Inside Star Citizen: Life of VFX

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   [Music] hi welcome to strategy Crips I'm Max Snowden and this is where the magic happens severe Factory video games certainly in our games in particular it's it's basically it's energy represented visually so you're more typical the effects explosions fire all that kind of thing they're representing that kind of energy and the motion and the force and the violence that comes to even things like leaves getting blown around by the wind it's motion uh in in games the effects are everywhere in Star citizens

2. 00:00:46

   so there's cooling there's steam there's Mist there's fog there's fallen leaves there's buzzing flies if the player fires a weapon they're going to expect some kind of payload for that they're going to expect to see muzzle flashes depending on the weapon of course but they're going to expect to see impact effects again without them kind of the effects in a game it's hard for the player to really read what's what's happening they're not kind of getting them visual cues and it sort of hinders their progress I think VFX matter and Star Citizen because the visuals are fantastic in our game but without the actual VFX the everything can look very static so it's not always the most tangible thing in a frame the players Seas but when you take away the effects you kind of notice that they're not there I joined crg nine years ago and there was quite a small group of us actually there was there was three or four of us VFX artists so originally the the VFX

3. 00:01:36

   were struggling for consistency it was obvious that it was a project in its very early days and we were looking for that identity we were looking for that kind of consistency of visuals that that language that can be understood by the player and that's really why you build a team why you build a department to allow that kind of continuity in in VFX in a game so really in the nine years that I've been here we've kind of built a department a proper Department full of different skill sets different disciplines we've got a whole programming team we've got production we've got a better QA we've got Concepts we've obviously got artists as well we now have a coherence of visuals we have a language that is understandable and works for the player we had a good base in the first place but now the the toolkit is really really powerful and it

4. 00:02:24

   needs to be for the ambition of the VFX in the game so the VFX team is basically a microcosm of game development the team is currently 21 people we also have a core team within that being the programmers the production side of it the concept inside of it and the QA side of it as well and we need that because we're serving other departments we're serving art we're also serving design and we need to have that kind of skill set within the team to be able to do all the things that are requested of us I'm Leo van stinkerser I'm a principal gfx programmer I do two things I manage a small team three four people of cfx programmers and I kind of handle the different projects that we have as a

5. 00:03:12

   team that that gets done and then the second part is I do put some programming myself as well so I intentionally kept the team pretty small so that I have some time to program myself as well my name is Francesca I am a VFX programmer we had a team of four VFX programmers and the one that manages me is Leo a program specific graphics features and tools and other stuff related to VFX specifically mainly for artists to be able to do work with and create really nice visuals from my name is Alexander I'm on the VFX team as a tools programmer my job is to create sliders and the UAE elements to make it intuitive for the artists to work with we have a lot of different environments and effects and we need to take care of every single one of them and it's my job to make sure that it's easy for an

6. 00:04:01

   artist to work with different type of effects I'm column and my job in the VFX team is assistant producer so generally day-to-day I do scheduling and just supporting the team in anything that they need to do so they get to focus on the creative things whilst I deal with what they would classes the bar inside of game development if the vf16 didn't have a producer it would be horrible he manages a lot and talks to other teams and makes sure we have all the information we need to be able to start working on a task if we had to do that ourselves that would be a lot of hours wasted every day the VFX editor is basically the place where you create the effects you give it a texture or a picture and you change a few values and suddenly it moves and you

7. 00:04:50

   see coming to live it could be a smoke it could be a fire it could be lightning there is not much you can do without the code that would make the artists a programmers we program everything related to VFX that includes tools that includes features includes smaller things like triggering the effects from game codes to system for managing VFX making sure that VFX stabilized that they die on time as VFX programmer we get to work closely with VFX artists my name is Kevin and I am a VFX artist here at cig 90 of the effects we make in starships and our particle effects when you fire a weapon at the end of the barrel we will spawn a particle with a texture on it and then we modify parameters to be able to make that look

8. 00:05:39

   like a muscle flash or smoke or whatever so basically we just have a bunch of parameters on how to spawn how to move and what a particle looks like Star Citizen is a really beautiful game and VFX are a large part the effects really need to be tailored for basically every possible situation this gives a lot of opportunities for for creating visuals and effects in ways that you would normally not see in other games the VFX needs to be seen from every angle from a very far distance to very close up we have such varying scales from just small rooms to planets to ships and even just empty space itself everything needs to be dynamic and systemic so all dvfx they are based on the underlying systems we

9. 00:06:29

   get to look at these systems find the right Hooks and try and Trigger the right effects at the right time getting all of that together to get a consistent hole is pretty challenging but the results are always pretty cool the relationship within the team is very Dynamic we work together a lot and it kind of depends on what you're working on to Who's involved production tends to be involved a lot of the time generally on a day-to-day basis working closely with Aztecs and obviously other programs is pretty great there is a lot of feedback and information circling around what Paths of what you're working on you may want to improve on or even what parts are working well and should be iterated on even further it creates an environment

10. 00:07:17

    in which no one feels like they're stuck on something foreign sex team we're basically a support team for everyone else we create effects for the vehicle team we've created X for the locations teams including planets any location you can think of we're going to be adding effects to them in some form or other and gameplay as well obviously all of these things are design driven so we need to create effects that help designers provide that feedback to the player we won't always be working on the effects at the exact same time we don't really come in on towards the end because we don't want to work on something that's going to get changed eventually so once a ship has been approved that's when the VFX team starts

11. 00:08:07

    to work on it mostly people don't notice VFX I think subconsciously they do they look at a ship and they see a cool Thruster or when it dies a cool explosion or whatever but then again we have the subtle effects you don't notice it and the less you notice it the better it is it just plays in with the whole environment we provide a supporting role and we we contribute to making the game as good as we can the future of VFX at cig is bigger and better as cheesy as that might sound but it's also it's maintaining existing effects and it's building tools within

12. 00:08:54

    the team that make that possible so one example of kind of tool improvements to help us maintain as well as improve effects is external reference in let's say you have two water effects they look very alike but there is a slight difference and suddenly an artist makes a even better picture to use for this water effects my job then was to implement a feature to just be able to change the picture of one effect and both of them change at the same time the one that's going to do is allow us to have a small group of Master effects that we can then propagate to other effects libraries throughout the game and it means we can we can maintain a smaller group of effects and we can make sure that those improvements Cascade throughout all the other libraries where those type of effects will be used being able to have the same effect looking a

13. 00:09:44

    bit different over two projects saves time for the artists and it's easier for them to keep track of everything and upgrade the visual of an effect so that's going to streamline the process absolutely it's going to make it easier to keep a high quality to keep updating and improving the high quality through the years as well So currently I'm working on Lightning within gas cards we already have some lightning system in place but now we're adapting it to be possible to strike from wooden gas clouds this will give some extra gameplay opportunities for designers and the environment artists to dynamically spawn the lightning and hit ships hit players and make cash cards more dangerous I guess I think the

14. 00:10:32

    lightning of cool is cool but I really like the new fire so something that we're really proud of and that we've been working on for a long time is fire propagation so fire hazards and that's being handled by our VFX programmers the finance system has already existed for a while but it was never fully finalized on the visual side so I'm currently implementing all the necessary back-end features to get fire looking as good as possible it's back to the final visuals I am working on more specialized way of spawning particles for fire which creates a more interesting Dynamic way in which fire propagates and the way things start to look child as but after fire has been there for a while that's been kind of a long process and it's still ongoing it's very very complicated and it's very ambitious but we're getting to a point now where I'm really

15. 00:11:19

    really happy with where it's going the fire has a system itself is obviously gameplay critical the visuals obviously help to communicate where fire is present how strongly it's there and to give a real sense of danger for the room you're in the actual damage that the fire is causing on rooms is communicated through these visuals one of the best things about working on VFX for starships and is being able to see your work enter the game so quickly because we update the game so we so often so being able to see your work in players hands is always exciting to release a feature some new VFX that are part of one of the releases and you see players actually use your system and kind of push it to the Limit and it's always great to see working on statutes

16. 00:12:08

    in particular is especially good because the citizen is a really really good looking game working generally in graphics and VFX I think personally is one of the most satisfying sort of disciplines when it comes to programming VFX is one of the big puzzle pieces to making the environment feel rich and full I feel like that's one of the biggest gains of VFX is making the game look beautiful so what do we learned this with well hopefully we learned a bit more about how Downstream teams like VFX these folks who generally come in towards the end of the pipeline brain

17. 00:12:57

    life texture and Nuance to any game add those finishing touches that elevate the amazing work of other teams and add essential elements that really really make the difference between the immersive and the uh not immersive and don't forget that this year's ship show has begun as well as a new initiative Spotlight in the various missions in the verse I'm pretty sure this week it's Salvage you can check it all out now on the robertspaceindustries.com website for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckabee thanks for letting us share the process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next week