10 for the Artists: Episode 01 (2015.04.28)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] welcome to the pilot episode of 10 for the artist uh this is a pilot episode of a show that is brought to you by you um your subscriptions help make this possible and I'm Lance Powell the supervising director of cloud Imperium on Star Citizen and this is and Bachelor Junior 3D artist I did I had to think about it yeah I almost forgot who I was sorry go ahead uh yeah senior 3D artist uh on Star Citizen just to kind of get things going what uh what do you work on specifically specifically I work on ships and making ships possible in

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   our game by building pretty polygons and uh can you describe um the uh the complexity of uh oh man the ships I I mean I can but I don't know if we have enough time for that okay perfect because I've got 10 questions that come from the audience and I hope one of those questions show up so we'll have to answer it anyway okay okay uh so the first question is from OD um the question is the ships and Star Citizen require functional Interiors with room for things such as power plants Shield generators and so on how is this influence the interior or exterior design of the ships so it influences both the inter interior and the exterior in different ways so um smaller ships that don't really have interior spaces

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   the components that the ship carries influences directly the shape of the ship so the bigger a component the larger that section of the ship has to be in order to house the component so good ships to look at that would have that would be the Hornet um the 300i the upcoming new version of the uh Merlin basically we have to shape the ship to make sure that it can house all the components that it's supposed to house so that's the exterior for the interior it depends on what components are going to be accessible to the player from the interior so let's say for example something happens to your power plant and you're on a constellation for example there's a space inside the constellation where the player can go and interact with that object which then means we have to create a hallway that's wide enough for the player to go into

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   that we have panels that open up and there's enough clearance space and things like that so the spaces will change inze depending on the things that you interact with so all the components will shape the ships in uh in every way actually so I couldn't help notice but notice that you had a little gleam in your eyes when you mentioned the Merlin uh can you can you talk about uh that ship and uh specifically where you started and then how you got to uh where you are with the uh with those volumes keeping those volumes in mind sure sure um so getting the concept model of Merlin which is I think what's currently in Arena Commander right now that's actually the concept model it's not the final one so I had to sit down and go ahead and get all the components that the Merlin was supposed to house get all

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   the proper sizes for them and then plop them into the ship and realize that none of it actually fits correctly which then means I have to go through a process of changing the shapes uh you know making certain sections fatter making certain sections thinner to make sure that it all fits and then once that's done I have to go through a pass of actually finessing the shapes making sure that it communicates the right personality and things like that so um I use let's say a Mustang or traditional muscle cars as influences for that on top of making sure that all the components work so uh yeah we we went through a lot of pains to make sure that functioned because the Merlin is an incredibly small ship so you don't really have a lot of room to play when it comes to that uh but we made it happen and it looks PR awesome you you talk like a man uh who's been on your 10th date with ship and things are

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   going wrong yeah so okay second question uh it's a two-parter uh from two different people uh from cyberwolf the question is what types of reference materials do you use for weapons and ships and the uh second question comes from solo uh which is when you start out to design anything how do you get your inspiration do you walk around the office surf the Internet watch Star Trek any other science well the absolute first thing that we tend to do or that I tend to do anyway is find out how the thing works that's like number one like does it fold in this way do things deploy from this location things like that for follows function exactly uh so then we'll go ahead and do a resource dig a reference dig on things that do the same thing like landing gears for example or how guns will deploy what does the housing actually look like and

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   things like that so we have tons of references um to help us actually figure out those sections and then we start thinking about how do we communicate the personality of the ship and that'll come through you you know getting like you said before uh old Russian helicopters for Mk for example or um stealth actual contemporary stealth planes like the SR71 for uh ages things like that or like I mentioned before Mustangs or muscle cars for Krueger and things like that so we have uh a language that we want to Define for each manufacturer and so we'll go ahead and do reference digs for those you know the thing the elements that we want to incorporate for that look and uh that's basically how we do it and it doesn't really matter we we'll look at sci-fi we'll look at World War II references and things like that

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   so we'll grab whatever works and take the elements that we really really like and incorporate them yeah I think uh to also round that out is the uh now that the manufacturers and and the ships are starting to fit into a manufacturer uh that we've had to start defining what those manufacturers actually look like so you know if you uh for example come up with a new ship that um is from AIS or Anvil well there's a distinct language that needs to start uh needs to be applied to those manufacturers that gives them that particular look uh for example uh MK would be uh MK would be old Russian helicopters right so it's uh they have a lot of funky looking shapes is what they what they're basically known for at least their older ships are like that

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   some of the newer ones are a little more streamlined but this cuz they're new right they're coming up with the times now right exactly um Anvil for example they have a lot of Fighters military ships they have more of sort of like a blocky look to their design agis is a lot sleeker things like that so uh yeah that's right so uh we're taking things forward uh and moving them forward is going to be a lot more refined uh by manufacturers the ships will actually start becoming more distinct by that manufacturer type question number four I'll go back to three question number four from cyberwolf do the artists hang out together and exchange ideas with each other uh or is an artist in Island catering to their particular

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    strengths no we hang out we share ideas on a minute to- minute basis basically I'll call somebody over and say hey how does this look does it look like trash does it look amazing what do you think right I may love it and someone else will be like well that totally doesn't work and I'm like well why not why doesn't it work right um and I'll do the same thing to them so we go back you do it to me all the time right it's so the big thing is it's a team effort right so you know people get kind of tired of hearing this in a lot of cases but you know I say there's no there's no I in team and the reality is that you know the the artist in me wants to own a thing um but you know not everyone's strong at everything uh you know except for Ellen but you know the the idea is that you do want to play guys for their strengths uh and you don't want to be the case all the time

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    you want everyone to have you know ultimately the exact same set of strengths but given that you know production is that rarely ever happens you know we start spreading people around and making sure that what's getting the attention is the ship uh which is what the priorities on and not necessarily the individual so the individual brings their best to that thing and if it can't close out with that artist we'll close it out with somebody else in the team the third question is from Rodell the great when can we expect to see some concept for a animals plants um he's looking forward to seeing what trees and Wildlife and other plants look like you can't take that one I can't take that one I wish I could take that I'm acting no well I can't I don't know the answer but I'm I want to know too okay so the the long and short of the long

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    and short of it is uh that the um the alien races are being uh fleshed out right now as we speak um their home plants are being fleshed out uh by the writers as we speak um the details of those alien races are they're as complex as I think you'd expect them to be given the scope of the project uh and by that I mean not every alien you see on Star Trek comes from the same gravity style planet in our world we've got a handful of alien races where um some are going to come from heavier G planets so it impacts the way they look uh some come from energy plan impacts the way they look um you know one of the things that uh we've been kicking around for a while and starting

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    to reflect uh the way that they look as a vuel um and the vuel uh um operate on a much higher spatial function than humans so they tend to think very 3D they operate very 3D the entire environment is very 3D uh and by that I mean we walk on a 2d plane you know the way that we drive is usually on a 2d plane uh so everything that we do tends to be very 2D um if you remember the Wrath of Khan you know the way they beat him uh as I said yeah the guy operates 2D in other words he's going to attack and then Circle back and attack again and they went they went in depth right right um so you know these things are starting to to manifest right now uh plants uh is being worked on by the persistent Universe uh Team uh which is uh manned by Mark Skelton uh and uh we

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    should start seeing some of the persistent univers stuff come online within the next month month and a half uh persistent universe and the um I'm drawing a huge blank on the other component of the game which is the social module social module so the social module is uh is coming along also in a month and that's where um the audience is going to have the first opportunity to see a lot of the the plants the animals are different story uh animals is something that uh we've been kicking around for a while because we do have pets we do have pets we do have pets so I want some alien alien pets right we do have we're supposed to have alien pets we're going to have alien pets we haven't started concepting those alien pets yet and that is something that uh I think once the universe puts a nail in a handful of environments that they'll slowly start

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    working on that awesome skipping number five we going to number six uh six questions from Steve Hunter it's a good one since the ship pipelines changed more than once in parenthesis how are the ships handled in art in the art phase do you draw them on the inside out uh or the outside in that's a good question so far we have done it simultaneously so a lot of the ships uh the Merlin's a great example I did the modeling for the exterior while Paul forgi which is another uh senior 3D artist uh was working on the cockpit and he's continuing to work on it right now um so basically what we do is we Define our boundaries and we basically say hey don't cross this this boundary otherwise you're starting to clip out to the exterior or on my end don't cross this boundary or I'm clipping into the

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    interior so we basically just Define where like the line we draw the line on the sand and say don't go over that side and we're good and then we can basically work you know in isolation in our different scenes and we'll go back and forth every day just to make sure things are getting updated properly um but that's basically how we handle it how how we've handled it so far how do you uh how do you bridge the gap so once you meet in the middle where do you go all right we got to and uh pull these influences from these into this one well that that's kind of more of an organic process it comes down to so we're we're working from the same base of references to begin with so we should already be starting at a good place um then what happens is it depends on you know what's what's going to be leading the charge in terms of the shape language uh so if the exterior is going to be leading the

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    charge which in a lot of ways it usually is that will then influence how the interior must change its shape language so that it looks like it fits so it's but it's an organic process you know I'll do something and say hey Paul what do you think of this if he likes it then yeah cool let's make this change to the interior to make sure it fits with the exterior and we'll go back and forth do you do you draw them inside out how do you what are your what phases do you go through in order to get to the final product okay so ideally the process is uh we get a concept done uh generally we have a couple of concept artists in house uh but a lot of our concepts are getting done out house with sourcing uh David hobin is doing some great stuff um he basically defines what the ship looks like and if it meets all of the gameplay requirements then essentially it then

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    becomes a process of just getting that concept to work in game now in situations where that isn't such a smooth transition because for gameplay reasons things don't actually work or we have to make changes at that point we have to Pivot and say okay well we'll have to start doing some concept ourselves and at that point it's us sort of reconception certain sections making sure it works sometimes it leads to an almost complete redo of certain ships and then we'll go into the full modeling process where we basically do all of our geometry after we're done with that we'll do something called custom normals which basically makes our Geo look better without using as much Geo so it's a cheaper way of making our ships look circling back to that first question right um then we'll go through our material paths where we basically Define

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    what the surfaces are made of and how they look and how light reflects off of it and things like that then we'll go through the process of making them totally destructible so that you can blow holes in all of our beautiful hard work oh wait there's one more uh we also at some point in there have to make sure that animation gets a hand on it to make sure that you know all the panels open the landing gear deploys the character can actually sit in the cockpit play with the joystick and things like that so there's a huge amount of steps absolutely yeah so the uh seventh question is from punster has there been any particular design artwork that made you think wow I can't wait to see this in game all right I'm a huge I mean you guys probably already know this but I'm a huge Fanboy of David hobbins and yeah I've seen your desktop yeah you've seen my desktop exactly it's pictures of David hobbins okay on the

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    beach um no I wish I wish I had that um it's some it's the Reliant which is uh one of our new Miss ships which hasn't been revealed yet um I really love that ship and um I hope I get to work on it I'm really excited for it yeah I heard you call dibs on it yeah well I tried to but you know ultimately it's not up to me right you know under the table all you know cash well there there's one there's one other thing I mean we see concept every day coming in and just some of the bigger ships like some of these gigantic Capital ships I literally can't wait to to be able to fly my small ship into the hanger of a bigger ship hop out start blasting fools steal one of their ships and fly back out like the moment I can

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    do that that's it I'm done that's that's what I've been waiting for right so right yeah I think in my case it's got to be almost the exact same thing so I'm going back to the Vanguard the Vanguard is just such a a sexy looking ship um and it does everything that I I wanted to do in in the type of ship that I like to fly you know so getting to that to a stage so where we're going from concept to in game that tiny little window is what I'm looking forward to because that's where the magic happens uh tiny little secret um elen's doing some tweaks to the the uh freelancer yeah and it's looking sexy something you wouldn't normally say about the freelancer uh well not something I would normally say about the

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    freelancer but right I may say it after this all right hopefully so the fifth question that I skipped over because we were kind of bunching them all up uh was uh it's from amono Amo which one Amon Amon when it comes to clothing of the characters are you designing them with expectation that we'll be able to change their colors patterns materials what sort of challenges has the idea um of customizing presting you the short answer is yes um those are things that we're going to be doing um uh customization uh across the board is something that we have been focused on for a long time uh so the ability to change your skin the shape of your body the clothing

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    from the shoulders all the way down to the ankles the types of accessories that you're going to wear those have been the books for a while um the the challenges that we've uh come up against so far aren't with the customization customization per se but it's really with how we're utilizing the technology and the customization so for example a lot of the technology that we're using for cloth simulation is from rise rise did some things beautifully uh and to take that to the next stage means that we get to encounter brand new tech issues uh so the nod that we're taking from film is to take basically a normal type pattern for a shirt for example by pattern I mean not just the not the

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    textural pattern but how is this thing cut how is it stitched so that as you start doing your simulations it actually starts to fold and sit on the person the way that you'd expect it to Something That We're actually looking at at this very particular moment and are we going to be doing that real time uh real time that's awesome so that's another thing that we're looking at uh which is the Fidelity uh of the claw simulation the the portions of the game that are coming out soon won't reflect that but the long-term picture of that stuff uh will have all the bells and whistles so the character will be completely customizable um the um the simulations that the characters will have on them will probably be a mixture of something very simple and something very complex the eyeballs looking at Center Mass the chest we're probably going to put some

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    more Fidelity around those those areas um but that's those are still up in the air um but in terms of the uh ability to to kind of fine-tune your particular character you're going to have a lot of flexibility I'm going to skip eight for now go down to nine um is from Death Talon this is a great question as someone that is uh interested in getting into 3D art where do you suggest they start what programs or tools where do you go first uh uh well so the first thing is so when I was first starting to learn how to use Maya which is the tool of choice for me there are some guys here who like using 3ds Max and we always biger about it um just for the record we have one guy in house who's actually using uh soft and M what yeah oh wait yeah you're right that guy

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    um that guy yeah so the great thing about the world we live in right now is that you can almost get every question that you have about how to do something from YouTube or online right when I was first learning how to do it the way I did it was I went to the help page on Maya and went through every tool one by one figuring out what does what by actually failing at it nonstop right I didn't have like this beautifully uh edited video showing me exactly how something works so literally step one is just get a copy of it they have student versions that are free and start doing it like start from step one that that would be how you do it that's right it's literally that simple right I started in an era that was a little bit different uh than yours uh mine was more um like CAD drawing on paper ohen okay scan that

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    in plot your points out no I'm kidding that wasn't that bad yeah but your your spot on I think that the uh you know there's great schools that can train you in how to be a a a very solid artist they'll train you specifically in the use of the tool as a general artist all across the board um the ability to bring stuff to the table the the talents that the individual has is going to be a little bit different uh you know people show up with with with interests that that uh that lean them towards a little more technical a little more artistic um those things depending on the type of person that you are um will almost govern your your interest and your your focus um but I think that to Ellen's point that there's there's enough

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    material on on YouTube the very very least to get started um you know the things that you can't measure ever our uh passion Drive uh and a person's person ability to grow you know and those are independent of school and so on so you know I think that to the question from my perspective is always one of you know as an artist uh you know am I profession in the technology and the tools that I'm going to be using but then the more important thing is do I give a damn about what I'm working on and the stuff I'm doing um because that's what makes the difference between you know decent good and great right right right I mean also I mean you make a good point just being proficient in a tool is just step

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    one to be able to actually produce work that doesn't necessarily mean the work will be good right so being an artist and knowing my are actually two different things two very different things right so the the easiest one of those to to get good at is just learning the tools right which you can easily do through uh YouTube or any other online resource right becoming an artist that's a lot a lot harder right much harder right um but yeah so 10th question uh is from brith um and he asks can we expect to see cool graffiti uh in some of the depressed crime ridden areas uh maybe some nice Regional differences from the planets and anything inspired by the Shian and vuel yes um the persistent Universe uh team is

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    working aot lot at creating a huge mix of environments uh spaces uh that reflect various cultures the distance between the culture and a widely populated um system uh so for example if you're from Earth uh everything around Earth will be built up and bustling the further you get away from Earth will start feeling a little more you know kind of rough and Tumbl the further you are away from Earth's influence you're much more on that edge and uh of of uh the names of the NPCs right now that we're working with are are specifically called as boring as they are by name uh Frontier uh and uh

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    it is uh you know the types of Frontier are you you know kind of an outlaw type person are you a pirate type person are you somebody who you know a good description of front could actually be like um you know Luke's Home Planet could be a frontier um you know Serenity could be Frontier um you know but it's opposite of Star Trek which is you know close to the the the home planet right which looks nice and shiny and built up graffiti is really interesting it's uh you know it's something that we talked about um with one of the teams and that you wouldn't expect traditional graffiti at least on a space station right so the question always becomes well if everyone has these digital components everyone's got this digital stuff where did they get the spray paint right um and what

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    kid is running around spray paint tagging on a space station right so we do have a case with the the Nyx space station which is a der uh asteroid uh space station that's been kind of run down it's got a feel of kind of Aira I guess is the best way to describe it um question always comes back to the environment which is where they get the spray pain so how we go forward is a digital spray point it's something something we haven't really explored yet so uh we do know it's something that that we we have to do there may be an opportunity where people can actually put their own tags or so on in the future so we have to solve that that problem um and the very last question um which is number eight out of 10 right circling back from L wolf which is how do you personally deal with negative criticism when you're

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    presenting something you'd otherwise be proud of oh man that's hard Best For Last um every I mean I everyone deals with that differently right it's uh it's something that you uh sort of learn to uh not take personally because really at the end of the day what we're all trying to do is make the best game possible and US specifically we're trying to accomplish that by making the best art possible and um we may think that something works very very well and it just doesn't and if if we keep holding that close to the chest and we we take the criticisms personally it's just going to make it harder for us to see how we can make the art better so the way I do with it is just realize

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    that it's not a personal thing right like I although I put myself in in the artwork that I create the artwork isn't actually me it's the thing I made that's right and so you are just trying to help me make that better and so is everyone else and so you know why would I take that personally so that it's not always easy to do that that um everyone deals with it differently but that's how that's my perspective is we're all on the same team right yeah yeah I think to add to that it's this is one of those projects that's not like a traditional console project it's not a three four year property where you're in a bubble hidden from the world for a long time and then all of a sudden one day the marketing uh machine gets turned on six months beforehand and then you're like here's our stuff and the world goes okay that looks pretty cool six months later

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    it's in their hands and they're playing it and then you start watching The Meta critic score do this thing right we're not that case it's a very public company it's a huge property um you know we've got a lot of really you know top top men working on the job and women uh working on the job and it's one of those cases where you know we're slowly rolling stuff out to the public you know and an alpha state where they have opportunity to see things you know sometimes as short as day of the thought of the original thing right you know uh and so it's a very rare case where um you know if somebody doesn't like something you you typically go yeah you know we got it out there to test it out it's Alpha right um at some point in time it's going to be refined

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    and then redefined and then redefined and then rolled back out polished and I think that uh you know this is one of those properties where you know you really can't you put your passion into it you know um and you meet the vision of uh of you know whose Vision we're matching uh and then uh and you go forward so as long as you're your passion satisfied uh you know that's usually where I think we we tend to kind stop the the um how hard we get impacted by criticism uh it's like yeah I did my best we did a great job I like the way it looked right you can't please everybody um you know but godamn it looks great you know uh and again you know like the

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    lightsaber with a little exert on the end I had absolutely no problems with that right me NE a lot of people hated it right in the end they're going to see it they're going to be like H that's cool they're going to forget about it two seconds later that's the thing though right because there's so much there's so much more to take in right it's just a tiny little thing right all right well thanks a lot for hanging out with us uh the first ever hopefully not the last T of the artists subscriber based show right so thank you very very much for making this show possible and all the other 10 for the blanks um so leave some comments down below tell us you know what you think of uh our answers to your questions and uh thanks again for hanging out with us I'm ow Bachelor the 27th it'll be the 28th next time you see him I'm Lance Powell uh and

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    goodbye yeah see you in the verse see you the [Applause] first hey guys thanks for watching um temp for the chairman uh if you guys would like to uh see more episodes go here if you guys would like to subscribe to our YouTube channel and always keep up to date with all our video content go here and uh if you guys would like to watch episodes around the verse go here please and I will see you in the verse