist is placing cards, if you paint one card to make it
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white here, well, it's going to be stacked on top of the other and you're going to get spots all over the place and no control over it. So, this allows us to give control. And what you see on the last image is the possible results. For example, now, I can paint one side of the of my 2D representation of my 3D space and get this possible result, which is pretty amazing. So, next video, we're going to take a look at our tools. Okay? This is not the way it's going to be exposed to you guys in the character customizer. You'll know more about that later. Okay? This is the tools we use to we can label to we are able to actually create the hairstyles. So, let's take a look at this video. You have the full range, so you can go
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for full white. These are melanin ranges, so realistic ranges. Fully white up to black. Obviously, you can go red hair as well. Get out of the way. You also have the dye feature where you can see all the things we talked about implemented. You can go a bit more wild on this. And this is why important the length of
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the card is stored in those vertices. And obviously, you can fade it as well as much as you do. So, all the possible combinations between the realistic melanin ranges and the dye layer, okay? This is how the occlusion is working, so you can see this shadowings, creating more negative spaces, more structure to the hair. And if you look at the temporal line here, you can see how this pixel depth asset helps us with the transitions as well. By the way, did I tell you these are actually game ready assets, ready to go to be used? So, now that we understand a bit better
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how the hair is working, that's why the boring part that I told you just before, you can examine this these images with a bit more of an informed opinion. That is basically the example. Now, that's all very exciting, but we want to show you hairstyles that are actually in star engine and working. So, that's the video we're going to take a look next, okay? Oh.
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Hey guys, so I can see by your feedback that you you you really enjoyed the dive, so going to try and direct things that way next time. Pretty cool. Okay, yeah, these are game ready assets as well. Now, like I promised you, we're trying to make this diverse and get away a little bit from this type of hairstyles you just seen now, which is a bit more military. Um and for that, we'll have the next video. Now, it's important for you to understand if there's any 3D artists, character artists, hair artists out there, you will know. Some of the hairstyles you're going to see next are some of the hardest things you can do in in hair for games. In a practical sense, if you can do what is going to be shown next uh and render it at 60 frames per second on an MMO, you can do pretty much anything.
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It's a it's our glimpse into the future of what type of diversity we want to achieve. Uh we're not only going for this style, but just showing you that if this style is one of the directions, then the full range will come. I hope you enjoy. Thank you, guys.
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So, yeah. Like I've been saying, these pictures you see here, they are all rendered as you've seen real time depending on the light conditions and stuff. But, there is no tricks here. This is actually how it looks. Uh and that's why we're really proud. Like I said, it doesn't end up here, okay? We're pushing this forward. This is just to replace the stuff that was there that I'm pretty sure you guys were tired. Nobody at CIG was happy with what we had. Uh I can assure you that. Yeah. Especially as an as an artist, right? So, but we finally arrived. Now, we've seen all this. Um what does this mean in a practical sense for you guys? It's the It's the question you may have. Well, let me tell you really fast. We made over 75 hairstyles since like 6
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months ago. On the last 6 months, we made 75 hairstyles. That is a lot. That was possible with all the changes we made. That is a great achievement. Now, we cannot hand them all to you right now. It's It's It's very simple. It's very simple. It doesn't end up here at the at the artist end, okay? After this, there's a tech art pass where they need to skin it. They need to make it work with hats, with goggles, with everything that needs to work, right? So, it just takes It's a process that takes time, but we wanted to have a certain amount, a quantity that would be enough to replace all the stuff that is there, give you enough variety for you to start, and that's what we're going to see next. Now, it also tells you tells you when are you getting it. So, as last note, I'll leave you with this
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video, and next Forest will come here to talk about his stuff. So, let's take a look at this, guys. This is actually what you're getting. Into the PU. So, before the year ends,
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you're going to get to enjoy these hairstyles. It was a pleasure to be here with you today, guys, and see you in the verse. Another round of applause for Andre and getting new hairs into the game. I can't wait to put new hair on my character, I'll tell you that. And for Ian and his awesome character team and the amazing characters they showed us earlier, absolutely fantastic. I'm going to run through this, we don't have a lot of time. I'm going to talk to you about character heads. We've talked about hair. We have talked about outfits. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the heads and our pipeline of getting us from the actors that we hired to do the photogrammetry all the way to the game characters. So, we have a DNA pool expansion and
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customization I'm going to be taking you through. We got We made a data-driven pipeline for adding new heads. So, what is a DNA pool? DNA pool is just a bunch of heads that we put into the game, that way you can modify the ears, the nose, the chin, the mouth, and you could interpolate between all the different heads, a DNA pool. We want to expand the pool and allow for more selection and range. So, we scanned 60 new heads for our DNA pool, 60 new heads. And we processed them internally. We also added customizable facial features, skin tones, complexion, makeup layer on top, revisited the eyes. These characters look new and they look great.
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So, our current pool, there's the 18 heads right there, but that wasn't enough. We need more. That is our new pool. Very exciting. Right now in the PU, when you're playing, see that center row? You get nine females and nine males. And now we get all we're going to be getting all these characters. It's for Squadron and the Persistent Universe. How do we do it? Well, we partnered with Clear Angle over in Pinewood, London. And they have this thing called the Clear Angle Dorothy scanner. The scanner improvements allows us to get shoots done in 4 weeks of sessions.
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Custom coded flash that just kind of does it automatically, all calibrated in seconds. Our old to give you an idea, our old process for doing this took hours to calibrate. This thing does it in seconds. Talk about state-of-the-art. Average of four scan actors per day now. We used to be doing one. What this means to you is we can get you characters faster. We can get you new heads faster. Polarize the image data resulted in a proof spec, blah blah blah. Those are awesome texture maps that we could put on the head. That way we could render them, make them look really good. Photogrammetry captured in raw images at 8K texture map resolutions.
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Hyper accurate scan results. Now, close your eyes if you're a little sensitive to light. 2 1 This is the process we use to get the pictures, to build the photogrammetry, to calibrate the cameras. Go. Relax. To the right, just take about a museum pose. He's looking nice there. Yeah, perfect. So, there we got So, we got some characters here on the screen. Those are all built using all these things that I've briefly mentioned.
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I want to talk to you a little bit about skin tone, though. Skin tone's tricky. Because we want to apply it. We want to be able to customize it. We want you to have the ability to do whatever you want. So, what you see is some really weird-looking characters. We see a head with some yellow. Yellow's good in this case. What we're trying to do is we're trying to find the average skin color. Once we find the average skin color, we can figure out what that skin tone is, and then we can apply it. The blue means it's further away from the average skin tone. So, when you apply your skin tone, it has less influence. Keeping those high details. Keeping the color, the the blemishes, the imperfections. That middle one, that white head, that's where we get once we've extracted the data. It's now ready to apply the skin tone, which you see at
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the end. All right. So, here's a little more detail what I'm talking about. We knew that we were going to get a pull for these heads, this pull of all these different awesome shapes, noses, ears, lips. But now, with what we're doing currently, you can see that we have calibrated all of our uh source photos of our actors. And with
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that, we could figure out exactly what they're supposed to look like. And then once I extract and do the average thing, I'm able to get a value. And that value translates into a skin tone. And that skin tone translates into a chart that you can customize your character with. And what's great about this is as we grow our pool and we get more heads, we get more skin tones. So, our skin tones aren't based on, you know, ba- uh whatever it should be. What should it be? What does it look like? These are real data. These are real data that we get from these incredible Clear Angle scans and the incredible tech that is bringing by uh our staff. And the skin tone will grow along with our head data.
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And along with our heads. And there's an example of me just applying it and showing that in practice. And now here's another look. Here's a couple more characters that I put together with this stuff. And here's what's great about that. I did that with our brand new character creator, character customizer for Squadron 42. Every head you see in here, which will also be applied to the persistent universe, so all heads are in the verse. And as you could see right here, here's a little scene I put together using the outfits, using the hair, using the skin,
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using the heads. And I did that all with the new character creator. And here to show you that, if the live demo of the character creator, I'm going to bring back my good friend Sean Tracy. Thanks, buddy. Come here. It's awesome. All right. So, what's this all mean to you guys? Let's show you. Time for live demo. All right. So, I want to welcome you to the bio- biotic corp Calliope machine. All right. So, here you can see we've
00:56:07
got the Whoa, I'm getting I'm getting feedback. You can see we've got two body types that I can select from at any point in So, we're going to start in right away. Now, you might recall how the character creator currently works. You would have a whole bunch of source heads from our DNA pool. We would select one of the facial shapes, and then we'd blend it up or down depending on how much you wanted that certain facial shape. Now, this was pretty good, but it's not the most intuitive of systems. So, instead what we wanted to come up with was a much more intuitive way to control this. And what we've now introduced is sculpting mode. it's quite interesting to know what's
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going on behind the scenes, and this wasn't an easy problem to solve. But, our animation programmers and tech artists and everybody came together, and they figured out a way to basically make it so that from the DNA pool, we are making a selection based on what you want out of it. So, it's going up between all the different options. Now, I'm going to start making some changes here right away. So, I want to wind up the nose. You can see that it's all very intuitive. It's fast to use. I'm going to make the lips a little bit bigger here. There we go. Something like that. I think that looks pretty good. I'm going to adjust the brow here. Maybe make a little bit of a heavier brow. Now, we can adjust the eye shape. We can go more almond eyes. We can go more oval. We can have a heavy lid. You know, I can find a whole bunch of different
00:57:44
options within here. So, here we're starting to look pretty good. I want to give him a little bit more of a hero chin. There we go. I'm liking that. Yes. That's cool. All right. So, not to spend too much time on that. I want to show you some of the other features. And speaking of features, we go to our skin tone. So, finally, you're not just selecting a preset skin tone. You can move through the whole gamut of the lookup table. And this is melanin and hemoglobin at the same time. So, at the very top of it, I've got a texture slider. So, instead of the whole head sort of selection, we can go between all the different textures. Now,
00:58:32
like Forest mentioned, we're going to have 30 of these for one body type and 30 for the other body type. So, here I'm kind of liking What am I liking? Oh, I like Yeah. I like this one. So, here and I'm just going to set a skin tone that I kind of like. Something like that. That's cool. All right. So, the next step in our skin tone is the complexion. And complexion, we've added freckles. So, here I'm just blending in and I'm blending out the amount of freckles. Now, I've cranked it all the way to the top just so you guys can see it. But, for my character here, I'm going to keep it kind of subtle.
00:59:19
Like this. Put quite a few of them. Something like that. Uh we've also got sun spots. Now, this is a you you a little more weathered skin. We'll give this sort of look. And we've got a whole bunch of different blemish masks planned for you guys. Whether that's sun spots or liver spots or anything to that effect. Now, I'm going to give this guy kind of a weathered look because I think the skin tone looks pretty cool like that. Yeah, I'm digging that. All right, so next up eyes. So, no longer do we have the green and the brown, just the the full selection. You've got a full RGB chart of what you want to select. So, if you want to have bright green eyes, if you want to have hazel eyes, if you want to have blue eyes, if you want to have any of these eyes, this is all very very nice. So, again,
01:00:07
we can go with a deep browns, we can go with sort of a steely blue, which I'm kind of digging for this skin tone. I quite like that look. That's cool. Oh, well, we'll get into some funky colors, don't you worry. All right. So, one of the other things we've added, and it was mentioned before, we've added a makeup layer. And with the makeup layer, we're totally inclusive. Any of the body types can have may makeup. Now, I don't want to spend too long on it here because we're going to get into it in a couple minutes. But, I just want to show you sort of blending that in, blending that out for this particular body type. So, next, as Andre talked about, we have all the hairstyles that you could want. So, I'm just going to pick a couple
01:00:56
different ones. There's a, you know, a reality for some of us and another reality for another one of us. There it is. That's what I want my reality to be, hair. Something like this. Uh, I'm digging the mohawk though for this one. He's got a bit of a Mr. T look to him. I kind of like this. Yeah, I pity the fool. So, it might go without saying that we've got beards now. So, if you want to select a full beard, you can select a full beard. If you want just mutton chops, you got your mutton chops. You want your handlebar, you got your handlebar. All right. So, we've got all the different beard types that you could want and we're going to add as
01:01:43
many as you guys really want. So, I'm kind of digging the full beard for this guy. Yeah, I'm digging the full beard for this guy. Uh even further to that, we've got eyebrow selection, which is I mean, you can go with no eyebrows. That's That's a very real Yeah, you could you could have bushy ones. You can have a little bit more, you know, normal kind of straightforward ones. But, it was mentioned before during the hair and uh with Forrest's uh discussion that we've got the hair dye as well. So, with the hair dye, you're going to affect all the hair at once. And right now, I've got all selected. So, I I can go through the gamut of all the different hairs uh uh uh melanin that you can set. So, here I'm just going to darken it up
01:02:30
a little bit. And if I wanted to dye the facial hair, I could just dye the facial hair all by itself, setting a dye color here. Something like that. But, in the end, I'm really digging the jet black on this particular one. So, I'm going to frost these tips a little bit. I think that's going to look kind of cool. Let's set a bit of a blonde here, turn up the dye amount. And then, what's really cool about this, and I'll show this in a minute, is that we can actually control the fall off of it. So, again, if I just want this on the tips, I can just blend it right about here. So, there we go. He looks a lot different than how that started, and I think that's actually
01:03:17
pretty fun. Now, there's a lot of stuff in here, and I can't wait for you guys to explore it and spend as much time as you want uh customizing and expressing yourself as a character. So, once you're done, you've got to sign off a personal declaration that the physical appearances that the Calliope process has allegedly caused um are okay with you. So, let's go to our next body type. So, I'm going to go to town here real fast. Right right away. And you might look you might think it looks a little off or so, but I don't know. We're going to get there. Let's make some changes here. Going to adjust the bridge of the nose, maybe a little bit of the cheekbones here. That's maybe a little extreme. Let's go
01:04:05
back here. Something like that. And I'll make the lips a little bit smaller here, and I'm going to lengthen that chin for a little more of a triangle kind of face here. So, you can see you can tweak to your heart's content. You can spend a lot of time doing this. And and I don't really like the brows. I like a little bit softer of a brow for this particular That's looking pretty good to me, actually. So, next, just like we did before, we go into features. We can do the skin tone. I'm going to select a certain texture here just cuz we got to get going on time here. Let's go. Something around here is looking pretty good to me. Cool. All right. We go into the complexion the same way that we did before. So, we start with the freckles. And I kind of like a real freckled
01:04:54
appearance on this particular character. And I'm going to turn down the sunspots. So, we move forward to the eye color again. Ooh, I'm really digging the green. I like the green kind of look. And we get to the makeup. Now, this is where I wanted to spend more time. Now, I'm arguably not very good at this, um, but I I will do my absolute best to show you guys, uh, how you can how you can use it. So, first is the eyeliner. So, the eyeliner we can do any color. You can go as crazy or as or as chill as you want to go with this, but for this particular I'm going to go quite dark here just in the dark sort of fuchsias and purples. Here, we'll do in the inner lid
01:05:42
eyeshadow, and that I'm kind of keeping the same theme, I think. Yeah, and then we're going to do the same thing with the broad eyeshadow. So, again, we can go as crazy or as calm as you want. what I've had good success in doing is kind of having it cranked and then I just pull it back to a little more of a of a of a natural blend, something to this effect here. Uh, next is the lips. We can do the exact same stuff on the lips. Now, what we have as a whole bunch of different, um, makeup masks, and you've got three different channels within those masks. So, basically, three different colors that are affecting different areas of it. Now, for the lips, we can go with the same sort of theme if we wanted, and I think I'm actually kind of digging that.
01:06:31
And then let's go on the lip liner little darker. And then lips are a lot more glossy, so we can increase the gloss there, so that looks a little more like a lip gloss. Yeah, that looks pretty cool there. And then, like I was doing before, I kind of just pull it back a little bit. And there we are. So, next, I think we're good. Yeah. I think we're good. I have no business doing that, that's for sure. Um, it's same thing on the hair. Again, we've got a whole bunch of different hairstyles. These will be shared between the two body types, but for this particular demo, we've got the ponytail, we've got the slicked back kind of look. Yeah, I'm not finding one I'm really
01:07:19
digging yet. Ah, yes. Yes, now we're talking. All right. So cool. Now, again, we're fully inclusive here, guys. So, if you want facial hair on any body type, you got facial hair on any body type. That is up to you, guys. So, on the eyebrows, I'm just going to leave them cuz we can't can't really see them anyways. Uh but for the hair, I really like dyeing this hair a certain color, sort of, you know, something in the darker range. Going to turn that down. I like the nice jet black. Look at the makeup bounce out. That looks cool. Um I'm going to turn up the dye, though, and I'm going to try to carry my same theme forward here. There we go. And then, I'm going to give it a bit of a
01:08:07
fall off as we can do, so it's just on the tips there. So, let's see that in action. All right. So now, you know, at first, we weren't sure about that character, right? But in the end, I think she turned out, definitely. So, you go to a review, sign off your declaration again, and head to game. So, you know, I'm really lucky to be able to sit in front of this. And again, it was a huge amount of work from tech art, engineering, designers, and specifically the squadron feature team that has done all this work. And one of the cool things to note is that we use this now internally as a tool. That's why it's me up here demoing this. This is our tool internally for creating all
01:08:56
these heads, for creating all the NPCs in the verse. Because as Chris put it one time, he doesn't want his NPCs to look lame. He wants them to look cool, and this gives you cool looking characters. Thanks a lot, guys.

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