Star Citizen Live: Effecting Visuals

7 June 201901:04:451,518 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] hey everybody welcome to star citizen live affecting the visuals this week our show is all about the creation of visual effects and joining us on the show this week is director of visual effects or a visual defect effects director you know he'll tell me which one that is Mike Snowden Mike how you doing man I'm well thanks how are you I'm doing alright which one is it is it director visual effects is the visual effects director is a really matter it doesn't really matter does it I direct the effects directly the effects so we've had you on the show before I think it was last year sometimes we had you having on a panel with a couple other folks we had we we had some generic questions about the effects what we're going to do today you know once we're done talking for a little bit is we're gonna go into we're
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gonna go into the engine and we're going to actually demonstrate a bit about a bit of your team's work some of the things your teams are working on how we create them how that process is done because visual visual effects at least to me are I don't I don't know if many people have ever seen a game without visual effects I see it here all the time in early builds and whatever and I see a designer flying around a ship with absolutely no effects whatnot it's well it's pretty funny looking just it just looks they just look like a rock through space visual effects do so much to bring life to to any scene they're in and so I was really excited to get the opportunity to get you here and to show this for us before we get started why don't you tell us a little bit about
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what your team does specific the visual effects seems like it could cover a lot so so it was a run down what are the types of what are the types of things that we see in star citizen everyday that your team is responsible for Wow okay well as you say I mean the effects kind of everywhere in the game you know and it's sometimes you're doing a good job making the effects when people don't necessarily notice as you say if there's no effects in the scene you know because everything it just looks lifeless and still so one of the things for the effects is is exactly that to kind of create motion and life and movement whereas where otherwise there wouldn't be any we kind of so we serve this design team as much as we do serve the art seems as well you know so even if you think about the most I guess the the the effects I'm most familiar with the
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thirst is on a ship without them you're not necessary going to see that your ships moving you know if you're looking third person mode so yeah we're kind of what kind of servants to the art and design teams really yeah and how did we affect play in the environment placement of dust dust motes flames you know anything again all that kind of motion and movement they expect to see in in a real world environment surface interactions as well so that in bed in the vehicles and a place into the environment footsteps London dust effects all that kind of stuff yeah and in a general sense why why are things like like dust and in fog and stuff necessary it's it's we see this we see
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this question a lot and I'm just gonna hit you with this one right off the bat you know quite we put fog everywhere why is their desk everywhere I was watching I watched the new Godzilla movie last last week and every scene is coated in fog and rain in other stuff which I'm sure absolutely we're not there when they were filming why do we do that well I'm looking outside and every every scene is covered in [ __ ] rain outside so oh no I mean it's an art direction thing you know a lot of you know out there are directors enjoy being able to create atmospheric environments so and I don't mean literally atmosphere because obviously were making the space game but adding things like fog and dust allows scenes to be lit more volumetrically as well so it's really just creating yeah
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just serving the needs of the art direction I guess now before we get started I have to I need to ask you about your what's what's that on the left and I was seeing I'm seeing an 64 I'm seeing what looks like the EU version of the Super Nintendo Wii had their mom I guess in your left my right that's not the Super Nintendo that we had we over here we had this purple monster the purple brick purple brick yeah this is my this is my it's my collection I have surround myself with all my old consoles to kind of remind me of why I got into this industry as cheesy as that sounds but yeah yeah I don't play them as oh yeah I've got it I've got my Dreamcast up and running it's not at the moment obviously it's just there but yeah yeah so yeah I just I just love all the all the old games
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I got consoles I got a I got one of those all-in-one consoles they sell it like the fair that does like five rows actually it's 7 consoles in one I think yeah it's on a premium for space but I just like of it I that's not what this shows about we're gonna get off consoles I just somebody would somebody would kill me if we talked about consoles the entire era would you I would like to do it so let's go ahead and jump anything so I understand you've got a you've got a scene set up for us yeah sure ok so I'll switch to that okay can you see that Dagon's there so this is just a super simple scene this is the kind of a variant of my my good old faithful test particle scene I just filled this with you know just all kinds of park was
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really but I thought that for the purpose of this of this I would start with a simple an effect as possible really it's just this tiny little dot this whole thing I was like a modern art installation yeah well there's actually a reason for this so this was when I was originally setting up different scale explosion effects and damage effects so these were I think this is 2 meters for me is and it was all kind of incremental scales to make sure that the right the right scale was in adhere to but yeah so so I would say 80% a large chunk of the VFX artists job EIG in particular is working with particles mm-hmm and so yeah we have we have well it's actually called the VFX editor now because there's more to it now than just just particles it used to be the
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particle editor but now it compasses a few more things which are all kind of probably elaborate on lights around but yeah so in its end its kind of most simple form we can just place my basic effect and you can see that I'm going to come around I can draw draw with it do my signature and then from there you know depending on what the requirements are whatever the whatever the art the art team have requested all the designers have requested this thing will eventually become something completely different it could become dust rain fog like we'll just be talking about it could be become a thruster anything that you can think of this in the game this V effects it can be coming up all through this both of this editor become one of those
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things I think I can kind of jump to something to another example of something quite different that's just a sign this so here you go we just got some fairly simple sparks really using GP particle so I have that looks ribbon L to increase the count significantly its collide in you can see it's kind of colliding with the environment it's been affected by the gravity that I've got set up on the scene as well if I switch the gravity off it will change what the effect looks like first ones one thing about working with particles really is there's lots of we kind of very much try to adhere to the real-world settings I guess to kind of make them as believable believable as possible can we kill bear gravity and see what happens sure yeah you like to bear with me I'll be usually
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I've got all these windows across three different monitors so I'm just going to be dragging things into the to the main screen for the purpose of this demo so yeah if I switch the gravity off they go off it goes I do the same thing in no gravity okay I noticed the color changes you're moving it what is that yes so this is this is kind of particle color over life the reason here is the the hotter it is the Col is going to change based on the heat of the thing so I've got I guess I've got to take a look Oh lots of hierarchies as well the particles we're not just limited to one one emitter but yeah we've got a color right in here so this is the particle
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age curve so the life of this particle is specified here so this the each of these individual particles are gonna last for the three three seconds I've actually got a random value on it as well without the randomization everything starts to look a lot more uniform so suppose I just stripped that backing see it's all looking very uniform now and yeah changing the color over the edge you'll see that the value kind of increase it so it's it's blue for basically half of its life and then it starts to go orange but also what go on sorry beer oh yeah I'm just gonna say we've also got an alpha curve on as well so actually while it's changing color it's also becoming less and less opaque so they gradually dissipates into the air how many particles are we looking at
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here well it's a count of 20,000 so that's 20,000 particles in this one single of that yep yep that's right yeah yeah that's fine though that's fine let's just let's go 200,000 why don't you can see what's happening as well because there's such a high count now I don't if you can see it but the screen is absolutely like around it it's kind of it's the exposure exposure it's darkening anything around it as well and that's kind of again kind of simulating and that's the dynamic exposure on the lumberyard camera that's right yeah yeah so yeah the exposure settings a camera based yeah so brought that back down to 20,000 because 200,000 was a bit intense even for me and when you were dragging it around it was
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changing color and I know the color is supposed to change based on the heat but why was it changing when you were dragging it around it's actually not changing because I'm talking right and you just see in the color change a bit more because as I'm moving it those particles are spawning continuously graduate okay I can hear you I guess oh yeah at the start of each Parker's life it's it's this blue so this just makes it more clear I wanna do that I want to do the disneyland phantasm music when you I'm slightly disappointed I don't actually have a lot of fiber particles for this demo but I can you put the gravity back on and move it so I can see how it differs so actually got a gravity box so it's actually the box itself probably doesn't cover the whole area oh
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yeah yeah so yeah you just get this lovely cascade in and then from doing that there's a whole range of settings though that I can edit and I need to edit so make it look convincing so as soon as you're thinking about effects behaving you know based on on on gravity settings you want to be thinking about the the track and the mass of the thing and you've he go we've got gravity scale so I can actually if I just reduce that gravity scale they're still being affected by the gravity boat just like a 10 a 10 percent of what they were before I can do the opposite as well I can make it really heavy so they're just flying down up yeah conversely I can I can leave it next to gravity so if you want so Monday and then Friday something else has just
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kicked in I think I've just done abled something else I think I've got wind or something that is now yeah so that sort of thing so gravity is one thing then we've got wind as well so it's just yeah so yeah I mean I've got I've put together a few examples here to be honest I didn't put as many together as I would have would have liked to the day kind of run away with me but yeah um all sorts in here but before we got a question from the chat here it says how do you account for the various graphic quality settings on a user's end do you have to make separate effects well we could actually really nice we haven't necessarily got all of our like system spec settings locked down because this
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was still in development you know technology's still graphics cards are still being released and things like that but we got a really nice setting here actually like and it's not trying to demonstrate this we've got this max distance log which itself has its own curves so if I give this max distance Lord must use the sparks one of them okay so it's optimal I'm just going to talk about bit about optimization not not specifically system specs but this this kind of ties into it to make this more optimal there's a few things I'm going to be doing I'm going to give it a max distance lot so let's just set that to something quite quite sure so this is a distance of 10 meters what I'm going to do is I'm going to control the count
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based on that distance so with this curve here I'm saying that by the time it goes to 10 meters the count has gone from 20,000 to 0 just change that curve so just like our ships and anything else have logs in widget level of details the effects have an actual like a dynamic log system based on how far away from it you are exactly yeah exactly that yeah I noticed I've got some funky buttons on my shelf as well so this used to be effect self so one of the things that I've got here the distance think so I can see that it's actually 30 meters away from the camera fact let's just make that a little bit bigger so this 100 meters is it's much distance a lot that's a zero check how far away I am
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from it a bit further kind of fading away hmm so this is one of the ways that we were able to have really high GPU particle count it's not like this thing is constantly a drain on the on the players GPU where we're very sensible with the way that we optimize the effects so what else you got for us that's just not a look that surely so this isn't a continuous abilities like a burst effect I've actually put this on any speed over life so I've got it's something that we
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probably haven't really used a huge amount actually in our in our effects in the game so far but we've got a speed over life curve here this allows me to change the speed of that particle over its life this is technically this is in and we call the mode artistic as opposed to physical so one on the 100 was talking about being kind of physically based and adhering to the rules of gravity and wind and things like that on the flip side of that we can also become a bit more creative as well so we can we can make this these effects the basically each particle now is going to be slowing down again over the lifetime which is five seconds this thing is going to be if I take off the random 40 actually don't know what the what is the 40 I don't know if it's miles per hour kilometers per hour it's just the speed
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let's just say it's it's a speed of 40 and yeah what's going to do is halfway through its life it's going to slow down completely to zero speed it's going to ramp up again and that's how you ended up with some quiet like an interest in movement and I think that some of the effects and I gave some of the more alien effects I guess you're going to be able to benefit from that sort of more creative approach it's it's what what happens commonly and start as it is is we you know you take anything not just a VFX any answer to the game to the point to through all the points of realism you know affected by gravity affected by wind and then you once you've got all the realistic aspects there now you have to tweak for creativity for artistic license for completely we want the thing to look how we want the thing to look so
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yeah it's good to see something like this the artistic thing it's like realistically there might be no reason for the particle to start off at this speed and then slow down and then speed up again you know unless we're talking about you know weird sentient tachyons or something but well why not I like that we're able to so we try and we're kind of striving for realism in terms of realistic looking graphics but we kind of we're very much in influenced by Hollywood as well aren't we so we all got a lot of sci-fi movies and I think they have the same thing that I want to try and make it look convincing but sometimes what sometimes your perception of what is realistic isn't actually the same as what is realistic so we just find our balance of stuff looking realistic also looking cool if it
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doesn't look cool then you know we are a question the chat asking how you test for various lighting conditions like obviously we're in it we're in a very dark scene here how do you how do you know your particle is going to work in a variety different conditions good question we've actually got a time of day slider so what I would say is that I would be if I was working on an effect I would be back and working this testing sure that's fine but I would always be making sure this look we're looking at it in Scituate making sure we're looking today in if it was on the PE we'd be looking at it in in the pu level we've been making sure we look at it on Planet and if we're looking at our planet we've got to make sure we we've kind of moved the Sun around or move the particle around the planet so that it's essentially we can't really sign off an
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effect that's all it's been it's been tested thoroughly under all under all the lighting conditions that also applies to gravity as well because we need to make sure you know if I go back to that spark effect I need to make sure I might have it looking really cool when gravity is on I need to make sure it also kind of works in space as well you know I couldn't I can't really cheat as much as maybe we can in other in other games we have to be very very thorough with our testing for yeah and to answer a Killa marks question you can see it bouncing off the off the boxes now okay yes yeah so this is this is actually screen space collision which is one of my favorite settings that we've got we've got plans doing it to kind of flush out the
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feature so it's it's got the first kind of pass at the screen space collision it it's a much much it's a GPU it's a said before collision it's much much cheaper than the CPU collision that we have on the old CPU particles it does have its limitations because it's because it's purely based on because it's a visual thing if you if I go behind this wall you'll see that it's all of a sudden it's gone it's because you've taken it's taking it from the point of the mission so it thinks that there's nothing there now so what we would typically do for an effect like this I'd probably create another version of that effect I'm even gonna name it as I would the
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thoroughness ice then so I've done they're basically just copy and paste it then one of the nice things about this the effects editor is that these what we're seeing here this this library call it particle library this is basically an XML file so the copying and pasting process is just very straightforward we can even copy and paste directly in the XML like you know plus plus or something but yeah what I would typically do is sorry I was rumbling them I do ramble a lot sometimes okay so I've duplicated it I've created I won't take the screen space collision what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna have that count so I'm kind of splitting it out now half of them are gonna have screen space collision the other half ants and what that should mean is that you can still see these particles here
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they're not being cold anymore so that's just one of the ways that we would potentially work on that the problem that I have there is that because these aren't colliding they're gonna just go through the floor so I'd like to say there's a this these elements that we really we need to flush out the feature set it's all it's all in the schedule it's all there somewhere yeah so you've got to you got two particles run in simultaneous right now one is colliding with the floor or the other one it's not going into the poor exactly yeah and it's technically it's one effect still is this is like in the hierarchy this is just a child you can change the color on though the second one so we can see their difference course we can what color would you like red I was gonna say hot pink but that's fine I'm not happy that's better I think uh yeah I can hear cheering cheering of approval okay
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I think in reality because it's an attitude it's additive and it's very very emissive it's all kind of just blew me now but yeah I prove that it's pink though I just tell mr. or paint they go yeah this again like there's all kind I've not really talked about any of these things but we've got emissive lighting so I'm really demonstrating kind of hot hi emissive FX it and if you drop below we should see that only the pink ones are going through the floor or is it only the other ones that we went through before it will only be the pink ones yeah although I need to change the well you know there will be they go purple rain right see what else we got here
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there was a question I saw in the chat and went by so fast that I didn't catch it looking for it right now okay it's gone I imagined it so what else we got to looking at what else do we have to look at here okay well um we've also got so one of the things that I wanted to talk about a little bit is some of the ways that we can manipulate the motion of the of our effects as well so we have as well as relying on gravity wind eccentric cetera as I've mentioned we've also got various ways in which we can introduce noise into the effect so we have we have in listen here that the movement category we've got vortex turbulence we've got curl noise we have SDF which is signed distance fields which essentially I'm
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going to get and they'll get flamed if I go this wrong the question was I was let's ask him to explain it and then I realized this is a minefield because everybody gets really close to it and then messes em so go ahead and try and then I'll have Sean Tracy evaluate you afterwards okay okay well my interpretation of it is that it's basically text year the can tell us that the closest distance from a surface so we would be able to use it for example if I I'm not going to kind of make one live because I'd have to I know it just wouldn't be fun to do but this this kind of area here this is scheduled one for an hour I've nominate someone else on the team if we really need to yeah basically I could create a sound distance field but
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from the geometry this kind of surrounding plinth I think what it would be cook but yeah if I create the scientists feel that this I would be able to make sure that the particles so as well as having screen space collision that the particles are going to know the the distance from that surface so they're going to know when they're actually going to hit that thing what that's going to to give you some some examples of where that's going to be really really useful in the game for gas cars for example we're going to be able to have what we already do have to be fair we've got signed distance fields for the gas clouds and we can we can make particles actually slow down or rather than passing through the gas cars we can make them conform to the to the shape of the gas cloud and it gives us a really nice way of layering extra texture onto the gas clouds to to kind of increase
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that resolution and make them look prettier but yes so that's that's one thing we've got what else have we got we got vector field so a vector field is another kind of 3d texture format that is kind of I guess that vector fields just gives us another way to manipulate and push particles around we can we create a vector field in like offline rendered so in it in something like Houdini for example 3d studio max and that gives us the ability to to generate yeah much more I guess more kind of detailed when so in in the engine at the moment we've got yeah we've got the wind where the wind is basically directional so we can control the direct and the strength but we can't can't bring in that kind of finesse to make much smaller dust motes you know kind of turbulence swirling around and things
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like that so that's where vector fields have been really useful I think actually me how one of my senior VFX artists he did a demonstration at citizencon last year where he had a vector field set up and I think it was the hammerhead engine room and he basically made this lovely vector field it was from all the geometry inside that room and the particles were pushing around so if you have like a post in the middle of the room you could make the particles push around rather than just going straight through it that was in the second stage as there's no last year and that's that's right you know it should be available on youtube right now if anybody wants to chase that up afterwards I strongly recommend looking at it so very very cool that was yeah so what is this effect that we've been looking at what is called the texta too small for me to read this is vortex and curls when I started as I was talking I wasn't even
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really sure that was what I was doing so yeah this is I'm giving a demonstration of vortex students as well as curl knives okay so let's take a look at this then I remember now so well I've got here I've got I've got a particle that's got a finite lifetime of ten so it's gonna it's gonna the the emitter it's gonna last for ten seconds what I'm doing this I'm pulsing it so even though it's even though it's got a finite lifetime it's gonna resume so once it reaches its it's ten second well basically over ten seconds it's going to start again so every ten seconds this thing is reborn without any turbulence on it just looks like this it's just a big X fear of ten thousand particles since I had vortex turbulence
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you see what it's doing hmm and what what is I know turbulence in the sense of air travel what is turbulence here mean it's the same kind of thing really it's just it's it's a it's a type of noise so it's it's yeah it's providing turbulence for the direction of the particles it's just a randomly generated shaking anything here yeah yeah well it's twisting it is because that's why it's a vortex turbulence is it's essentially creating that kind of vortex shape if I put the h2 yeah that's so you can kind of see there if I let me just kill all this I'll just just a really kind of minor note as well and it won't be very glamorous but one of the one of the cool things about this editor's again me.how actually he he has he's not just a VFX
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artist he's also got a little bit of coding ability so he's actually improving this editor for as we're going along so it sounds like a really basic thing but we have just really nice things like reverts at default and lupin announced our points loopy mode all this kind of functionality that just speeds up the workflow that might get overlooked sometimes it's super cool we got a question in the chat I think century have you ever had it just yeah it turn my auto scroll off and it's still going which is hard gold-bug I lost the question it was basically have you ever created a in effect there have you ever had to make a particle effect for something that you Jin that genuinely surprised you that they needed something I hadn't thought about before mmm well not at this company am I allowed to talk about all the places
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where I have strange effects requests yes so I had the request from a for a cinematix for a like a cartoony classic cartoony game and they needed a cheese smell particle effect cheese smell yeah it's like hey I need a I need a cheese smell like when a cartoon brings that up a piece of stinky cheese yeah yeah but it's the way that people say it sometimes it's just like yeah yeah she smell it's the most normal thing in the world but yeah I mean to be a bit more serious the the thing about start is and there's there's there's all kinds of requests again going back to the original question like where are the effects in the game yeah I mean there's all kinds of stuff we're looking at well it's not just particles either that's so
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one thing I wanted to talk about is we don't just exclusive the work of particles even though we're very heavily geared towards it but you know we've got fog we got screen effects we you you will have seen no doubt loads of information on the gas clouds again we did a we showed a nice demo at citizencon last year and we've been like incrementally improving that that's settled throughout there so far yeah I mean it's some of the some of the requests that we get pretty out there you know we've got we've got art directors with very very creative art directors as you'd expect so yeah lots lots of awesome requests really it's never it's never a dull moment you think we can look at some of that gas clouds that no well why not let's do that I mean since you brought it up oh look
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at you you've got it all in there yeah yeah yeah I got a I got Jake to to set this up for me even let's it for me but yes so this isn't anything to do with particles this isn't a particle but this is this is something that we've collaborated very heavily with the graphics team obviously the graphics team take you know more credit for allowing us to actually place these kind of things into our environments this is this is this is one of the kind of more sexy things I guess one of them or less less proven types of tech in in real time game development so being able to work with this kind of this kind of tool says is very inspiring as an artist I would say yeah and very challenging as well so I you know I jump into game I'm
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gonna run the corn I'm gonna try jumping into game no way I'm flowing so one of the things that we produced that one of the things that we we're working as a VFX team we're working really closely with the graphics team and art and design as well will you want to actually bring in and again this is this is something that we've we've demoed in in citizencon last year and and all the times we want to be able to bring in particles we want it to be a systemic so what we're doing with bb's if I can just jump back out of game again I'm gonna read it some scenes on the VDB ants to
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yourself I know we have this whole thing right before citizencon where we had to look it up and we were finding different definitions online and I was the second you said I was remembering this terrible search we were we were going through before citizencon where we actually had like conflicting definitions of what VDB meant I don't know anyone can I asked my team sure they'll be someone it knows this is the point on star citizen live where we go and we have we asked our team members who might know things that we don't this is a very common part of video game development because no one
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team member can be expected to know absolutely everything about the work that they do and one of the benefits of working on a team so the funny thing is no one seems to know they're all they're all just Google and I mean I could do that you know but definitely volumetric something yeah it's volumetric I mean that one's kind of obvious I mean having figured out the V is kind of it doesn't really show anything but I built this whole thing up about how you were gonna go ask a partner and how the strengths of working in teams gets us things and so glad you came back like you know no well I mean ally and vampire just just over there they'd know the answer for their there in a there any discussion about something I don't want to sleep ok good good go ahead yeah I was just gonna
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show so we've actually got a whole we got a room system the room system again people be familiar with from from hearing here another like designers in particular talking in other shows but we would have these video be hooked up to the room system so the VDP itself is going to be dynamically spawning effects and that's all driven through the room system and the rooms the work that's been done on that the entity effects system that's that's leo is one of our VFX programmers and what that allows us to do we can basically I'm not going to play around with these scents too much because I'm just going to break something there's a lot of sense here but we have a gameplay gameplay settings section here and there's a density x hopefully this is going to work if i ramp that up need to be in-game oh no I
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see it working so what are we doing I'm changing the the density multiplied over artistry laughs it says you know is it going to limit my screen is too far away to read the words yeah I've got it I've got a feeling it's too subtle as well for the I don't think it's going to translate very well but basically if I can get to a point where I can see the light can you see the kind of lab it's sort of this I was hoping it'd be much much more more strong but yeah what I was gonna say was we've also got particles that are being being dynamics bonding based on the voxel density of the VDB um just quickly trying in July again reason reason for that so that that's where as I was saying before we we kind of serve gameplay as well as design as well as as much as we do are
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as well and this is another thing we're collaborating closely with the designers it's not just about how the thing looks but it all sorts of how it feels and one of the common problems with with gas clouds with them being such a so large and so kind of nebulous it was quite easy to lose track of where you are and stuff and that ring that's why we brought in we bring in particles to give you that sense of space and that feeling of speed as well I'm just gonna try and find a light it's a good look these right light guess I'm just gonna so this isn't necessary gonna look as pretty as it does but I'm just gonna do for visibility okay okay ooh I'm man it's
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more subtle than I wanted it to be you kind of see only the one that would when I move the camera but I'm just yeah I'll try and find a video like it maybe that kind of demonstrates a bit better I mean really bees are the the VFX team as if there's a there's people at oh can you see them now yeah see yeah so that's all I was trying to find you then it probably isn't that exciting really but yeah the point is that these effects I've not placed these manually at all because that's a really an aspect of making a game so as big as ours we need to need to be smart with the tools as well we need to come up with methods to allow these things to systemically appear and to come in based on rule sets rather than just having to manually place because it wouldn't ever be sustainable for the VFX eyes to just you know base all these emitters
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everywhere we find that with just about every department it's we have to build sustainable procedural systems because when you're working at something the scale of star citizen even with you know even with five studios across the world view you you have to there has to be some procedural element to almost everything I mean that's something as well as properties going off on a tangent now but one thing that we've been really really focusing on this this quarter so far is the prop planet it's perfect improvements as well and that's a similar thing where there's work being done to improve the actual planets themselves I think and I think it's planets before and we're also we're also improving our effects based on the work
00:38:53
was getting done on planets before so again it's rulesets so the so the the terrain itself is going to be driving the particles it's going to be deciding where particles appear based on height and that sort of thing so that's pretty pretty cool as well again very challenging but very cool kill Merc has a question about whether clouds like this will affect radar and scanning well this isn't a question for Mike kill mark that's actually that's actually a game design question and I didn't want to call you out specifically but it's a good example of the type of questions that you are for game designers as opposed to VFX directors and stuff like that so you see a lot of those questions come through every single every single show and I I have them to qui tacet yeah yeah I think I think I know the answer though Jared I think I can answer it I see why go ahead you thought you made this whole thing
00:39:43
about how you're not the person to ask but I note I know the answer yeah okay go ahead try and if you mess it up I'm gonna tell her Tom a bleeped so short answer is yeah vdps can can affect your am reading you're going to get I know this because we've worked on the screen interference aspect of it as well so we used I think initially on the first pass we had it set up to to voxel density so the virtual density just a demo that it could be done voxel density was creating interference let's try bringing in a [ __ ] see if it actually works while I'm talking if it
00:40:32
doesn't then I'm shamed myself yeah way too fast yeah basically the distant you know I was talking like sound distance field before the the distance from the wall is what we are going to be using to as one of the options to have electromagnetic interference effect the noise look at that it's not doing anything let's forget about it I were it's cloud is problematic well the problem is it's not problematic wanna can be problematic see it's too nice it's a nice cloud anyway alright so we've got about 20 minutes left what else do we got I feel like I got a loud [ __ ] I've got some videos as
00:41:22
well is it working just just blasting through some videos to show Joe some random still so this loads that I haven't talked about as well as just having like the simple particles I've been showing we've also got a lightning region we've got have icon example of that we've got spline guided particles which which kind of tie in with the Lightning region let's just do it so I just try making one sure let's just go for it I do it live yes as the saying goes okay so lightning region initially it's probably gonna look kind of crazy initially when I bring it in there you go looks kind of weird this is let me just make you
00:42:13
so if I bring this my editor cross so one of the reasons that we renamed this from particle editor to the effects editor is very much for the well I'm gonna show you now so we now have a light in effect the group like not lighting yep I'm going to assign this completely new light in effect to my default lighting region again sorry I've got a kind of drug loader loader windows left and right and again you can see there's all these kind of settings and I'm gonna just assign that effect to it Chris we're not gonna make a child particle can't believe I made a decision to do
00:43:01
this live absolute mother yeah we actually do a pre-show and we do these things we go over the content million so there's no surprises and whatnot these things are all planet even when they look kind of wonky it's like things are find out and we were like no we're not gonna create this life we're gonna show it though cause it would take too much time to do it live or whatever and then windows yeah that's my least kind of yeah yeah so all I need to do is make these blind go dude give it some actual missus what's good i I will fall back to a video if I can't get this to actually
00:43:47
work by the way I feel like there's a gremlin in might I seen make it additive uh just double-check I've got all the rights weapons in place I feel like I'm gonna fail it found it screw it I'm just going to show video something showing up example ego that's what you were wrong way something like that so basically one of the display I wanted to show this blind guide it affects just because it gives us again it's like something that we've not had for that
00:44:35
long I guess with a few months I suppose with it time flies we can just get again it goes down that the kind of creative versus realistic approach you know but who's to say what what kind of alien technologies out there and in our universe in the star citizen universe this makes me want to touch the screen see if it travels with my finger yeah yeah all kinds of stuff whoa yeah and this is a combination so I don't know why I've come to this video but this is a combination of this gives a good idea that as well as just blame apart because we're also controlling camera shake we've got fog in the level as well and in fact I'm gonna load up a different scene if that's okay Jared you
00:45:25
you've got 15 minutes you can do whenever you'd like Mike okay let's do it so I'm gonna go to an electricity templates level which is kinda just another test level I think I did actually show a version of this in the gas cloud demo of Boyd's it's a good example so here we go so we've got some this reminds me of lesson Yeltsin like everyone stay calm yeah nothing to see here yeah I mean it's to be honest it's like a good example I would look at when you're walking around the office you see people watch some people's screens usually the VFX this group of people around where there there there's kind of crazy shiny stuff on people's screens and the majority of his wear glasses no yeah it's no surprise were staring at this like all day every day but yeah so
00:46:18
if you had to guess how many particles are we looking at here oh I can I can look the actual number I don't know it to be honest it's an interesting question because the actual number is less important from work from a performance and optimization point of view the number is less relevant it's more about how much memory the the allocation is taking up and how many how many how much memory the the textures are taking up as well that's what I want to hear that then not every part of the was in serial you and I need you know even adding kill noise I've talked about if like kill noise quiet but I didn't kill noise will incur a cost as well so sometimes you have to see okay well I've had to kill noise what does it really add to the effect can I use something else kind of use the turbulence noise on
00:47:06
its own which is cheaper it's always about asking yourself questions about how can I make this as efficient as possible but it's also occasionally fun to just go crazy as well so if I actually played it so I've got something so I want to track for you you can see if I show all the helpers hide it messy kind of surprising how scary these kind of things kind of look if you see all these these green lines that's because I've I've got a particle with fact that is a rapid way around the when you find the layer see these ones here mm-hmm oh yeah so they're a bit they're a bit rough looking they're not they're not kind of I wouldn't put them in the game like this they neither quite a lot of work but it's just an example that you
00:47:54
can we can animate these effects as well and these are just working the way up and that's what you see all these points these are all control points that essentially the spline is rocking its way up along yeah this fog in here there's basically particles there's so many so many terms as so many things I could talk about space loot particles are you see how it just feels like this environment is completely full you know it's full of fog mm-hmm and it's almost like infinite I just carry on going infinitely it's because we're using a Spacely well some space we perfects and what they do is they actually title so they're they're they're kind of we call them bricks so it's like tiled bricks and that that gives you that and they spawn from the camera is so it makes you feel like you're in this kind
00:48:42
of thick thick environment but really it's more of a trick we know that certain effects certain particles have physical displacement we've seen them hit walls we know that if a player moves through them that a bounce off the player is that something that's possible with the fog as well well the fog that I think the large of the actual individual particle is the more problematics is going to be we could make it do it and it's going to look strange if you if you had like you know if I had if it right I could just a single you see me kind of moving a mouse around in the middle of the screen you know if the particle was that laid on the screen and it and it hit though it hit the boundary it's just gonna look weird it's just going to give the game away really it's gonna it's gonna you know the players going to know that it's
00:49:29
just it's just a smoky texture honor I'm a big quad so absolutely we can do it but it's more about you just got to be sensible with the things that are going to be using collisions and maybe we just have dust motes the colliding with the with the geometry rather than the big thick fog the thick fog itself would just begin we'd used the soft particle settings which makes it fade away as it gets to the gets to the edge as well just to show you some really nice decoupled lighting examples know anyway so okay I'm gonna load up Delamar okay so one of the things I just wanted to know what it felt like to say no to a developer did it feel good not really know as good as I'd hoped I wasn't offended by it you
00:50:19
know you can say no I'll just do it anyway okay so yeah this quarter one of the things again we've talked about this we've talked about this in monthly reports and in we've shown videos I think we did a little segment on it didn't we in fact earlier this season we did it we did a we refer to every quarter of the show as the season internally that's talking about earliest quarter we get a bit uh decouple biting yeah cool okay well I'm gonna load up Delamar which is obviously one of the one of the more established environments in our game and this decoupled lighten rollout that we're doing it's it's for me postman forgiving it's like breathing new life into into the older play all the locations and I think we're all really excited to to show the backers when it goes when it goes into the live live
00:51:09
release get people back in some of these locations maybe they've not been there for a while because get excited by all the new places but yeah it's kind of probably people get bored of me saying it but it looks better while costing less and which is which is you know the the dream really now for anybody that didn't see that segment give me the 10 cent version of what the couple lighting is okay Saudi carpet light is it's literally the the the lighting of particles previously was based on the tessellation of the particle of the the vertex the vertices of the particles so to get high-quality shadowing on particles we had to rely on much greater amounts of verts and it was prohibitively expensive we couldn't do it for such large-scale effects like
00:51:58
this which it just wasn't possible you we just wouldn't be able to afford it at all and you just end up with like poor quali kind of blocky shadows what decoupled lighting gives us is a much softer more natural-looking shadowing on the particles it kind of you kind of see it's picking up the light really nicely here this is what this is a good example of one of the things you talked about earlier how sometimes the best VFX work isn't noticed at all like we would expect to see natural curvy shadows on stuff like the fog so so when you see this it's impressive as it is it almost doesn't look impressive because yeah we expect this because we've seen it in the real world so we expect it so it doesn't stand out as something and it is super
00:52:47
cool yeah that's what exactly what I was saying before is like if you do if you don't you job a lot of the time people aren't necessarily going to go wow just got shadows on it you know people get VFX artists playing games will will definitely notice I'm sure here's another one so we're in we're in the drug lab one of the one of the kind of OC locations and the PU and this is ooh this is a great example this is one of my favorites I love seeing the kind of I call them cadres I don't know what the monthly profit so M is for that but there's a light behind these this kind of farm and you just get their lines going through it absolutely love it yeah gorgeous it's a you know your computer is in Winslow and we are sending your image to us here in LA over over a video
00:53:39
conferencing software and then we are regurgitating that and the second copy up to folks over teams so this image is twice processed over what people would see in on their own client and it still looks pretty amazing yes I've got a good point cuz sometimes when we show the effects in videos compression and streaming it can kind of take take a hit but yeah when you see these when you see in game when the backers get it live I think they're gonna be super impressed to show another completely so this I just got a fold of super random things
00:54:26
that I've made over time for the project sometimes as well one thing I will say is a lot of the stuff that I've shown in these videos it's not so much about this being actual content in the game it's more about inspiring inspiring other developers in the company the VFX artists but also you know the art and design teams to know what we can achieve and what can be made so something like this is a good example way it's I think I've called it space anomaly I mean you wondered this is the nexus and if you go inside it you'll meet Captain Kirk exactly there you go we've we've got a bit of law added to it already you know yeah I'm it so okay so I talked about particles I kind of failed to show lightning although well kind of yeah yeah screen effects you will have seen
00:55:17
like camera shaking uh stuff like that fog we've also got meshes like one thing that I don't actually have a good example of it right now but we we've also just implemented a nice some nice improvements to the to the wall recall and the VFX transparency shader so a lot of the time what you see in that I've got these particles mm-hmm that's it kind of have this lovely slow slow soft environmental dust and so we've also got a really nice mesh now mesh shader that we can add and this is super simple stuff to be fair like it's not that it's not like wow star citizen scrolling movies or anything but it's we can we've we would kind of rely in with that I'm not having it for quite a while and bringing it back in so I'm talking about simple UV scrolling on our meshes being able to fade those meshes the opacity of
00:56:07
the messages based on distance and based on an angle so like edge angle fade and again and also a soft particle or similar to soft particles have them fade as they collide with other geometry it's just another tool in our Arsenal it's also something that we can give to the to the to the artists and they can they can make these these meshes themselves it kind of empowers them there's some conversation about that in the monthly report this month that went out and I think there's actually a video cool yeah a report if I'm not mistaken I don't process those anymore so I'm not as attention to them as I used to be yeah and it's quite early days with it's it's as I say it's it's not exactly like revolutionary but I'm just having it it's like wow okay we can we can do more for cheaper as well we've got more control one thing I didn't show and I'm
00:56:56
not gonna unlock it's definitely not something lights account as the finale but I didn't really talk about like the implementation of effects as much so and to do it work that's recommend that these work with the designers use in things like data forger and scripts and there's so many ways that we can bring in effects into the game it's not just about the effect it's not just about making really pretty effects it's thinking about how they actually are implemented in the in the world that we're creating I'll just do a more yeah let's get now jump into my favorite [ __ ] what's your favorite ship my favorite ship is the carrot okay as legally mandated by YouTube comments so
00:57:48
the classic the classic thrusters okay so this is I think pretty much the first things I start working I'm gonna join crg all those years ago I've always had a fondness for the thrusters the thrusters so we're using the particle emitter strength curve it's similar to the age curve we're hooking that up to the thrust input so as the as the ship applies more more thrust depends more power from the ship it's ramping up the strength curve it's not just like in some games that you just see like that you switch you vehicle on and you've just got this this just to this either there or it's not there like this is a much more subtle and organic and more natural-looking way of adding effects I think and I'm just going to jump out of game I'm gonna find that effect really quickly and this wasn't I
00:58:36
wasn't prepped for this at all so I won't take longer so we have the aegis Claudius thrusters okay so I just drag it into the scene again thing you can keep asking me to make sound effects but it's not going to happen well if I was just making this if I was just like working away and I was on my own I wasn't on being filmed at id tend to make sound effects when I'm making an effect it's usually a sign that I'm enjoying the effect and I start making silly noises so yeah so this is like the way that the effect is on its own so obviously it looks quite different when you just see Institute but I've got this strength value here on the on the on a particle entity and this is the
00:59:26
equivalent so this is when the ship is idle and this is when the ship is giving light is requested full full full simple and it's just nice that we just got this sliding scale so we create these effects using the strength curve I believe I just find a posse so here you go so we've got this strength Knuth yes this is 1 this is 0 strength so this is whether the ship is just idle and this is at full strength as well and people ie glide people be looking in this they were looking in this librarian that we see in all kinds of stuff there's a few test particles I've still going here from where we've been doing a lot of work on like damage effects I think we brought in the first the first pass a thruster damage recently and then we've got we've got
01:00:16
shock diamonds in here as well somewhere all kinds of stuff it's not just one effect we've got lots of kind of layers we have effects that appear just from coming coming throughout my sphere like just a sort of shock diamond that you won't see when you find on its space but you will see it and when you're entering an atmosphere on planets so the loads of store things again it's the kind of thing that as you say if I think not everyone's gonna notice to fight that necessarily but it all adds to the overall experience it's not quite tangible but it just makes it all look and feel better I will wrap up with a question from Groth Azul here if you had to pick one favorite effect so far that you or a member of your team has done for star citizen what would it be that's a good question all your children make I I love the I really like the God so many to choose from
01:01:09
I love the Idris explosion that we did back games come yeah we showed the bracket Gamescom obviously Idris isn't isn't isn't out there yeah but actually a lot that effect I love the other Mac the names gone but the big the big weapon the big the big railgun the road yeah yeah the railgun the rogue on it's not Saturday I got time to just get the weapon is it a special I would some really nice things were weapon effects actually we're starting to kind of hit a nice groove with the weapon effects I can't remember the name of the damn thing oh I'll tell you what I will
01:02:05
show you talking about effects that really like let me show you this one yeah that's one then I have to let you get back to work that is a that is an impact effect for a weapon and this is a this is another really nice one this is a this is one of these yarn Jean explosions so the this yarn we have a very we have like I never there's so many things I was going to talk about this all cannae the window we have like very specific textiles so we got a style guide where we have set like a set of set of logic and law that we apply to
01:02:53
different manufacturers and different different alien races so there's this is a really nice example of this yarn is that lots of cool noise there which I was talking about before you know what I like I love explosions I mean I'm a VFX I so I cut I suppose I have to end on on the odd explosion or - you wouldn't know it's gonna toggle through toggle through these explosions burn in my eyes yeah all right yes but I'm the one that has to explain why I keep these people away from work for longer than I'd agree all right Mike thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to be here with us and it take us through this welcome I
01:03:42
think people enjoyed it I super enjoyed it that's it that star citizen live this week we'll be back next week with another show check out check with us on Monday to find out what it's going to be about I don't know it's gonna be about but I don't want to tell you just yet it's just another good one that : hopefully things work out schedules and availabilities alright see you later everybody we'll see you next week figure thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can
01:04:30
check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library

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