Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Lighting the Universe

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   Hello and welcome to Around the Verse, our weekly look at the development of Star Citizen. I'm Sandy Gardner. And I'm for Stefan. Uh for the past week, you've been intercepting messages about a top secret ship in development. Here's the latest transmission. [Music] As you probably guessed, the ship in

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   development is the Aegis Eclipse. And starting tomorrow, the eclipse will be available as part of our latest concept sale. You can check the comm link tomorrow to learn all about the eclipse, its role, and its history. And in today's show, we will see how story and tone can be reinforced through the art of lighting. But first, let's go to the Los Angeles for their studio update. Hi, and welcome back to Los Angeles. I'm senior producer Eric Kaine Davis here with your monthly studio update. This month, we've made great strides and finished a variety of tasks across both projects, and the team here in Los Angeles continued to grow, which really helped us knock things out quickly. Now, in the past, we've talked all about item system 2.0 and its impacts on the myriad of game features. Regarding its impact specifically on ships, it is an improvement to how

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   players can interact with ships and their systems, such as how adjustments to item settings can affect gameplay. Now, our tech design, engineering, and QA teams have made steady progress in their various disciplines. Now, in our endeavor to reach the goal of rolling out a fleet of item system 2.0 ships with updated or new items that can be loaded onto them, we've now successfully converted the Origin M50 Interceptor to fully utilize this new system. We've chose to start with this ship because it's the least complex example while still allowing us to discover issues that we can address for all 49 flyable ships and beyond. It's been the perfect test monkey. No offense, M50 pilots. And you've probably learned from your own experiences that one tends to be a bit more meticulous the first time you attempt something. We do the same thing

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   at Star Citizen by properly documenting all necessary steps, thereby creating guides to speed up future processes. And now in our first round through, we also look to identify opportunities to create tools further speeding up our overall implementation time. And this attention to detail has really allowed us to balance power usage, heat generation, uh associate EM and IR signals, and balance hydrogen and quantum fuel consumption. This will also give players a reason to consider upgrading their ship components and make multiplayer gameplay a bit more rewarding. Now, QA aided with this conversion by taking an early look at the ship and determined how to convert all existing checklists to the new 2.0 framework. When making any impact to our game, QA has to test everything, which

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   in this case included all the different interaction points. Now, prior to the interaction points, it was limited to just testing enter and exits, but checks were added for ladder enter exits, entry enter exits, power on and off, engines on and off, as well as looking ahead for features not yet implemented, such as ejections and cases which more than one player attempts a particular interaction. Now, the engineering team has also made strides in the areas of persistence and inventory. They're currently working on creating a technique for clients to request persistent information. This work supports several large features in 3.0, including cargo, shops, commodities, air traffic control, ships, players, and a whole lot more. It will allow game code to query for a modified data for entries that aren't even spawned, such as

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   selling cargo for a ship that's landed at a station and hidden away from ATC. These features will also allow game code to correctly respawn and orient ships or items that have been abandoned on planets or in space. Meaning you can expect the world and your possessions to remain in the same state in between game sessions. Unless, of course, a pesky pirate comes along and does what pesky pirates do. Now, we've also made progress on the system which allows one to park their ship inside of another. This should be pretty straightforward as possible and result in being able to transport any stowable ship safely from point A to point B. This was based off of a rework of the landing mechanic that is currently in game. Now, the new docking areas are set up the exact same way as landing pads used within the current universe, taking components with

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   a different interface and a new mechanism for locking. There has also been some work on the physics of getting the Ursa rover to sit inside the cargo bay of the constellation Andromeda without it popping through the walls and jittering. So in other words, hopefully physics won't go wild and blow everything up, literally. Now the team also now has converted the basic quantum drive to item system 2.0, giving it the ability to store quantum travel and other nav points. This means that all discovered quantum travel points are able to be set as travel destinations for use at any time regardless of distance and signature strength. Now, the next goal is to make quantum drive look and sound as awesome as it behaves by connecting the VFX and the audio to

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   the actual transit. This also involves working closely with design on a way to better display them to a player in a logical interface. And then from here, we can move on to pure 2.0. 0 systems as Quantum Dry now uses the pipe system for fuel and for power checks. Now, also this month, we've implemented a few new features into our IFCS or intelligent flight control system. On the physics side, we've now implemented an autopilot system to allow our AI and any other system to utilize IFCS like takeoff, landing, or quantum drive or anywhere a ship control really needs to be automated. And we've also added some support for cinematics to be able to automate the motion of thrusters on ships. So they don't need to hand animate every thruster action in a cinematic. The thrusters on a ship will

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   now behave as intelligently as they do in our current game. Now our ship team has been making very steady progress on the RSI Aurora since our last update. The art team has now completed the seat geo for the ES and LN variants and be begun work on the engines while tech design is implementing these new assets utilizing the item system 2.0 framework directly into the ship archetype making this our first first scratchuilt item system 2.0 ship. Also, the Anvil Terrapin's exterior is nearing completion of the graybox phase and has near final animation. Our tech content team continues to improve performance by automating and improving processes. As you know, the scale of Star Citizen is such that even large teams need some additional support in the form of

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    outsourcing partners. One of the difficulties with outsourcing tends to be ensuring a team's refined processes are adhered to and assets delivered meet all requirements for simple integration into our game. As you've heard in the past, there are many pipelines and processes within Star Citizen and some of them are more complicated than others. onboarding and outsourcing team requires that the tools can be installed and run in an external environment with limited support from us really in order to save time. So this month the tech animation team developed a standalone installer that automatically mounts sample assets, tools, and documentation. No matter if it's for motion builder or for Maya, we can now easily bring onboard any potential partners quickly, saving both them and us time. as well as these same partners benefit from our

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    extensive internal tool development that we did for our own needs. Tech animation is also responsible for character skeletons. And like all things, creating a character skeleton can be done manually or automatically. Typically in the games, the rig is not really that complex, nor does it change often. Thus, the manual approach could actually save time. But when you're on the cutting edge of technology, updates are often required. For example, an animation engineer may require the addition of a specifically named joint for code purposes, thus requiring changes to all skeletons in the game. This would be very timeconuming if done manually. But we've now completed our SRC or source rigging scripts and can make these kind of updates quickly, easily, and bug-free. The time and energy saved is not only for the rigging team, but also

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    for the animation team who will be utilizing these skeletons day after day. Now, a programming analogy would be to think of the rig as a compiled executable. The SRC rigging scripts are the source code. So, if we need to add something to the skeleton, we update the source code and compile it rather than patching the executable. You would just really build a new. Now, changing gears a little bit. Up until now, you may have noticed all of our characters eyes have been more or less the same, but the tech art team has created a new data structure that will allow players to customize their eye color. This supports the first pass of the character creator where players will be able to select from a preset color palette. Now, the tech art team has also taken

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    advantage of a feature recently provided by the LA engineering team. Through the magic of item port tags, the body skin tone will now automatically adjust to the skin tone of the face. In the case of NPCs, this will make maintain consistency for our characters. And in the case of players, this will ensure your body always matches your face. Also, they've created uh a process to generate SDF or signed distance field volume textures which are used in conjunction with our atmospheric flight model to simulate engine trails. We've made solid progress on art tools for our various art teams. And one such tool is our unbevel tool, which simplifies LODs or level of details creation process to increase performance on anything beyond our first LOD and speed up the delivery time for our ship pipeline. We've also

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    taken large steps forward on our procedural system for outposts, including color tinting, material variation, and even variation of props and their placement within the outposts. Lastly, our tech art and character team have added more armor to the armory with a fully rigged female medium marine as well as a male heavy outlaw suit that we've shown in previous updates going from now concept all the way into final implementation. We're also far along on many new uniforms, costumes, characters, and heads. The male OMC light is wrapping up its initial high poly pass and moved onto in-game mesh creation. The male Schuban minor uniform has moved to in-game texturing now that the in-game mesh is complete. And a new shipjacker

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    uniform for Squadron 42 just finished up concepting and is on its way to high poly. Our female marine BDU finished up sculpting and is now headed to in-game modeling. And with the FOV slider work in progress for 3.0, The character team is doing a bit of work on our helmet interior, starting with the heavy outlaw and the heavy marine, which is used by our UI team to establish necessary boundaries. Well, that wraps us up for this month's update. We really enjoy bringing you these in-depth looks into our progress. Thank you so much for your support and see you again next time. Thanks, Eric. It's great to see all the detail going into character customization, even down to eye color. Yes, we really want to give the players the ability to create unique characters and this is just the start. As Star Citizen grows, so will the possibilities for character customization.

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    It's all about building a believable universe. And one very important way to do that is through lighting, use of shadow and fog to help set a scene, which is why our lighting team is building a tool that can handle a game as large as Star Citizen. Uh, take a look. It's pretty cool. My name's Emry Schwitzer. I'm a lighting artist here at Cloud Bureum Games. Hello, my name is Nate. I'm the vehicle art director here at Foundry 42. I'm Chris Campbell. I'm lead lighting artist at Foundry 42 in Frankfurt. Hi. Uh my name is Maria. I'm the lighting artist for Star Citizen. I'm Ben. I'm a graphics programmer and by habit I've sort of become the volutrics and the lighting kind of guy. Lighting in general, um, my my opinion

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    of it is is pretty much the most important pass. It goes into an environment or a ship or or or a planet before it goes out the door. Bad lighting can make good assets look terrible or good lighting can make bad assets quite nice. Actually, you can have substandard assets and and light it well. We don't make substandard assets, so we're pretty lucky with with with really good quality to start with, but it is the basis of it's not just the cake, it's the cake and the cherry on top. Lighting is the the character of the scene. It it creates this feeling of like either glooiness or or happiness. You can use lighting and and color as a way to uh to create a um a continual story line uh from start to finish. So like a story can start warm and happy and then by the end it can feel cold and

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    and more bluish and stuff like that. And that's all told through lighting. We started um with essentially Cry Engine which is now Lumberiard quite a long time ago. Uh and the game and the engine was very focused to delivering a certain type of scenario. So it was out of the box really good at creating outdoor environments. It had a a sun time of day system. Interiors it wasn't so good. Um it kind of fell down a lot of areas. You could certainly get good results with it but it was very kind of cumbersome. Its lighting systems were mainly built for either large open like smallish levels up to about 4 km. It didn't really account for uh really dynamic worlds. So over the years we've tried our best to cater the engine to something that will scale and

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    and scale from your little basement under the stairs to drawing a whole galaxy. So that's like the ultimate challenge. The the scale of our lighting is is really interesting. the sun uh is a light source all the way down to like a small decorative light on on a table or something like that. We we try and keep the the power of those lights in relative terms. So obviously the sun needs to feel hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than a little desk lamp. And that creates interesting questions for like how the camera auto exposure works. So, how like it feels when you when you come from a small dark room and walk into like a a brightly lit exterior like on the surface of a planet or something that uh we need to create that feeling that uh there's a real difference of intensity between these

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    lighting sources. In Star Citizen, the idea is that you'll be able to go up and literally shoot out every single light in an environment and the environment has to be able to react to that. So, how do you build that using the existing tech? We we couldn't. So, we had to retool a lot of things. You know, there's all these variables now at play and and the tech wasn't there. So, a lot of the the improvements that the graphics team has been working on has been to allow those things to exist. We're we're kind of like halfway there, I'd say. Um, we've we've approached many different uh things in in several different ways. So, for example, last year, I think sometime you saw the animal for screen space flares come in. Again, that's tied to the lighting system. Um we've got on horizon real-time cube map generation. The whole sun system that we had um has gone. Um there is one sun in the galaxy uh which

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    will light all of the planets. So there's there's the guys in Frankfurt obviously who are developing the the planetary tools and the lighting system for all the planetary tools are in the planetary tools I should say. So, it's it's completely driven by by the atmosphere of the planets. And for a for an artist to get his head around all that at times, it's pretty challenging, but it's it's good fun. We do use lighting for uh for creating a a change in the in the physical like in the player character as well. Not not normally in the the lights themselves, but through things like color grading and and post effects on the camera. Uh which generally falls underneath the the lighting umbrella as well. So changing the the color of the screen like either desaturating it or or adding more contrast and stuff like that. That's uh that's part of lighting as well. Like if

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    the player is hurt or injured then the color grading can react in in the way that uh that it either desaturates or or uh makes the color more vivid or something like that. When it comes to the ships then you're talking really about a different set of challenges. All the lighting in the ships is 100% dynamic um and 100% physically correct. Hence, we have a physically based rendering system. You do want to have some sort of feedback loop with the artists. Um to to make sure that the light bulbs are positioned properly to, you know, just just make sure that even within a small ship like that, your eye is looking at, you know, specific things that you want to call, right? If there's a turret somewhere, you want to know that the turrets there. It's not hidden away in darkness. Um, so there's definitely call outs that that we notice, but it's also, you know, a collaborative effort going back and talking to the designers and the artists and making sure that, you know, if there's a component that you

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    interact with on a wall that you know that that component's there and maybe it's flashing if it's, you know, damaged or something, right? The challenge with that is you kind of need these tools put in place um to to make that happen. Now, what was happening up until a few weeks ago now, we we have a layering system. So, um, you'd essentially group lights into small groups and switch them on and off at different times during the ship's state. So, if it was in an emergency state, you'd switch the default state on uh off, sorry, and then switch the emergency state on. Now, that kind of works in theory, but it has a lot of a lot of problems with it. First problem is your your your cry file or your lumbumberard file ends up being obscenely big because we have thousands upon thousands of lights. Um that essentially 3/4 of them most of the time

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    are switched off and the transition between one state to the other is is kind of it's on and then it's off. Um so you can walk around the world today, you can come into this room, you can switch switch these office lights on and they'll have a distinct style when they switch on. um they might flicker if they're an LED. They might come up to a a temperature and cycle through a temperature color. We have temperature charts that we use that's that's in the engine. So, it's completely correct. And that kind of negates things going wrong color-wise. So, we we wanted a system where we could we could transition from on in a very creative manner to different states. So, whether that's evacuation or auxiliary or even to off, we now have a light grouping system so that each room has its own power state. So you can go in, you can enable or disable power to a specific room. You

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    can that room can take damage and now maybe that has to be put into an emergency state. That controller is creating these transitions for for me as the artist to control. So when ship A takes damage at location B, like everything within that radius of location start to use starts to use this system. And when you actually see it working, it's it's really quite powerful. Um, and it goes to show how powerful lighting is because you can completely change a really ambient soft feeling environment into something that feels very very aggressive extremely extremely quickly just through light alone, not nothing else. I mean, the the challenge is is finding that right balance. I mean, if if things are out of whack, then it can feel like uh when you when you leave a small interior and the interior is too brightly lit, then all of a sudden the

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    sun feels really underwhelming by comparison. Or vice versa, if if it's uh really bright outside and you walk into a really dimly lit interior, then it's just pitch black and it just doesn't it doesn't feel very uh immersive or helpful for the player if you can't see where you're going. I think that there's a general vibe that every single level tries to achieve. You know, there's some levels that are vibrant and and you want to be welcome there. You you or the goal of the art director is to make you feel welcome there. Um it's a nice calm place. And then there's the other side of things where it's tense and it's you know something like Grim Hex where stepping in there you kind of kind of you might want to watch your back, right? Um so there's definitely different moods that the environments want to convey and lighting plays a huge role in that. It all kind of starts out as a concept. There's some ideas thrown around. Then

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    the design team goes in and blocks out the environment and gets an idea for the forms and the shapes uh as well as the gameplay and the pathing the players are going to take. And then art goes in and kind of details it using all of our modular sets that don't necessarily mesh together very well. Then they do decal passes and prop passes to kind of bring it all together. But then lighting is really the thing that that kind of makes all those elements of the environment cohesive. It blends all of the different assets that we have together and guides the player in the right direction and enhances gameplay as well as just overall makes the general composition of the level as good as it can be. Lighting also heavily affects or heavily impacts um visual effects uh because things like particles aren't aren't normally directly lit in the same way that basic geometry is lit. Uh they in

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    our game they receive lighting from from direct light sources and also from cube maps to to give them a kind of an ambient lighting feel. Uh but that's that's not always it doesn't always look directly the same as as the environment might look. And so there's a lot of balancing and back and forth between the visual effects artists that they that they tweak their uh their particles to the same level that the that the lighting looks and vice versa that we also try and keep that in mind so that we don't create a a situation where nothing can work. So basically uh what starts here is like all the uh interior area is ready. Of course, for now it's purely dark and the as the rule for lighting artist is once we light on the room, we're going to tell the space. But how we light up this thing is basically uh introduced by the

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    atmosphere from our art director. So here is a good example from our art director. So basically this is a uh the lighting setup before and this is what we are trying to achieve. So according here is like because we have the different version of the light. Basically we have three different version of the light. Uh first one is like it's a fake light light source which going to trigger the uh emission power. So here is a light feature and what we do is like we linked it with the uh emission power to turn them on. So obviously each space once they have the feature the light should comes from the direction of the feature. However, uh in this industry, what we did is like we have this lighting feature first which going to control the uh image ship map

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    and then we have another actual light going to tell this space like where the light comes from uh from this spot direction. And after we set up all this space, we were trying to push like different color for car and warm. And once I turned around the fork, I will try to get them even closer with the uh guidance from the art director. So basically that is how we work. Uh usually once I've done the lighting, I'm going to just do the uh character testing cuz character is a very important part of the game. So usually once I done the lighting setup, I'll just use this test feature to see and walking around and make sure like in different positions. Those light going

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    to cast the character correctly and they're going to able to see this character and also uh we have two different light setup. The one is like a cold light like you can see casting from the H exit of the door. It's very cold. So in that case I designed some like warm light to make sure the character always have different code and warm tone to make the image looks more interesting. There's new lighting tools created on a probably a weekly basis at this point. Um we've we've just recently uh integrated a first pass of our lit fog technology which is basically a way of transferring old fog which is very kind of uh I mean it has depth but it feels quite flat in the way that it renders the scene. Um but this new technology allows us to basically gives you a sense

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    of where the light comes from or like light sources can actually cast light into the scene from uh from their source. At the moment, the the old fog doesn't react to lights in any way. So, what an artist will have done is they'll have put fog in an area and they'll have sort of set the color and the thickness of it to roughly approximate what it would have looked like if it had had lighting on it. So, as an example, if someone's put a red light in a room, they'll probably have put some red fog in there to go with. What they're actually trying to get the impression of is some very thin white fog with a really strong red light on it. So now when you put some really thick red fog in the room and then you shine a red light on it, it's going to go completely like opaque and it's going to be incredibly red and it's going to look terrible. What it's actually doing is it's it's basically just drawing a large

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    uh sort of cuboid onto the screen and then because it knows how far into the scene the opaque objects are in that scene, it can sort of it can work out how much fog it would have to it would have to put on here. but it has a few problems. So, as a very simple example, you can kind of tell in the shadows, it tends to over brighten the shadows. It sort of it flattens out the the effect of the entire scene. And the other problem we've actually got is if you add more lights, you can sort of see that the the scenery lights up, but the fog itself is just still this sort of like fixed yellow color that I've that I've picked in advance. Now, another issue that it had, this is a transparent sphere. And so, because it doesn't have any depth information, it can't actually apply the fog to this. So, the old fog system, um, the on the CPU side, it just does a a

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    very simplistic approach to this. And it it works out what how much fog the very middle of the sphere would have and then just sort of applies it over the entire thing. So if I zoom in on it a bit and then I lift it up, you can see that it sort of stays fogged even as it pokes out and then just as it crosses the entire thing sort of leaves the fog. So it that was mostly work roundable but um you often have problems with um windows on ships or anything with a large canopy would suddenly it would s the the whole canopy would then suddenly sort of pick up the fog of the inside of the place. So now we've got dynamic fog, dynamic particles to go in the lighting. It's incredibly cool. I've got a bit of a reputation for liking the fog and particles a little bit too much. It's actually the the second thing I do as soon as it goes into a level. You

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    automatically get depth. You get a certain ambient and a mood via via the fog. Um, and yeah, it's just incredibly powerful. It kind of backs up uh all all the hard work the lighting guys put into into the levels. That's intense. That's very intense. So, with the new fog, you can obviously see that the the lights are actually affecting it. Um, we've got a spotlight here going into it. What's quite nice is that if you get down into the soup, you can kind of you can actually very clearly see that there are these sort of shafts of darkness where the shadows properly affect the fog. So, this is um this is tech that we're integrating from from Lumbiard at the moment. to sort of it's still in progress at the moment, but um if I switch over to the debug modes, I can

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    sort of show how it's working. So, this is just like a horizontal slice that we've taken through the texture that we use. So, what we've got here is um it's kind of a it's a volutric texture that's at the moment it's about a fifth of the screen resolution and about 64 slices deep. And so, the the samples are kind of distributed towards the viewer end so that you get more detail up at that end. And just because because the camera sort of widens your field of view widens in the distance the same amount the same uh number of divisions is sort of spread over many more meters in the distance. But as you can see this um this rectangular volume has been sort of inserted into um the volutric texture. It doesn't bother inserting them here because it knows uh it knows that there's an opaque object. So it doesn't really need to know what values it's got

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    there. So that's just a an optimization. So that's just the density and the color of the the volume that's been inserted there. So then after that we have a second pass that um it takes it takes all the lights in the scene and again this is just a a single thread of the of a compute shader is run for every uh every voxil of of this volume. So into a second texture we take all the lights in the scene. um we multiply them through with the with the density and with the opacity of the volume. Um and we actually you you can't really tell here, but it's it's working out depending on your viewing angle, it's sort of saying a light will sort of scatter towards the camera more. So I think that you probably can't see it, but the

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    highlights will change shape very slightly. Maybe not. But also from here you can see that um this this dark lump here is casting a shadow from the main light but it's then it's still receiving kind of blue light from the sides. So then the next pass after that we actually we do a little bit of blurring after this point. But um the next interesting pass what this is is it's actually it's a ray march that's been done through the entire volume. So at this point it's worked out that any object that wants to be wants to have fog applied to it now just has to it can just read a single point in the texture and it knows that that's exactly how much fog something at that distance would need. So up near the front you can sort of start seeing the fog coming in. But as you get deeper anything beyond about this point is going to get exactly

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    the same fog drawn over it as about this point because it's it's pretty much opaque by that point. The great thing about that is that whereas the old transparency you had to just work out for a single object on CPU how much fog in general it would get, uh, this you can now just any pixel that's being drawn can just read this text to find out how much how much fog it should have. So it doesn't have any of the same problems. Another quite nice thing actually about this, if we go back to the to this view. So this is now evaluating a noise function and just applying it onto the fog. So you can sort of see the patchiness just sort of slowly drifting around inside it. And uh if I turn off the debug, you can now see that there's a sort of there's slightly more richness and there's slightly more kind of complexity drifting around which sort of lets you kind of work into the

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    scene a little bit more like sort of get more interest, get more variation. In order to switch over, we need to basically pick a date where every old fog volume in the game will break and every new one will start working. And so it's just a case of once we once we've got the tech in and we're satisfied that none of the parameters are going to shift around um and you know suddenly the density value won't mean twice as much as it did yesterday or you know whatever like that. At that point the environment teams and the ship teams have to go through absolutely everything that's got fog volumes on it and just make sure that they all look good or delete them if they don't or replace them or whatever. check that the lights shining onto it don't show anything that was slightly dodgy about how the lights were set up or all that kind of thing. It basically replaces the old fog

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    technology completely. It looks better in almost every conceivable way. We've been integrating it from the most recent Lumbiard release that we've got. A lot of the work that I'm doing at the moment is just sort of moving taking that and integrating it with the with the things that we've changed in our in our copy of the engine. So minor things like um exactly where you get shadows from for the sun, we've changed that to be slightly more efficient, but obviously the new code is coming from a system that hasn't done that. And so we just have to go patch that up, find find where those parameters are coming from, find where that data is coming from, make sure that it all feeds through in the right way, sort of hunt down bugs that are caused by by differences between the two systems. The fog, uh especially in space, is going to make a huge difference. Um, the UK graphics guys are looking into

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    creating a unified fog system so that even in, you know, the asteroid belt right now, they're kind of dull and and plain looking. It's just a bunch of rocks floating around. But in in space, you have a ton of ice particles. You have a ton of rock particles, you have all these little dust particles floating around, and that creates volume. Um, so really one of the focuses going forward is making those spaces feel more alive and and like there's matter there. um like there's stuff that you're passing through as you're flying through the the asteroid belt. Uh and that's that's driven by the fog system. So that fog system is going to be be massive. But having that in the engine is is incredibly cool. Um you can create a sense of depth just with fog alone. And then as soon as you you introduce lights dynamically reacting to that fog, which is what an artist would spend a long time trying to recreate, it's an incredibly powerful tool to have to be

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    able to guide players like we kind of touched on before. Uh and to create a sense of depth away from the camera, sometimes the things that you don't see in the world and your your mind makes up what that is is is far more powerful than actually seeing that asset. So so strong silhouettes and things like that is is a very kind of distinct and cool style in my opinion. The fork was only uh different for so if by default the fork going to come like really intense. So it's depends on what kind of thing you are working for. I can show this is the default sense. So they just come as a volume but you going to active the fog scattering with the light. So depends on the situation of each sin we have to design like where the fog is come from

44. 00:35:09

    or what may possibly cause the fog and usually the fog effect shows up on the like brightest point. See we have a hot spot around the ground and we got the window the lighting traveling through here. So in my way how I design the fox scattering is like alongside the direction of the uh possible lighting source comes from. See here's the window. So that's why those fork kind of falling in that way. So this is actual lighting source. And again um if I turn it on this is everything life. So the entire sense uh lighting wise it's consisted with basic image shift light fixture and the real lighting hotel space and the fog effect. It's brand new. It's only come in this week and we're we're at the stages now of scaling it up. So we we it's going to

45. 00:35:58

    work in an environment like this. Uh, great reference. Thanks, guys. But we've got uh we obviously need to make that work on the scale of a nebula, which is is is bigger than a, you know, a solar system. I am I'm very excited about the lit fog. It's something I've played with for for a few years, and it constantly amazes me with how how much it improves the atmosphere of of an area. Um, it just makes things just the air feel thicker, and you can really feel like you're you're in this space. Like every single day I basically grab a new build and there's always some kind of new thing that's just like a new value that I can tweak that just makes things look a little bit cooler. And it's it's really exciting being able to see that kind of stuff. Wow. Heat.

46. 00:37:55

    Uh, I bet the crew had a lot of fun covering Nate and all that fog. Uh, does that count as research and development? I'm sure it does. And I'm going to say yes. Then, uh, before we go, I just want to remind subscribers that this month's issue of Jump Point will be available tomorrow. Subscribers can also fly the Drake Buccaneer as part of the ship of the month. And if you're interested in learning about our subscriber program, check out the link in the description. That's all for this episode of ATV. Happy Hour Friday returns tomorrow at noon Pacific. The talented Josh Herman will create another creature live on Twitch, so be sure to check that out. Super cool. Let's see if he can top the flying spider. And I also want to thank all the subscribers out there. You're the reason why we can make shows like this one and happy hour. Of course, Star Citizen wouldn't exist without our backers. So, big thanks to all of you.

47. 00:38:45

    Yes. And thanks for watching. We will see you around the verse. Everything I change blows up the game, so that's fine. Are you all right? Could have had it could have doubled with it being a bit longer.

48. 00:39:32

    It's pretty intense. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. It has got a funny smell to it though. It's quite It's not bad. This is when the fire alarms go off. It's going to be hilarious if it does go off. Thank you for watching. So, if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest in Star Citizen and Squadron 42's development, please follow us on our social media channels. See you soon.