Inside Star Citizen: Jump On It | Fall 2019

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   jump points the gateways between star systems these wormholes through space bring with them the promise of star citizen's expansion beyond just a standard system and at citizencon 2949 we got to see the first successful traversal between stellar clusters with our arrival and pyro from the branching path design to the volumetric cloud tech encompassing from the massive gateway structure itself to the particle Eddie's the player must navigate within from the lighting to the VFX and more to celebrate this milestone we sat down at the desk of assistant art director Jake Gainey for a decompressed discussion of all aspects covering the creation of our very first jump point and to hear from some of the members of the team who worked to bring star citizen's first date way between star

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   systems to life [Music] we've always known it we want to do like

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   wormholes and jump points some previous was done I think back in 2014-2015 a lot of early concepts went out to Chris I was working with Marcel on the concept side of things so we've done a lot of loose investigations first to understand do we want something big do you want something this small does it fit into the law of SC there's several things you can play with such as you know is its Farrakhan's its injure calls its square the very kind of like or call shapes that you can kind of play with and then how that thing would operate how you'd enter it what's it look like to the third person as well as the first person so just to get those ideas out there and in several iterations for weeks right and then we kind of like settled on what you kind of saw in a demo so I think it's a really good opportunity for me to know show you some of the content live

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   in the editor maybe run through some of the processes that we went through to build this content and just speak a little bit about our processes this is the this is the Stanton location bridge it isn't just confined to one area as well the cool thing gives us though don't even notice demo but we we arrived at the edge of a nebula this is all contained in the same scene so I can zoom out of this location and you can see again this is fully volumetric so the the approach for this is using the gas cloud tech that's been developed I mean it's been developed super if they're specifically for the coil but the more that we've developed with it the more that we've realized that we can actually start to build entire space scenes with this and for the the persistent universe obviously it's less of a linear experience than it is for squadron 42 because we're

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   squadron 42 we know the exact location that will bring players into these though these space capes and we'll know how we're going to direct the player into them when we're building content for the persistent universe it needs to be a little bit more 360 than that eye needs to be a bit more flexible so you can see from this gas cloud that we've got here we can pretty much move it to any position and we'll still be able to get like kind of a good feeling from in the core vibe the cool thing isn't something that we've done a lot in squadron 42 as well it's been able to actually construct these areas with polygons with the design team to get exactly what we want represented in the engine just to show you a little bit behind the the process and to build in space games like this with this boy about Richter we do use a little bit of Houdini to kind of generate this content and I can show you this is the obviously

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   this is a combination of various different different elements we've had a lot of internal tools developed by the kind of the VFX tech team who have built what we call CI g-cloud tools they build the CI G cloud tools to be able to basically turn geometry into gas cloud so with with this kind of like shape that you see here this has all been built our geometry all of my own preference I've built this and for yes monks but really you can build this in Houdini as well and then we're able to almost sculpt environments with geometry and then turn it into the gas cloud afterwards so I can just quickly boot up the actual wormhole itself this is a it's a separate scene actually in the game it's part of an object containers that we

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   stream in this in the the kind of talent we've had like a new entity belt I don't know a great deal about the entity the awesome part of this is I should traverse him through the the wormhole were actually going into a completely new system you know we're not faking and if then here we're actually traveling to the new system and even even myself working on this every single day that still blows my mind I'm still kind of completely taken aback by the technology that were able to kind of bring for this game we had been Perry who's the one of the graphics engineers in the UK common and builders of brand new shader there's already I shaded that the VFX team has used that it's mostly for doing kind of like where you would use a particle effect but you don't want to have one and that's called the effect transparent so that has a lot of tweakable slider II

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   kind of things for them to mess around with so what we actually did was combine that with a more traditional shader that could do lighting and opaque geometry and that kind of thing and then through all that in front of Jake and he picked out which bits he was actually going to use so then we just deleted out all the bits that we didn't want to use and then started specializing different parts of it to get the kind of details that he wanted out of it kind of fly freely and you can see some of the kind of variations that we have to put on us this is all this is all real time in the engine as well like we were kind of again we're not faking anything here this is all this is all kind of constructed and you can see there's lots are kind of cool variations we built this for the demo we never actually go down these roots but conversations that we had with designed very early on with Tobias and design we were saying okay well we have the capability with the

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   technologies that we have to build secondary roots do you want the men and he was like yeah cool put them in we might not go to hung them but we've got them and we can explore them in veneto so it's good to know that in the future that will hopefully have kind of branching paths and the opportunity to go to different locations here you can see from from here like the defamation of the surface as we had their vertex F formation in the engine before but the vertex defamation that we had the better that permission by the way is driving the the kind of uh suppose the animation on the surface of this thing the vertex defamation we had in previous shader work was very uniform and we couldn't get any variation or displacement to the way there that kind of animates on the surface so something that been put into the shader where that forest was the ability to pour very ation and that defamation so we could

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    get this kind of like overwhelmed we feel to it and if hidden had something that really helped us when it came online and then we had Caleb which is the principal effects artists come online and build a lot of the local particles that we see in little as well and I actually think that that that really helped give directionality to the tunnel when we felt like we were losing it because of the speed being slowed down Caleb came in and built these particles that you see here and I felt that ball of that back hopefully just in time for the demo they know something that kind of tripped us up as well though because quite late on we had some feedback I think a very late play test we've seen quite a lot of feedback on the first iteration of this thing because we wanted to feel incredibly fast which meant I made it incredibly fast but then you couldn't do to straight turns you couldn't do a

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    90-degree turn because the kayak would 100% crash because it like the speed I had but we've got feedback constantly that it was like no I want more turns I wanted more up and downs I wanted we've got a good reference with Space Mountain and we look at a lot of YouTube videos unlike that and rollercoasters in general especially with this like how you build up to this like when you go up before you get a free fall so then Jake and I we just talked and may change this to his spline because obviously that modular set was kind of working then so we could go to Dini which he worked in moved to spline around quickly exported which was a little bit of work but then we could get it into game and we could test Vega so what you can see here on the screen is it's the tunnel route entirely and so it's from start to finish the way this began is that tobias

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    and design would go away and he would construct the tunnel out of what we call designer solids so simple primitives in the engine and then we would come in afterwards and use Houdini to generate that into a mesh my first point I put in my head that I always kept there was like it needs to be modular built so it could use our modular take that we're already building and we're using for like the rest stops so you can say this is the obviously the kind of final generated match all of the chambers and also if i zoom in here as well you'll see the obstacles be you know columns are obviously or as we call them in turn at the obstacles that you fly between they're all procedurally generated across the surface of the tunnel I say build to the match and it's all driven by this spline here so what we've built

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    in the end is we were very very keen to build a system that we could you know generate hundreds of these in the future or to build more and more of this content and to also have that flexibility that we needed from design so design would come online and say we want like this part of the tunnel to be a ninety degree turn it's like it's no problem because you can take the spline here move it around it takes a little while to generate but you can see how straightaway we've got an entirely new route there and it's procedurally generated the columns across that roof it's procedurally generated the chambers across that roof so we've got a system hopefully that's got a lot of flexibility to it we need to change anything we need to build anything it's all there and it's all possible and actually in the end we we had an awful

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    lot of support from both of the VFX tech team and also a lot of the effects artists I'm building the final content so actually what we delivered was was a real team effort the building the world so what we learned this week we learned that the technologies developed for squadron 42 can benefit star citizens persisting universe in new and exciting ways and that jump points are more than just connections between star systems to aim to test the pilots mettle as you navigate it's Eddie's and Flo's obstacles and branching paths within four inside star citizen I'm Jared Huckaby we'll see you next week thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our

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    website at www.uvu.edu/library