TL;DRHe has been working on a new system for making more distinct space stations, and he doesn't know whether that work will actually make it into the game.
You haven't actually been on a ship recently. In the most general sense, you can't give them details on that. You can tell them you've been working on a space station.
Well, I've just been doing a space station. Basically, a lot of the stations we have right now are kind of starting to feel the same, because we're using the same kit to develop these things. And so what I've been working on for a while was just trying to develop a new system for unique, different-looking types of stations. So I don't even know if the work I've done will actually make it into the game, but it's more to figure out the idea.
So that goes back to two points we made earlier in this show. One, are we working on space stations that you guys haven't seen? Yes. Two, does everything that's concepted make it into the game?
I don't know if these ones will or not, but I think the idea from the beginning was more to just develop a system so that eventually we can get a wide range of different-looking, or different-feeling, types of stations and stuff.
TL;DRGurmukh Bhasin says he may be remembered most for concepting the Vanguard, and calls the Carrack, which he also concepted, a very cool exploration ship.
I worked on a bunch of ships, a bunch of variants. I did the concept for the Carrack and the concept for the Vanguard. I think right now I'll be remembered the most maybe for the Vanguard, but I think the Carrack is a super cool ship.
There hasn't been a week since the Carrack was first introduced where we haven't had a half dozen questions: When's the Carrack coming? When's the Carrack coming? It's definitely a ship that captured the imagination of a good portion of our community.
Yeah, the Carrack is going to be a really, really cool ship. Once the game is out, once you can find jump points and explore different parts of the universe and all this stuff, the Carrack, that's what that ship is built for, is exploration. Which I think is one of the most exciting parts of the game. So once that thing is out, fully flyable and everything like that, I think it's going to be pretty awesome.
The ships that I've concepted, but, to be more general and broad about it, my favorite accomplishment is just being a part of this project. I think this project is super adventurous and really risky and exciting. It's not your normal game project. It's not your bread and butter, where you just do the same thing over and over. This is something where we're pushing the boundaries. And being a part of a project like that is really rewarding, slightly stressful, exciting. It's all of the above. But I think my biggest and most exciting accomplishment was just being a part of this team for so long and helping to make what is going to be one of the best games, I think. It's a really tough project to be a part of, just because there's so much to figure out, and every day has been an accomplishment.
Absolutely, and nobody's done it before. I don't know if it's fair to say that people are starting to copy us or not, but you kind of see that. Space has become super popular as far as games, and a lot of the stuff that we're doing, people are catching on and starting to use in their games. I feel like we're the leaders of this movement in some ways.
As for how it will affect Carrack development: Gurmukh is the concept artist, and now it will soon go into the being-built-out phase. So those are different team members who will be building it.
So I always wanted to do a single-seat fighter. So not necessarily a specific ship, but a single-seat fighter. And I always wanted to do one for Anvil, because I think that's one of the cooler companies. Aegis is one of the cooler companies as well, but has so many ships. And I always thought it would be fun to do one for Anvil. I'm actually going to be doing one on my own just for fun, because I never got to do it here. So I think that's probably going to be one of my first personal projects when I'm out: a small single-seat fighter, something that I always wanted to do.
It has been finalized, and the art is 95% done. And if you want to see it soon, you have to be nice to Ben. He's the one in charge of that. You'll be seeing it in the not-too-distant future. The beauty pieces are fantastic. Well, the first one; I haven't seen the second one yet.
It was really cool. He also did, if you guys remember the first pass on the component system, all those component concepts, that was also Gavin. Gavin also did the Starfarer.
BL
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement and Online Strategy
I believe the Sabre is moving into grey boxing right now?
TL;DRGurmukh models in Maya, renders in KeyShot and finishes in Photoshop, preferring KeyShot over V-Ray because it is fast, intuitive and has built-in materials.
Yeah, KeyShot. A couple of us have been taking part in the beta testing for KeyShot 6 and it's really cool. The thing that sold me on it is just it's really easy to use and you don't get headaches from thinking about render settings and hoping your renders turn out nice. It's almost like a real-time render, so you pretty much see what you're gonna get on your screen pretty quick, and really high quality. Super fast. We were using V-Ray previously, and even with V-Ray RT, which is great, it's amazing, but the materials are pretty much already built in there [in KeyShot], it's so intuitive, you can get something out in a day. KeyShot, yeah, it's real easy, and for me, the best part is it keeps me in my artist mode, like design mode. I don't have to worry. Drag and drop materials; I don't have to worry about trying to set up materials and figuring out the settings to make it the right kind of metal or the right kind of glass or whatever. So that's just why I enjoy using it, because it's really easy.
Well, no matter what render you do, if you're doing animation or if you're doing still images, still images definitely take into Photoshop and take them to the next level. Images straight from render are usually a little flat and lifeless, but if you do a couple tweaks in Photoshop, you can bring them to life. And then for animations, you just use After Effects pretty similar to the way you would use Photoshop and bring your animations to life. But I think that's one thing that a lot of people don't realize when they're first starting: you have to add an extra layer of information to your renders in Photoshop. A lot of people think that your render is your final output, and no, you definitely want to add that last 10%. It really does a lot for the image.
TL;DRTime varies widely with complexity and uniqueness, from a day or two for a simple character to weeks for complex ones, and about a month for a single-seater ship concept, with larger ships, new manufacturers and interiors taking longer.
For concepts, it really depends on what type of person this character is, right? So if this is just a regular miner, you just have a onesie, that can take a day, right? But if we're going on to a heavy marine, where it has all these different functions, attachment points, and also EVA capabilities, those things take a little bit more time. And just really the uniqueness of the character kind of defines how long a character would take. And plus, I do not just one character, but three variations of that character. So a little bit more time, because I can't just show the producers and the artists and also Chris just one concept and be like, 'That's what you got.' You can't do that. So I have to show different variations, and whichever meets the standards and also the creativity bar, they'll select one out of three. So it really depends. I've had characters approved in two days, and I've also had characters approved in two weeks.
I think that's the nature of the beast with being an artist. It's one of these amorphous things where you can build a checklist of everything you need to do, but you don't necessarily know, going into it, how long each thing is going to take. And sometimes I'll be working on a piece of geometry and I'll think, oh my god, this is going to take me three days, and it'll take me a day. And then other times I'll think, this is going to take an hour, and it takes six. And our producers hate us for that. But I think that's the nature of being an artist: sometimes things take a long time, because you're going through this stuff and figuring out how it looks, where it's going to go, how it's going to factor into the ship.
Ships, they take a really long time. It just depends. Usually the size of the ship definitely changes the amount of time it'll take for concept. But a single-seater, I would say roughly about a month. And then you just build from there; the bigger the ship, the longer it's going to take. And one of the things is the company that is creating that ship. For example, Aegis is one of our more defined companies within the ship companies that we have already. The Retaliator kind of sets the tone for what future Aegis ships are going to look like. So when you have something like that providing information, it will speed up the concept a lot, but if it's a company where there's a lot less pre-made ships to define it, then it's going to take even longer, just because you're still trying to figure out the look and the feel and all that for that company. So it's a hard question to answer. As well, interiors take a long time. For the Vanguard, for example, interiors for three variants was about two months, with all the art and all the modeling and all the design, which I think is pretty good. And then the exterior for that one was also about two months, just to figure out the basic shapes and stuff like that. But if another ship similar to the Vanguard by Aegis was to be done, now I have a lot of assets I could reuse. So the more we do it, the quicker it's going to get. So yeah, I hope that helps.
TL;DRThey all want to make art outside work, but long hours and commutes leave little energy, so some have unfinished home projects, though a couple teach classes or do demos.
Yeah, same here. When you're here till 7:30 or 8 o'clock and then it's an hour home, because it's LA traffic, and you're home by 9 and then your girlfriend's like... and you've got to deal with that.
It's also like, I start new projects all the time at home and I never finish them, so I have a hard drive filled with 50% projects. It definitely takes brain power, and usually when I go home I literally want to turn my brain off, so I watch trashy TV and lay on the couch.
TL;DROne artist says designing space toilets, which every ship they've worked on has, is the weirdest, while another cites an unnamed upcoming film's creature design they can't discuss.
Well, the weirdest thing I've ever worked on is for a film that's coming soon. I can't talk about it. But the director told me that he wanted a creature whose face has to look like female genitalia. And so, yeah, I've worked on that.
Yeah, I'm pushing to do more on it. There's still a lot of work to be done, so we're just trying to figure out a schedule for when we can work that in. Gonna be going and working on some of the interior stuff. I've been telling Ben all the fun things I want to do with it, so hopefully that will get signed off and then it'll be good. I'm excited.
TL;DRInterchangeable suit parts like gloves, boots and helmets are the plan and the goal, with characters built from swappable items and ships made as modular as possible without looking like Frankenstein builds.
I mean, that's the dream, though, right? Being able to customize whatever, as an MMO. Because the way we're doing our characters, I could be wrong, but from what Forrest and Omar were telling me, there will literally be stages on the characters. One will be the glove, and we call them items, right? So the whole concept of components: you can swap in, swap out. So yes, you can have an RSI helmet, and then you might have a light marine boot. That's the idea. That's what we're working for.
We're trying to do the same thing with ships, too. We're trying to make as much stuff modular as possible while still being able to keep things unique. Because in the end, you don't want a bunch of Frankenstein-looking things. But you do want customization. So we're figuring out a way to make sure that you get both.
TL;DRInternal guides give rough poly budgets by size (small, medium, capital) but every ship differs, and whether players will ever be able to put their own ships in the game is undecided.
What they need to do is they need to bribe us. No, I'm just kidding. Poly counts are, I guess, kind of hard to answer. It just depends on the size of the ship.
We have a guide that we're trying to stick to, but different ships obviously require different amounts of poly count, depending on how big they are. But we do have guides that we're trying to stick to very, very hard. We are breaking them down by small, medium-sized and capital. And I think they break down to somewhere around 300,000 polys for a small ship. And that would be like a single-seater ship, like a Hornet or a Gladiator or a Gladius or something like that. A ship more the size of the Retaliator and Constellation is supposed to stick somewhere around 500. And capital-class ships, we are trying to get them in somewhere around 750 to a million polygons. But again, these are just basic guides, and every ship is unique and has totally different requirements. So you're going to see ships that just do not fit in that at all, depending on what the requirements of that ship are. But those are the things that we're trying to aim for, for performance reasons and production reasons and things like that.