Star Citizen Live: Making Mountains

2 October 202001:04:221,626 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hi everybody welcome to another episode of call of nope see i almost did the wrong show there i've reversed the verse nope that's it's one of those that really wasn't on purpose that that that's me not knowing the end of the show star citizen live game dev uh making mountains uh on the show if you've never seen star citizen live before we have a couple different formats this week we are on our game dev format which is which is where we are going to hang out with one of our developers our designers our artists our our people who work on the game and explore a little bit about their process how they work and what they do for star citizen so joining me on the show this week is no stranger to star citizen live uh mr patrick gladys patrick how you doing
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oh good fantastic do you know the name of this this time from home huh do you know the name of the show because i don't apparently star citizen life star citizen live all right so uh patrick you are a member of the uh uh planet content team the planetary tech team what's what's uh correct me there's a bunch of different subdivisions what do you do for star citizen let's just go there we are or i am part of the environment art team specifically the environment art team from the germany office and we almost exclusively handle all all the things um organic right so that means planets geology vegetation and since we are the content team that almost exclusively works with all of
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that stuff or produces all of these things we are also the team that drives uh the planet tech forward in terms of communicating with the engineers who are actually programming and building the planet tech and so we we it's basically the ping-pong game between the the two the two of us you know the engineers and us and this is how yeah this is how we operate all right and the last time we had you on the show we uh we were painting planets we were using the the new painting tools to show how we can cover the surface of a planet um there's going to be some aspect of that involved today so just in case you know for people who have joined the project since then or who didn't see your wonderful panel it starts at a citizencon about it uh before we get into this give us a
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brief primer what what does it mean to paint the planet painting a planet uh meant something else a year ago than what it does by now as you know we are constantly uh pushing planet planet tech forward and all the features that are coming with it um so painting a planet means to a first um actually do an artistic paint pass which means applying color to the planet and then what it means as well is applying all the other pieces of content that are necessary to complete a planet as well through painting and as i said when when we had the star citizen live stream last time where painting was covered all of these
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individual pieces of content like the color the objects and the ground materials all of them were painted individually in individual passes but since then a lot of stuff has changed and we will see some of the painting in this live stream as well but i will not go into a super like much detail but i will definitely show it off a little bit what we will mostly focus on um will be the height map creation though okay now the the we've talked a bit about an isc over the last quarter uh showcasing through sprint reports and stuff how the uh painting tools have been evolving you know even since we we showed it last time uh what are some of the improvements
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uh that have been made over the last year at this point uh probably the biggest improvement probably would be um a much simpler and more compact design of those painting tools which means that whenever we do these painting passes and i told you you know that all all individual pieces of content have to be applied or hats to be applied separately with that simpler design we basically we basically pack everything into one single brush so um it's it's basically a reduction like four or five times quicker you know when we had to do actually like five separate painting passes before it's all reduced into one now
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and sorry and uh the cool thing is um all the color information and everything is saved dynamically in these brushes now so whenever we want to change the color or change the the objects or the ground we can do so after all the painting is done and we won't have to repaint anything so it's not just a more compact design and more simplistic design of the of the brushes that we use and on the painting tools but it's also a much more dynamic so we won't have to do tedious reworks and and repaints of something whenever we want something changed we can simply pick another color and we'll automatically update all over the planet and this will save us as i said lots and
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lots more time yeah i mean it was already pretty fast before like the atlantic v4 came online that was already pretty fast and then to here we did a whole we did a whole uh a segment on an isc and i think a lot of the comments were it goes they can't really be that fast and it's like now we've made it even you know faster and less labor-intensive and the results have gotten better i it's one of the if you you correct me if i'm wrong because i am the layman here but when i look at the new results when i'm looking at the before and after shots you know between you know the painting with the new tools today versus the painting with the tools that was done just a year ago uh it seems like things that there's a much better uh uh diversity in the elements yeah you you see a much better breakup between the rocks and the plants and the
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the various foliage and stuff and the different ground coverings um the textures seem to be greatly improved i'm not imagining that right the the textures like the the gravel textures and stuff we do and i showed this on ise and i was that the gravel textures alone seem to be way more detailed now than they used to be am i am i imagining this or am i right no actually not um we have we have actually gone through i think it was two or three weeks and we have reworked every single uh terrain texture that we had before and replaced them with i think it was 80 or 90 new ones um that are not just reworked but they are based on um realistic data like photogrammetry data
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it is actually photo scanned real life material that that is now um in our libraries that we can use and uh it's it's it's much higher quality the the definition on the ground uh is much higher now so it's more consistent and coherent with what you see on the rocks which has also been improved and updated and you know it's it's one of these things we are always try picking picking in a couple elements of our entire pipeline um and thinking about like how can we how can we improve this how can we how can we raise quality make this make this look nicer more consistent more coherent and such and when it comes to one important aspect that probably um not many people think of right away when
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when we talk about it or mention it like this but a speed increase for us means that we have more time to iterate right if i have to do one paint pass instead of five paint passes that means i have five times as much time or five times longer to spend on this content and really polish it out until it works uh the way i wanted to and spend spent more time raising quality polishing things out tweaking things adjusting so on so the process of the process of making it faster and making it better it goes a long way towards uh one of the long-standing questions of how are we going to make every planet and every moon that we've set out to make it's it's it's this it's this you know
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this growth curve of you know as the tech improves and as things get better and things get faster that's how we're going to be it begin to work at scale and we're already seeing that in the a bit in the creation of the pyro now we're not we're not talking about pyro here but uh it's been it's been really delightful to see just how far you guys have been able to come so quickly uh as far as the the the groundwork now and of course we will be sharing more and more about pyro over the next you know several months so uh let's get to what we're doing today we've set the table enough we've recapped a bit and we've caught up with other things uh today you said we're exploring hype map stuff so uh at this point i'm gonna turn it over to you for a bit if you're watching live on twitch remember you can submit questions
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with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets and then our community management team will pull it out and send it on to us remember that patrick is an environment artist for planets and stuff so if your question is about uh when will this game feature come online that this wasn't the show for that if it's it's when will space stations get this he doesn't work on space stations it's the planetside stuff so planetside art related stuff that's our topic that's the stuff patrick will be able to speak to today so patrick if you want to share your screen i'll turn it over to you and i'll let you uh let you drive for a little bit all right that's so do you see my screen in a second zoom is put it on the wrong screen there we go now we see your screen
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oh good you see substance designer yep fantastic all right so um as you already said jared we are going to take a look at um a bit more like an in-depth look when it comes to height map creation some of these things changed as well you have talked about the citizencon citizencon demo that we have done in 2000 i think by the end of it was the end of 2018 i think so where we showed off the the process here uh but since then a lot of things changed and it has to do with the swap from v4 to no from v3 to v4 um and yeah uh we thought let's let's have a bit of fun let's create one of these height maps from scratch and uh by the way explain
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some of the changes that have happened how it affects us as the art team how much time we get back from this how it affects quality and so on and so on you know so yeah how how how would you describe this shape what would you say this shape looks like this shape looks like a paraboloid this is official like this is you you can basically swap uh shapes here and the official name for this shape is a paraboloid terrible but uh i refer uh to it as a simple blob so all right not very scientific but whatever uh so yeah let's take a look at the editor real quick
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so this is a slightly modified version of microtech that i have here and if i fly around you can see that i have my my blob paraboloid shape um on the planet already looks very natural looks very natural right but this is usually um you know or one of the many ways that you could start with um what you can see though is that you know the how the color is distributed if you look at all the other height maps around it you have you have decent you know visuals it kind of all makes sense you can see that there are mountains and then there are valleys and they're filled with some gravel and such and it all follows the shapes nicely and so uh the same thing happens for this
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shape but you can see how this flatland here that has this swirly like a swirly pattern to it kind of creeps up our our half sphere here and it has to do with how um our height maps blend together it's not like we can simply produce or throw in this height map texture and it will always be the exact same or this exact uh cutout and visual because a lot of things happen in the editor on top right that might influence the the visual or the look of our height maps um let's take a look over here you can see that this blob appears many more times
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all over the planet and since it's really geometrical shape the data that you can see on it looks kind of janky right now uh sometimes a very young planet and it's preteen years going through some acne issues something like that but you can see that you know sometimes these shapes blend together sometimes we get we get multiple frequencies of these things blending together and forming entirely different formations and this is this is the um this is something we have to take into account um but it's also the beauty of of our planet tech in general because from one height map by shifting it around and making it blend with itself and blend with all the other surrounding
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height maps we get very very nice happy accidents like these that produce very interesting results so let's go back to our original one here so as you can see we have this elevation and it's it resembles exactly this texture um the dark pixels basically mean there's no elevation happening or basic or dark pixels mean in this case because okay i won't get into two crazy technical details here but if you look at this one i have changed the the values of it slightly so the dark is gone right so why why did i do that um if the pixels here on on the on the
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outer outside of our blob were dark it means that the height map on the planet surface would actually be pushing down but if we want a flat mountain that is simply just bumping up then we have to constrict it to a gray gray color value and from gray upwards our height maps will be bumping up and grey downwards they will be bumping down i can demonstrate this quite easily by for instance just famous last words here i can demonstrate this easily yeah yeah so minutes no no no no no i'm a professional
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those are other famous words i'm risking it right all right so i have just added another tiny blob and i'm going to put it in here you can see that the gray is our default base plane and now that i have added this these dark pixels you can see that this blob here is represented and it actually bumps down might not be super visible but oh wait i forgot this one so now now you can clearly see that it bumps down right so um this is fundamentally how we have to think of uh the text or textures and all the colors or the the values and our height
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textures this is actually something you know it's not specifically to us this is this functionality is very very common in in most game engines and and other games are using it precisely the same way so yes let's revert this one back and you can see it updating right and if you if you made the uh the second blob there a lighter color it would be a another mound next to it uh yes precisely um a lighter color yeah you could easily you could easily for example
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add multiple elements like for example i'm increasing the tiling here and now i have four of them on one texture so what happens if i export this right i'm just going to export this to the engine right now and then you can you already see that something happened but the height map didn't update and it has something to do with our planet we have to reload the planet that goes quite quickly and we do have our four blobs and the cool thing is all the color and everything else is adjusting dynamically to it within a second so i don't have to manually go in or retweet something or adjust the the trees or the ground materials or or anything anything really i can dynamically swap out this thing
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with um anything i like but uh yeah these are just um these are just a couple likes very simple geometrical shapes so how can we make this more interesting um just to also demonstrate how we could attempt to to if if it really was like a single mountain like this one or a single large hill or something how could we make this more interesting we have a couple nodes in substance designer that allow us to detail these things out for example like terracing node most of these nodes and are a couple of of them um we have built ourselves to um yeah simplify the or speed up the process
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and and have things that allow us to to simply put in the details that we need or like um other other games or in in like previously in the very beginnings when i joined early on we weren't even using substance designer for it but we decided to go for it because it's um it's a it's very nice we can basically replicate if we are missing anything we can replicate it in substance designer build our own custom nodes that do precisely what we need instead of diverting back to another software and that keeps our pipeline quite tidy and nodes are really useful uh for for for going back and identifying and tracking changes that happened you know six seven eight nine steps ago exactly and it's all dynamic yeah so
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this looks more like a cake now but let's export this one yeah so i've added i've added terracing now right like a cake see this looks odd but if i reload the planet one second bloop and we have our cake on the planet and you can see how the color again automatically adjusts and the bedrock is automatically sitting on or being applied where the slopes are but you you can also see that there's this part here where it's where it's you know it's not these layers are not continuous and that's something i mentioned before is the the surrounding height maps they start
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blending into that height map in order to fuse all of the elements together to not have any weird seams or cutoffs or hard repetition we blend all of the data together so that in in the end it looks like a nice continuous consistent landscape so this is still quite geometric uh although i've seen and i've seen things like that before i i grew up next to a uh a quarry actually as a kid and oh nice and and the mountain what started as a mountain at one point ended up being a very terraced looking thing as they were slowly you know systematically ripping into it so i've actually seen that exact structure
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very similar to that structure in real life not naturally occurring but yeah oh let's let's make this more similar to what you know then um because i can invert the entire thing right and then this is a little more query like but still very geometric and unnatural looking and i have to adjust these values because it's still bumping up and not down so that would actually result in a very very awkward um visual so i'm tweaking these the quarry i was talking about was actually a mountain it was when i was oh when i was five it was very big and when i was 10 it was smaller when i was 15 it was smaller and actually drove past it about two years ago for the first time in a decade and it's almost completely gone now
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they've almost completely just destroyed but but when i was growing up it looked very much like that they were systematically whittling it down terraced by terrorists by terrorists but yes this this also looks like this looks like the traditional dig you know down yeah yeah this is how i know quarries there's a big one close to my hometown and they they look more like this um so what i have done now i basically inverted the entire thing and defined the ranges here so that we have our grain gray default plane and all the other values here are just getting darker and darker and darker which means it's bumping down so this is what we get so now we get
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this white plane um cutting through so what could that be right um it is actually the ocean level we have bumped down our height map so much that we are hitting um that we are going past the ocean level all right so so the system at this point automatically fills the ocean in but what if you were is there a way to cut the ocean out of because there's no ocean around you obviously we have a method of cutting in holes into the terrain specifically for caves and such i think it also works for the ocean but generally we don't do that because we simply by adjusting the entire elevation of the planet
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we decide where where the ocean should show up and where it should not show up yeah so uh yeah and then i told you about our custom nodes uh so we can take this and transform it to something more natural looking right so i'm going through oh from something very geometric and i can adjust these uh i can adjust that noise that frequency that we are adding to these edges here to produce a more realistic result so what is that note doing like it's basically taking the existing information and starts pushing these things in and outwards based on based on a noise based on a mathematical noise
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something like this okay uh how what like let's say something similar would be this here wait i'm gonna take another of our notes which is called vortex and i can for example put in whatever really let's do it like this so i have this noise up here and i can put it into the vortex node and it's driven by this bottom noise and by adjusting this you can see that i can start swirling and moving the existing
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information around so this is something very cool that you can do very interesting alien or even lava formations with i hooked it up into um an inflate note now so all all the bits and pieces if you look if you look at this string here it gets inflated so now all these shapes are pushing into one another and creating a more like like like something is flowing or something has been pushing these these things around like a dry it looks like a dried lava bed to me yeah yeah like lava had been through here before you know and it's all dried and cooled so just for the fun of it let's put it in here
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this is looking very very harsh right because we didn't adjust our ranges but if i do so if i give it a more reasonable range to live in i can constrict it maybe even further because these these shapes are quite quite intense okay so now let's export that and take a look at it here you can already see the data adjusted there we go but the height didn't so now i reload and the height adjusts and there we go see i didn't even detail this out uh at all
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but it's giving me quite a funky result so if we ever were to do and a weird alien planet that has these odd shapes due to very harsh wind they're all aliens we are also an alien planet that looks cool yeah right it's something that we uh we don't have yet it's a good example it's a good example of how the existing tech can be used to push things in new and exciting ways right not not everything new requires new tech you know so you know there's still a lot of there's still a lot we can pull out of the tech that we have at this moment so if we go back to to our little quarry
00:28:10
um this is with the landform node applied so this noise that starts deforming everything a little and then i hook it up to a sediment node which adds a little bit of sedimentation on top so you can see now it's like the the soil started sliding down a little and accumulating then similar to how we did before with the swirly shapes we can can inflate or deflate this a little to to sharpen up some of these features and then export again and check in the editor and the cool thing is someone can be let's say
00:28:59
uh pascal pascal is uh also not unknown um he has been on various shows multiple times right so let's say he he's working on the actual painting of the planet while i am defining out all the local height uh data and information just as we're doing right now and i'm just working through it and then pascal comes by and says hey you know what i finished the painting and i get his latest changing changes uh from the server and i see all my height maps with pascal's updated painting within like literally 30 seconds i just need to reopen i might need to reopen the editor one more time but uh that's about it so now now that we have applied huh i'm
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just saying this i was muttering to myself this is pretty cool and uh yeah now since uh we have uh we have applied this noise to the to this geometrical shape that we had before and it looks a lot more natural now i think it's something similar to the mining pits that we already have on hurston now that i think about it there are some mining pits on hertz yeah they might not look exactly like this but they feature similar visuals yeah i like this one a lot uh one of the questions from the chat how many of your nodes do you have that are custom made or scripted and uh do you have a favorite node that the did you like a go-to node so the custom ones that only i did
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are are these one and one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven eleven twelve thirteen and then there are a lot of notes that sebastian did you know because he's the techie guy so these are my non-tech artist notes that just give me funky visuals but he he does like crazy stuff he does he does the intense things like um like almost simulations on a 2d basis or erosion node so let's for example oh let's let's do something a little more from scratch so let's combine one of my notes with some of sebastian's notes right so let's go for the landform node and let's let's take a look at
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a simple noise sorry if you hear the emergency cars it's uh frankfurt central so we have a very simple up and down and i'm putting it into this landform node and i'm exaggerating the node properties here and you can see how the existing data gets shifted around so is a very cool note because i can make something very terrain um very terrain-like or very believable terrain out of just two nodes see how because the the idea behind this note was how do land masses form right that messes formed by
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you know constantly or not constantly but sometimes being moved around or shifting into one another and deforming and fall like even faulting and all of that stuff so i thought like how cool would it be to just have one note that simply gives you that result in an instant right yeah so this is already quite believable uh when it comes to the basic shapes and and now i can take this and further detail it out but before we do so let's let's just simply check it out in the editor as we always do because ultimately how it looks like in substance design designer doesn't interest me that much i need to know that it really looks great in the editor right oh so now like another one of these happy accidents happened i can see my my features but what what
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happened here right i can i can double check here these values are all like be below gray right so this thing should be bumping up but it's bumping down so i need to adjust that maybe adjust the range just not have it be too extreme oh actually like this sorry okay and there we go now you can see the the visuals that i get in in the substance design of viewport are already highlighting these tips red that means you know they're high so it's it's high elevation so i can export this again and you know this is already quite interesting i don't i don't hate this
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uh if i reload again just by changing these values i get a completely different visual suddenly like you know it's it's it's bumping up my landscape this look how it looks from the top you know you can see these forms deforming and shifting into one another it's quite cool it's a very good base to work uh to work from the the scale is interesting because when we look at it in substance designer it's it's it's i i'm seeing it on like a much more like macro scale when i see it when i saw what you were in designer i i see that and i look at something like that and i expect that to be like an entire mountain range and then because this this uh uh this particular height map is only mapped to this one little area here it's actually a much more condensed
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thing i don't know i don't know if i'm explaining myself uh but uh remember when i told you about how our um our height maps are splattered on the planet and sometimes if there are two right next to one another they will be blending together as well so we can check that out as well here like simply by flying over and seeing how it all behaves so look at this this is the exact same height map but it's but it's it sits here multiple times and blends together and forms an even greater landscape even greater mountain range instead of just being a single dot on the planet that gives you that that individual mountain and then you know if
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i would like to detail this out let's take one of these tools here and this is where we and we're not getting into the painting as much now but um if i wanted to i can take us them heavy spruce tree areas and be like okay you know what i want the spruce trees to live on this plane here and i click in here once and there we go spruce trees some of the stuff some of the other things are bleeding in you can see that has to be adjusted so um this is where you know we start polishing things out and such really clean that up and this is without any detail passes and you can kind of see that here that the data looks and even after the detail pass there
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might be some areas where you get to see um wonky wonky color application like um but again all of this stuff are the bits and pieces that we continuously look at and and be like okay how can we improve this um let's polish this out let's improve this and we are making progress so all of that stuff that uh you might encounter on the planet and to look like huh what's what's happening here and you know we are probably looking at it at it already and and figuring things out for it but we have our priority lists that we need to work from uh so let's take the same mountain and we said we would like to reuse one of um sapp's node nodes this is like a really cool node erosion it really applies yeah no what
00:37:05
it what it says it applies erosion to to whatever you put into it so let's give it a couple values to work from sediment strength zero thermal erosion angle let's go for something like this and i'm bumping up the iterations here and setting this up and trying to see what it gives me see if we can see something in the
00:38:02
viewport okay uh let's try something something is off i'm gonna try something else okay it's no no no big deal though um it is something oh yeah we can show the diamond dynamic flow this this is also very similar to erosion and quite visible and doesn't need to uh to to render as as long so let's increase the flow depth so you can see now that what what happens what would happen if um you know rain started having an effect on the site map and i can hook it up to this flow node i'm gonna enlarge this here and you know
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white is the peak of our mountains and then the dark it gets the lower we go but you can see that i can dial in this this hydraulic erosion this flow here as i like it's a very complex node very cool stuff definitely increase the quality of our existing height maps a lot so what i can do with this now is i can dial it in subtly and now pipe it in to our export nodes and then you get all of this stuff right a lot more detail but what looks like a subtle you know like a subtle blend here is actually quite extreme in terms of
00:39:40
elevation so i need to dial it back even more until i i get a result that i like see this looks a lot a lot healthier now maybe even lower you know the the player experience is something that we have to really consider at this point as well because when we create these height maps uh we are speaking of you know elevation changes and frequencies and also bumpiness so if i was ever to do something crazy like like this you know if if i would really like our
00:40:28
backers to hate us you know have fun driving around in here that's obviously an extreme example uh let's see it oh you really want to see oh my god let's see it you know oh god jared is always making me do stuff guys it's crazy hey you're lucky i don't make you do devil's town please don't please don't fire me for okay all right it's quite bumpy i have dialed it i have dialed it down a lot but it's quite bumpy
00:41:15
could probably exist i know this is another height map already let's go over there it is there it is you know so this this doesn't work um but it's it's fine i mean we also wanted to talk about limitations and what we can and cannot do right yes just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do a thing no absolutely not and we have our strict rules and uh for our workflows to prevent these visual errors from happening right because first of all how would you drive your cyclone through this right it's crazy it's not this is this is not enjoyable at all um i mean rocks are already an issue right which we try to solve now which is great uh but you also see that the data it's so it's so much elevation data and the the contrast that that is happening here
00:42:05
um and the planet tech picks up all these little things and starts starts jamming all this data in between these crevices and cracks so this is something that we should definitely not do so you know uh we are very very cautious but let's let's go for um yeah let's go for it the same thing but a more healthier approach yeah now it's it's it's a question showcase that it's good to showcase that it's it's it's always important to remember that you know that it's it's one of the reasons you can't leave a procedural system up entirely to the procedural generation it's why these things have to be validated by artists and level designers and stuff like that because you know the the full breadth and scope of what's capable is not necessarily always a good thing it's you you have to use
00:42:53
tools responsibly and we just showed a very irresponsible use of the tools yeah so that that was useful that was good okay but let's show a more responsible uh approach right so another note because if we if we don't if we don't detail things out um these areas will look a little you know a little flat and the the planet tech needs little pixel variation to pick up on all of these little crevices to to achieve things like these where where one biome is creeping in through the crevices of another biome and therefore creating this this interesting mix right this result right here for example um so we cannot leave it too flat but we
00:43:41
also want it to have a reasonable amount of detail which is what we have done with this note now so i've added the the flow right which is still in there but now i have thrown uh maybe maybe let's maybe show it again so this is without this is with just the flow um also based on one of sep's node and then the detail soil node which which i have built to just quickly generate some of that close up nice a break up on top and i can basically decide if i want a simple noise um or if i wanted to be a more of a dry soil look so now i can sharpen this up and reduce the opacity here this is
00:44:31
something we have to do individually but you now you see that it resembles more of a more of a dried out patchy kind of look right so again like maybe before yeah this is without and this is without some detailed soil application right now see it's just these little tiny bumps they but they do make a difference they absolutely do make a difference because our new painting tools they can pick up on the slightest pixel variation and therefore we can assign biomes to you know i could probably assign a biome to to this patch and this crevice individually you know and and in in the editor that would be a couple
00:45:20
meters apart um so yeah let's export that again yeah let's get rid of our nightmare terrain uh if you have any questions uh i'm going to take them gladly folks have been asking if the system allows you to paint a planet and automatically use the correct material based on a planet temperature size atmosphere and stuff or do you have go in and set all those things individually each time so it is something that we have been discussing in the team as well and yes there is a uh there is an option uh you you see that okay let's let's let's i have destroyed uh don't don't uh
00:46:11
we have wrecked i have yeah we have wrecked it a little yeah that's but that's fine um if you take a look at this square over here right it's something that we have already discussed right um i can take for example the obsidian dark biome and paint it down and you can see that it automatically gets applied here right so what we could do because this texture and each and every corner of this texture resembles um specific humidity and temperature situations uh like the top right is cold and dry the bottom right is uh hot and dry the bottom left is um cold no wait cold dry
00:47:04
uh hot dry cold wet hot wet warm dry warm wet and then cold wet yeah exactly so i could basically go in and and paint something paint something in that resembles the or that would uh logically resemble some um climate for example if if it was earth uh i could where it's where it's cold and dry i could put my arctic areas and really paint this square out completely unrelated to any of any planet or or anything really and then we could throw any data at it and it would redistribute this data logically so no we don't the the answer would be we
00:47:52
we don't have to go in and adjust the all the time and repaint our biomes and because you can see even even after or even only this local height map here it already adjusts to the new data and the same thing is happening globally so it's the it's a very sorry it's a very very same logic be being applied there so just by adjusting our workflow slightly we could totally do that yeah yeah so this this height map that we've been working on uh we've seen that it's it's in this one place we focus on but we also have seen that it's replicated in other places yeah how how what's that breakup like how many different patches are there on
00:48:40
a planet how do you how do you keep these things from being too repetitious oh the power of death tools um you can see that what we have been adjusting and modifying right now is uh index or patch number three right you refer to it as patches uh it's actually okay um we tweaked patch number three right next to us it is patch number zero and let me show you something um we have a list in our planet editor tools whoops let's actually put it in here so this is something that we should that we don't show off quite frequently but you can see that we have
00:49:27
our ecosystems and what we call as ecosystems are all the height maps right this is the list of all the hype maps that we use on all our planets we have we have hills we have ice dunes we have the mining pit or you can actually also let's let's do it properly here you have a preview of all of it here you the mining pits you have mountains eroded and all of that stuff right so it's it's a it's a huge library of fightments all kinds of flatlands speeches and so on and so on so what i can do is simply select that second patch and for instance fill it with um fill it with something entirely different which is uh
00:50:15
let's do mountain billowy mountain yeah mountain billowy o2 that's my favorite all right let's jump back to our spot oh that was actually three not two sorry three oops and now turn this off so you can actually see what's happening and this is a good demonstration of the question that was asked previously see these are the billowy mountains and you can see that the data already adjusted but if i go back and put in something entirely new see everything moved with it um let's take some let's take a height map that you guys have actually never
00:51:03
seen before it's not on any of the current planets yet you saw it here first see i can just i can just go through this library and decide like okay what mountains could fit best right and i can i can define uh as as i've shown before so you see these funky colors right it's 0 to 15 so we have 15 patches 15 slots that we can fill so i can decide on a lineup of 15 different height nets that's yeah there's a single volcano right here now it's 15 different height
00:51:51
maps but each height map is used differently as well yeah we can it's not just a repeat every 15. that's cool get closer to that i want to see that you can see where bedrock is automatically we get these bedrock assets spawning in and defining out these slopes because you know it is just displacing upwards so if you want more silhouette from it you have to put assets on top which we scan scan sorry scatter on top procedurally as we do with anything else and that's how we can detail these out uh yeah so before i asked you to zoom in
00:52:39
on that we were talking about how each version of those 15 are still different from each other uh different different type yeah it's 15 unique individual completely different heightmaps yeah but but each version of three is not exactly the same as we've seen the beginning how how does it how does it make each version of that three different okay so um it is it is the exact same texture every single time but if i get in that volcano again then it's like like when we had that blob at the beginning some places we had one blob some places we had two blobs some places exactly exactly and together um maybe that's not the best
00:53:27
let's take this one for instance not very visible too yeah the blob was probably the best example for that but fundamentally it's the thing that i've already explained to you um let's show this one again so the third patch here is isolated right there is no third patch around it but if we check this spot for example there are two two patches um next to one another right so what we do like what the planet tech does for us let's take these mountains for instance it takes a height map and then it starts shifting it around and then it starts blending it with itself so you get you will get to see uh a somewhat new and unique look
00:54:16
every single time you pass by the sitemap because it's it's blended together with its surroundings in a new way every single time so yes it is it is a little different every single time but it's still the same texture we we just you know we uh have these tricks and and processes that that allow us to make it look super unique by shifting the blending it with all its surroundings and the cool thing is every other height maps do the same you know and by by that you get this huge mumbo jumbo of of of blended height maps and every everything looks kind of unique that's cool so so so one version of three is blended with two and four so it looks one way and then another version of three is blended with 14 and 15. so it looks different every height map
00:55:05
affects all the other height maps that's cool high students yeah so um i think unless you got one more thing to show us we're actually done yeah i actually i do have one more thing to show i think i think it's really cool example to show um we have been working on on very very as we have done this tiny example here right we have done the blob we have done this um what we have what we see now so this is another graph let's take a look at this um this one for example is utilizing a melt note that we have that kind of streaks through our
00:55:54
terrains and and resembles more or less some something like a lava flow or something you know it could be something volcanic use quite often um but let's show something that we have done for pyro um and i believe the the specifically that one height map we have already shown um in some updates already now mind you we're not going to see pyro we're seeing a pyro no no as applied to micro attack exactly so you you see how small these graphs are and how simple they are and what what kind of sim you know what cool results we already get from this you know this is really powerful because with just a couple clicks you know i can throw a couple notes
00:56:43
one two three whatever and then i get a reasonable result from it so this is what we wanted to achieve again speed right speed and quality um and our height maps like for all the game devs that i might be watching out there our height maps are only uh 1 000 by 1 000 you know 1k resolution basically so uh it's not like we can push for crazy amounts of detail no it's actually 2k but still um our height maps are 2 uh roughly two by two and all the other data is one by one so it's not like we can push for crazy amounts of uh detail so this is this is this workflow and this approach we're taking is perfect for us but let's take a look at a more defined graph you can see that there's a lot more going on
00:57:29
you know it's uh it yes it's it's a these decently long um decently long substance graph but it's still super manageable and and uh and okay and the this is the result we get from this um let's uh push this one away because we want to focus on that guy so we have these mountains there's some heavy erosion going on right you we have um we have some some wind erosion or some type of erosion that started eroding one side but not the other indicating that there's there might be some winds going on or soil sliding down the hill as you can see by these streaks and such and something that you already mentioned
00:58:20
jared is you know we can always go back to a node and then change an aspect about it and generate a completely new heightmap from this so let's say i'm super happy with the result and everything works as i wanted to and now i'm going to work on pyro and let's say we need 15 of those right because we have 15 no sorry 16 slots right uh so let's say we need 15 of those okay so i can basically be like okay i'm going to take this um and simply you know change the seed a random seed so it will simply generate a new variation of the very first node but since that changed all the other notes will change as well and in the end as you can see now i'll get a completely different result
00:59:11
by just changing a single value i can produce a completely new height map again not something specific to us this is very like by now this is standard in the entire uh games industry procedural materials um this is this is how most material artists work but we are applying this to height maps so now i can for instance change this from a basic noise to a billowy noise and it will again completely alter the look of this height map and give me an entirely different result i can also flatten it out if i want something flatter okay this is a little too extreme right but let's say i go down with the octaves and and restrict the range something healthier here
01:00:01
because not all the mountains are using the entire range of our spectrum see just by adjusting two things quite quickly i can produce uh an entirely new result if i'm happy with this i'm exporting it to the editor which i can do validated on the planet oh i have actually replaced it so i'm going to get back to it there it is plop did i export it
01:00:50
export again and of course it's important to remember that this is a hype map that's being designed for the terrain of pyro and not one that was designed for the terrain of microtech so uh the finished result you're gonna see here is not exactly uh the no this is yeah this is just for demonstration purposes right but you can see that parts of the height map are showing and other hearts are hidden because it's blending into all the other heightmaps and uh yeah as we already mentioned a couple of times all the biomes all the spruce trees here um i can for instance now take an obsidian area and paint it in here if i like to right and change the entire um biome and object scattering that we have on this specific area and yeah this is
01:01:40
this is how we go about the creation of height maps basically these procedures these workflows going back and forth validating in substance validating in the editor uh checking if our um if our biomes are painted down correctly and if they if the if the data like these streaks here if it all picks up well if it's not too noisy making test drives on these right will people hate us or not so this is this is basically how how we go about these things yeah this is it and i think we're done jared right yeah we're done awesome any questions any closing no we're we're out of time you can stop your screen share okay cool i know that that's me that's that's two of me let's go back hi uh so yeah so patrick
01:02:28
thank you so much for taking the time uh to be here on the show with us this week um uh as as usual you know uh with uh stress in live we always like to vacillate between the q a shows and the game dev shows where we showcase your process and i think i i really enjoyed it and i think looking from the chat the folks really enjoyed taking this look at you know just how how how something as seemingly simple as a height map is a little 2k texture file uh sits at the basis of a whole lot of what they see uh as the basis of every planet so that's very cool um as we usually do we are going to throw uh the raid to a star citizen streamer who's broadcasting right now uh i understand it is the dark law uh so if you see so if you're sitting here and you're watching uh live on twitch you should see a little raid indicator go up in the chat
01:03:17
go ahead and jump in there and when that starts tell them uh what what what should they tell for the dark law when they rate him patrick what does he do what's he up to i actually don't know the dark law very well i assume he's a he's a law enforcement person who operates at night ask him to do limbo or something like that i don't know i don't know i do know he's playing a 311 ptu today so you can check that out and uh just just tell them uh patrick says patrick says uh hello saying hi take care everybody see you next week have a nice weekend bye you

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