Inside CIG . Roundtable . Art . Pt 2

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:01

   foreign so let's start with the process we start with the character concept right so lead us through the table here how we get something done uh well it sort of starts with what character we need for like the first iteration of what we're going to release which is the the hangar so right now it's concentrating on the the main character for the hangar so we have a concept artist sort of Designing some things once that is approved through a person myself then it goes to Mark to actually build it out using zbrush and various tools so so usually what I do then is I will take the concept and just kind of do a rough

2. 00:00:52

   Block in make sure that the the size and the silhouette is correct something quick so I can I can usually show Chris Roberts and make sure that I'm on the right track because you know obviously from a concept to a 3D scope there's always some issues that come up like for some of the stuff I had to like like reduce the chest plate a little bit so you had a little more Mobility you know in the arms which I talked to Brian about you know beforehand to make sure that everything is that what I'm guessing at is true and like the way that the shoulder pads like fold in on each other is correct it's more real world it always happens in Concepts where if you do it straight to the concept it reduces Mobility so much that when you

3. 00:01:42

   put it in the game it doesn't look right so usually you have to either size things down or redesign them a little bit so that they work in real world so there's a lot of testing back and forth between what he's designing or building and and Brian as far as like what's you know capable of like movement and stuff so how do you do that part Brian is that motion capture oh okay so the kind of the full process uh there are a lot of technical requirements to making sure a character works in game and one of them is to make sure that the character Mark is building is fitting our skeleton we have a skeleton that we went back and forth on with the character our base character which we've already seen released and kind of figured out where all our joint placement used to be from now on any

4. 00:02:30

   character artist who builds a mill for our game now has to fit this in particular template and uh yeah there is a lot of back and forth between Mark and myself and uh will this in particular piece of armor work will this spacesuit work how do these tubes that are running along the spacesuit uh need to be built properly to uh to animate properly so there's a lot of thought process that goes into technically making uh these these in particular spacesuits work we can't get away with things in video games that we can get away with in movies it's movies it's matte you know sometimes you can fake something to make that shot look proper video games that has to look good all the time uh so once I have the character and he's skinned up

5. 00:03:17

   and he's looking good and and everything's been approved the next step is to take a set of animations given to me usually by Design so hey we need these in particular animations I then look at those animations and determine is this an animation that should be hand keyed where I go in there by hand and hand key whatever it happens to be or is this something that we can capture quickly and easily with motion capture if it's motion capture then we go out and we shoot it and edit it put it on our character make sure that again there's animation is probably one of the more technical sides of art development for a game and then how much of that interacts with Chris so obviously if you have your character you've got to fit inside correct I mean all of that has to be

6. 00:04:04

   that is actually something I'm really really happy about in this game and I love the fact that being on the ground floor at this game we were able to do something that I actually haven't been able to do in a game ever and which is I made a little proxy character with a little blocked out cockpit to figure out here's the different kind of control schemes here's where all the the panels can be that a character can actually reach I then made a little proxy file and I handed it off to to Chris and he's able to pop that right in move it around wherever he wants in his scene and line up all of his controls yeah now this doesn't take into effect that there's like alien races that are going to have completely different sets of like animations and ships once we get an alien species like the van dual um who's uh you know much taller than a human do the same thing we'll get him in

7. 00:04:53

   we'll get him in the proper position then I'll hand that off and let the the whoever's modeling the ship pop that in and customize their cockpit to fit the character as opposed to having the character fit uh the cockpit I can't tell you how many games I've worked on where I'm handed a model and the characters go through the floorboard of the of the Jeep or or whatever it happens to be and then there's a lot of back and forth it's going to be interesting because we're the idea is eventually we're going to be able to like have a human be able to fly like a vandal type so there's gonna be a big thought process as far as like customization and because the size difference between the Vandal and the human you know how you need to retrofit that

8. 00:05:41

   ship to be able to fly it so it's probably gonna put wooden blocks on his feet like he's stealing his Daddy's car booster side is that what's going to happen a little little lever to push the seat forward yeah or maybe there's two humans in it and one works the levers on the bottom yeah Indiana Jones yeah the kidneys yeah on this so then we've got your we've got the character and then where do we go well for me like when that my interaction like um the with the ship and Brian is uh I pretty much you know model it out and I do some test animations and then you know once it's to the point we go back and forth to make sure everything works right and then also for our ships uh we also have another unique thing uh we have I think called heart points which are interchangeable uh gadgets and uh and Equipment uh so it'll be like you

9. 00:06:33

   know weapons you can interchange or engines and stuff like that on top of once I'm done with the ship I have to go back and basically go back and and model those uh those extra hard points model design so that's another extra step and then the ship needs something to land on of course stand so yeah so we've built this uh Landing Pad it's almost like a small level various small details for nerdies and lighting and basically matching the scale of 300 eyes hey Jeff what's an Ernie okay small and decorative detail that just helps bring higher definition to the look of your of your model and Ben finally hanger that's where we got to put all the chips yes what would you

10. 00:07:21

    like to know so how many ships can go on the deluxe hanger and the deluxe hanger right now it's somewhere between 10 and 20 not entirely sure because there's various classes of ships that go in there everything from constellation down to the Aurora I guess so whenever I get these specifications I have to take them accountants say all right they have this much money going into this Hangar so it would be this big and then here are these different set pieces that can be tiled and put into there so on my end uh for concept I'm usually a very technical concept to ours love very clear drafting um which I reference from my experience in the military doing the same thing reading and writing Blueprints and

11. 00:08:09

    drawing up designs for Structural Materials when we would build stuff okay and then decorations for the hanger that's not you as well that is me oh that's you too cool so then I have to go to the programmers to uh work out how the rest of it works I'll make it look good yeah you gotta work out we don't do no programming we limit any program sorry anus we just make things Purdy do we have programmers thanks everybody so this is how the artists do their work and how the ships look and the characters look and the hanger is going to look in the landing pad and then later on we're going to have how the programmers actually make things happen in the engine