TL;DRWearing robes or cloaks over armor isn't planned and is doubtful, since modular armor changes size and silhouette, though some armors may include built-in hoods or capes.
So not impossible. We haven't talked about it. I'm not going to say it's something we can do. But because of the way we do our volumes and we sort of standardize everything, especially right now, all the undersuits are going through a standardization process to make sure all the armors fit on every undersuit, I wouldn't rule out the possibility that eventually we could have a standardization of armor where you could put cloaks on top of it, maybe. It's not something we're doing right now, but our system would allow it to be possible.
So that is actually built into the armor itself, so we do have armors that incorporate fabric, but our armors, since it's modular, they change shape and they change size. To have something that goes on top of that, right, because it starts with an undersuit, then you put an armor on top of that, then you put a helmet, and all these things are swappable. So they're changing size drastically, right? And we don't want all our characters to have the same silhouette. So just to throw another layer or something on top of that gets really complicated. But to add variety, we do like to incorporate. Maybe some of our armors might have a hood. Maybe some might have a little cape. Maybe some will have these drapeable aspects. But that's just an object that you just put over the whole thing, like a full robe.
I'd be doubtful, but mainly because there's also this big balance of if you standardize too much you lose variation, so you can't have a lot of cool different things and have them all work together at the same time, so you kind of have to pick your battles. The more you standardize, the more you sort of make a sameness across.
The armor sets are also very different sized, like the light to the medium to the heavy are big differences, so to try to hide your armor to that point wouldn't so much work, because if you're in a heavy and you're trying to hide it, you'd be in a tent. You'd be just walking around with a giant carport over you.
TL;DRTier zero heads have the most geometry, detail and blend shapes, with wrinkle-map blending decreasing through the tiers; zero and one are close, while the question's PU population numbers go unanswered.
So I guess the best way and the simplest way to break it down would be tier zero has the most amount of geometry, the most detail, and the most amount of time spent.
It comes down to fidelity. The tier zeros have a bunch of blend shapes also so you can hit tiny little nuances in the face. Whereas the lower you go, or the higher number-wise you go in the tiers, you lose fidelity. So it takes less time to make them. But the tier zeros are top notch.
Yes. And also, since we use wrinkle map blending, which is when those blend shapes are activated on the faces, they actually do wrinkles. So we have to do blood flow maps and different normal maps so that the face actually changes when different expressions are happening. So if we're doing a Tier 0 character or a Tier 1 character, they both have triple wrinkle map blending. Tier 2 characters have double wrinkle map blending. Tier 3 characters have single wrinkle map blending. So it's just blending between three images for tier zeros and ones, two for twos, and one for threes. So actually, there's really not a lot of difference between tier zero and tier one, except that tier zero has more blend shapes, like you said, higher fidelity and more topology. But the polish pass and the art pass is essentially identical from zero to one, except we spend a little bit more time on the zeros, obviously. But for them, it's more different.
It just looks more realistic, right? So when I squint my eyes or I lift up my eyebrows and stuff like that, all these different things, blood is pooling in different areas and I'm starting to get all these different folds. Most characters in games are starting to introduce that, but previously that wasn't really a thing, right? It was just the low poly geometry that was moving. And now, when you do different things with your mouth, your nose changes, blood pools in different areas of the face. So it just ends up looking way better.
It's all the little things that make Seth look real, right? All these little tiny things that he's talking about. You don't physically see them, but your brain picks up on it, right? We haven't crossed the Uncanny Valley yet, but it's much closer because of these little nuances.
TL;DRThey've been settling how torso ports are divided (undershirts, top items, then vests and gadget ports) while building a Maya tool that mirrors the in-engine loadout system for animators and artists.
Well, we've had it for a long time, but we've been finalizing how we're going to break it up. Because like I said, as the characters grow and as the S42 structure of how we make these characters changes, the process changes and how we're going to build the loadout. So actually with what I went into before about armor versus clothing and then legs, torso, all this stuff, what we solidified is sort of how we're going to divide up the ports for torso items. Because Riggs is making this automation system in Maya that'll help animators automatically put together loadouts the same way we do our in-game loadouts. I don't want to say this is the final way we're doing it right now, but basically we have our undershirts and then everything else is considered a top item. And then on top of that, we'll do another port that would then fit, I don't know how to describe it, but vests, things like that. Let's say you have a deck crew. So we have a jumpsuit and then you put a deck crew vest on top and then that opens up another port. It's really just this growing sort of hierarchy of you attach this onto this and then we open up all these gadget ports and things like that.
Yeah, we're trying to make the Maya content creation side mirror how it works in the engine also. It's getting close. So the idea is that between character art, tech art, and animation even, we can have the same exact thing working in Maya as we do in engine. So if there's ever a problem, like something looks wrong, we can check it directly with the exact loadout in Maya versus the engine. So we can see exactly what's going on. It's mainly my main focus at the moment. It came about because the animators were having some trouble seeing certain things, right? Like when he's sitting in a ship or when he's doing whatever, you can't really tell what's going on because he's in the light armor or the medium armor or whatever. This way they'll be able to put him in this shirt, those pants, that hat, whatever. So the animators will be able to see exactly what's getting in the engine in the final thing instead of just a generic character doing their animations.
No, it's custom. We have to make it because our loadout system is custom, right? Everything's custom. So the content creation side has to have custom tools to make it that way also. Very custom game.
Yeah, so we're working on that with the female and the long hair, like they brought up earlier. They're still working on the systems and fine-tuning how the simulation is going to go, like going back to resting positions and things like that, and also testing with zero-G, like hair in space. I don't think we see many games doing that. So we've got to make sure our hair, and this translates down to clothing too, like you're in gravity in a physics grid, and you leave the physics grid, and then suddenly your hair is just floating around.
TL;DRThey're locking down content pipelines and fixing bugs as systems come together, aiming for smoother, faster content flow rather than specific 3.0 features.
Make game. That is the best description of what we're doing right now. So actually, a lot of just what we talked about before, so with the loadouts, we're just locking down a lot of things and then working with John Riggs sort of solidifying this process, because going into 3.0, you don't want to do a lot of custom, I guess, non-pipeline-based actions because then it just breaks apart too easily. So he's locking down the pipeline and we're locking down the pipeline and things are going to be really fluent together. So we're solidifying that process. So after 3.0, as we make things, it'll just sort of go together and we won't have to go back and fix things. Everything's just going to be set in properly and the system will be smooth going forward, because the more we make these systems, the faster it'll be going through the pipeline.
The stuff I'm working on isn't really 3.0 specific. It's just studio efficiency. Make sure that everything works fine. The stuff that you get from Omar to me to Gaige painlessly. Speeding up the process every time. We have so much content to get through, so much clothing, so much everything to get through. We need it to be fast. If you do it in a traditional way, we wouldn't be able to get all the clothing done in time. Constantly every week we're updating the pipeline to try to make sure that things can just literally flow right through it, from one to the next to the next to the end. Very soon they're going to be able to test their stuff in engine before we even rig it, with some animations and everything. So that's part of the idea, right? So they can get their geometry in-game moving around and see, well, hey, if I change this a little bit right away before it even gets to them, then it's easier and better.
It's going to make my life so easy. I mean, I'm not so much implementing a lot of content. It's bug fixing. We're getting to this moment where we're starting to implement all the systems and every possible thing you could think of or not think of is arising. There's a lot of behind the scenes. So then we have to think, okay, well, now since we implemented this feature, now this is happening with the armor, and then how are we going to deal with this, and maybe we should change it, and that kind of stuff. So a lot of going through and a lot of fixing.
TL;DRThey hold back on specifics because later release contents are uncertain, but mention customization of clothing colors, faces, hair and hopefully armor tinting and mix-and-match armor, plus unseen armor coming.
I'm curious about how much we can talk about, because there's a lot of stuff in the works, but I'm not sure how much we're really releasing because we're not dedicated to it yet.
The issue is we don't know what's going to make 3.1, we don't know what's going to make 3.2 yet. So it's hard to talk about, because you say something like, oh, this is being worked on, but it may not come for six months, eight months, ten months.
A lot of stuff is in the works, so customization for characters is all over. All your clothing, colors, faces, we have multiple heads that are going in. People can customize hairs, a lot of it. There's a lot of stuff.
Armor, like you said, hopefully color tinting. Also, instead of going in like Star Marine, where you pick a heavy, a medium, a light, now we're going to start mixing and matching. Hopefully soon everything starts to fit together, because currently they kind of fit on different types of systems. So create a standard across the board, so when we open it up to the players they have a massive amount of options.
And there's a lot of armor that people haven't seen yet that's going to go in. 2.6 was a while ago, so there's a lot of stuff in that's probably going to drop that people are going to like.
TL;DRYes, beards are done, such as a goatee on one character, and characters and clothing are being upgraded or rebuilt for better quality and modularity.
Yes. I can't remember the exact character's name, but White has a pretty sick beard. Especially on tier zero, you can see those hairs just bristling around.
When the time comes that people see the updated Bishop Senate speech, and all the changes and improvements that have been made just to Bishop. We've made so much improvement on the character tech since that, because that first Bishop speech was released a month and a half after the data was originally solved. It was really early on in the process.
I think just like what's happening with the ships, they're all getting redone, that's happening with the characters. And I think probably within the next couple months, we would have redone every single character. We have a couple legacy characters that are still in. Those are going to get redone.
But it pays off, especially with these modular systems. You look at the old clothing and it's like, that's just not going to work. So we do it to make it more versatile and work across the board for players.
Oh, so actually, Mark has also been working on those. Dresses are in the works and recently he just skinned another character to test. We got it working, but it's one of those things you don't want to release until it's final, because simulation is such a fickle thing. We don't want to throw it out there because, like you said, clipping through asses and stuff.
TL;DRClothing simulation places rows of joints through dresses and jackets so the engine simulates collision and movement, including floating in zero G, with a Maya tool to set them up.
So imagine you have dresses or skirts, anything, long jackets. We can either do vertex animation or bone animation, but basically what we're going to do, for the sake of, I guess, the cost of processing power, we put rows of joints down these jackets or dresses and then the engine will simulate how they collide with the body, how they rotate, and then they basically just do their thing and they simulate. They'll fall around the collision meshes and then in zero G they'll interpret the lack of gravity and sort of just float in place, that kind of thing. Actually, I'm sure Riggs can go into the whole thing on simulation too.
Yeah, we use joint-based simulation at the moment. It's exactly like he says: draw basically the skirt or dress as joints and then set up a bunch of values. A lot of math, a lot of values, a lot of setting stuff up. We've also set up a tool for setting up dresses in Maya to make it a lot easier for these guys, because otherwise you have to literally place 10 joints, 20 joints around, manually place them all. So this does it all for them automatically. The next step for that tool is, Maya has the same types of simulation stuff in it, so again, to try to make the digital content side the same as the engine side, we would try to make it simulate in Maya and then export those settings to get a good baseline. And then in engine, obviously, it's always going to be a little bit different because the math that's being done behind the scenes is different. So then we would tweak it a little bit in engine to make it better.
Actually, the character artists do use Marvelous Designer, but we don't simulate through that. They do a lot of their initial wrinkles, and they'll bake their normal maps from sculpted and Marvelous Designer simulated wrinkles.
Yeah, there's no simulation in engine or Maya for that stuff. That makes the cloth look more realistic for them, then they give it to us, and then it's solid at that point.
It's a unique way that we do it too, because we have to lay it flat on a cone, so how do you sculpt wrinkles onto a cone, because it doesn't just fall naturally, right? Because we have to let these guys actually make the cloth fall. It's a unique pipeline, but it's pretty cool stuff.
I mean, with the fidelity, if you look close enough, there's a little bit of hair in there, but we're not going to have any kind of simulated flowing-in-the-wind hair.
TL;DRThe speakers say the most satisfying part is seeing how far the project and its departments have come, with characters improving, tools streamlining, and the team's quality and growth, including cloth now being tackled.
Getting to the point where we are. I've been around for a while now. Seeing where it started and how far it's come, it's stunning. I'm working on a project and I'm constantly looking at things going, wow. Because we don't deal with the spaceship stuff too much and the planet side and all that stuff. We're mainly working on characters. So to see the stuff that these guys are also putting out, it's brilliant. It's separate departments, right? So that's the idea that we really want. We really are trying to do the characters as stunning as these guys are doing the spaceships, because it's just amazing. And how hard these guys work, it's really getting there. The characters are really coming along.
For me, it's been similar to what he said. When you really just hop in a level sometimes and see what the rest of the company has been doing, it's like, holy shit, that's crazy. And you see the solar system, actually I'm not sure of the proper name, but Solid, where they basically make all the planets, the orbits and everything. When I saw that system, I was like, that's fucking cool. But when you really hop in game, it is, dude, it's fucking awesome. So when you see the systems, you hop in and then just hop in a ship, and then with the characters you made, just the whole thing coming together feels really good. And also, pipeline development is really fun. When all the tools finally come together and it just gets super easy and streamlined, it's like, oh, it's all paid off.
I'd say the growth of all the departments. I was just going to piggyback on what John said, essentially. The growth of the teams is just crazy. When we first started making them, we didn't know what the systems were. It's hard to develop art constantly, especially because we're always showing it, we're always iterating it. It's very difficult to do production and pre-production in a very similar timeline. So seeing that our team, the character team specifically, has grown ridiculously in the past couple of years, and seeing the quality of people who came in two years ago and where they are now, it has really improved. And I think you can see that with every character that comes out. Not only is it looking better, but it's also animating better and running better and being rigged better. And now with the help of the tech team, we're starting to get cloth, which is something that we were avoiding. And now when we have problems, we're able to approach it and be like, hey, this is really cool, can we do it? And then you guys are like, I think so. Or, no, no, no, go away.