Lance Powell

Basically, they want to know if you will be able to purchase additional fuel, store fuel in the hangar, and so on.

So, a couple of things. You will definitely be able to purchase fuel. You will be able to - well, the plan is to allow some ships to able to collect fuel from nebulas by just flying through them and then converting it inside the ship to actually use it as a propellant.And then we've got ships dedicated to fuel entirely like one of the versions of the Starfarer - the entire purpose of it is just to haul fuel from one location to the other and it's got the ability to refuel ships while in flight... so, that's kinda cool.

Sounds like a space AAA (Amercian Automobile Association - roadside assistance).

Yeah, exactly.

So, you run out of fuel. You hit the button... and it says, "OnStar. Can I help you?" and you're like, "I'm stuck. I'm out here in a nebula."

I'm hoping we make it sort of like a skill challenge where you have to actually line up your ship on to the Starfarer, get them to dock properly, and then refuel and just take off. But who knows, we're still working on that.

And if you're texting, then what happens?

Crash and burn... kill about 16 people.

That's right.

We joke about it sometimes... about getting sent into orbit. I actually want to do the "vomit comet" - the parabolic flight - that would be super cool.So, coming up with a cool design...

Can I just stop you for 2 seconds and just join me in this...[Looks into the camera]CR... we want to go to space. For research.

For research.

For research.

So, the design question - I think in a previous 10 for the Artists we talked about this a little bit. We tend to start off with real life examples of what it is that we are trying to achieve. So, if a spaceship is designed to accomplish a specific goal - whatever that might be, transporting fuel, dogfighting...

Space AAA.

Space AAA. A mining ship... whatever it is. We collect as many references for the actual function before we even start figuring out how we're going to design the aesthetics of the ship. So, we start off with function and then we go ahead and build the design around it. The rest of that comes from the style guides that we've already put in place for the manufacturers. So, if you have an Aegis ship which is supposed to be a mining vessel - well, the Reclaimer is actually not a mining vessel. But, as an example let's assume there was an Aegis ship that was a mining vessel. We would start off with mining equipment as references, and then we'd go ahead and apply the Aegis aesthetic on top of that. So we'd have smooth curves. We'd have like... space shuttling panelling, since that's part of the look for them, and we'd probably have the intakes on the top since that's like an Aegis thing. So, we have style guides which define some of the elements that these ships need to have and that's kind of how we arrive at the look. And we'll do variations of that and pick the coolest one.

Right. I think just to add some colour to that... the game takes place in the year 2900 [not entirely accurate... 2945] and one of the things we kick around a lot, more as a form of entertainment to new people who come on - myself included - the year 2900 is just a date that works for the story. It doesn't have practical implications on how design is going to work in the future. And a good example of that would be... there is some technology that is being worked on today and that technology far outshoots anything we're planning for Star Citizen 900 years later.So, the concept that we've been working with on the art side, specifically with the Persistent Universe and with some of the concept art, instead of people going... "Well, in 900 years everything is going to be a hologram and you may have a teleporter and your dog is going to be made out of nanobots and they'll be able to freeform and reform." Instead of all that stuff, we're saying... you can take a look at Rome as an example and 2000 years ago Rome was a dominant culture on the planet. They were hundreds of years ahead of almost every other culture and then they had the plaques and wars and they were sacked several times by the Gauls and basically it sent them back into the stone age. So, 900 years is really... what does it mean? You look at Star Wars is at 900 years... you look at Star Trek is at 300 years. So, it's our timeline and how we choose to tell the story.And to your point about the ships: I think that the ships take a nod from a lot of the cultural and creative influences that we grew up with. So, you're always going to see something that inspired us at some point in time slowly work its way into some of our designs because that's what we grew up with - that's what we really enjoy. More importantly, it's also what CR's tastes are - it's right in line with the stuff that we grew up with.I think the aesthetics kind of lends itself to something we've seen and re-envisioned, more than something that we've never seen because we can't imagine what stuff is going to look like 900 years from now.

Yes.

Love it. Love it. Boom! Now... followup question, and this is my own - When? I'm kidding.

That's a hard one to answer. I know for me, I try to keep my references as real-world as possible. We do have other spaceships that we look at as reference and inspiration as well, but we're definitely not sitting down and picking other ships from other universes and saying, "We want this ship." It really comes down to the purpose - what is it that we're trying to accomplish with the personality of the vessel, what it's purpose is, and then we build from there. We may use small elements from other sci-fi universes that we've seen but we're definitely not sitting there saying, "We need our version of exactly that ship." That doesn't happen.

To add additional information to the conversation. This isn't a direct response to the question but one of the things the design team is looking at is using frequencies of light. If you're using a red laser, you're going to have a longer band and it will have less impact. If you're using a green laser it will be somewhere in between. If you're using a blue laser, it will be a shorter frequency and far more damage. Everything in between, all of the various damage styles. The various range styles that come along with that. So, the complexity - it's being discussed right now to incorporate more real-world style future laser effects.I think things like neutron weapons, proton weapons, we're treating more like practical physics instead of traditional sci-fi. The weapon itself will provide - knock a couple of neutrons off of an atom and all of a sudden you've got an accumulation of something with extremely heavy mass. So, instead of it being a beam weapon... it is a beam weapon but it's like you got hit by a bus.

Right now, that's where it is still at. You go out into space, hop into your little bed, go to sleep and that's how you can kind of log off in space and it might save your state out there. It's something that we still have to prototype and test to see if it actually makes it in as a game mechanic.So... I guess the answer to that question is... Maybe?

What about things that you're working on right now like the component swap?

Yeah, so components... ultimately what we'll want to do is build our components... which will include beds and sinks and toilets and bathrooms and things like that - build it so that we can just use them on every ship, or as many ships as possible so we can reuse the assets and that bakes in the ability to potentially customize the interiors. Now, do not take me at my word on that because the smaller ships are all basically custom interiors. You will not be able to swap out an Aurora bed for a Mustang bed for example, it's not gonna happen... but it might be possible in the future. We're kind of trying to build our assets to make that a possibility later on.Now, the other components such as fuel tanks, ammo boxes, powerplants, ballasts - like we have... I don't even know how many... in the 10s of different types of components which are all completely swappable across all ships of the same class. So, there's a little bit of that going on and all of those components definitely have heavy gameplay implications. For example, if you have an ammobox on one side of your ship that is now adding mass to one side of your ship. The handling of your ship is going to take a hit as a result of that. The avionics will still compensate in order to make it as unnoticeable as possible but the moment you start using the weapon and the weapon starts drawing ammo from the box, you start losing mass which changes the handling of your ship and every component, depending upon its location on the ship will affect the mass at that location which then changes the rotation speed. It affects the physics in a major way. I'm not the best person to talk about how the physics work but the whole thing is going to be awesome.

That's an interesting gameplay question. Right now that has to be playtested to see. I am a really big fan of not really giving you an obvious distinguishing element between the two. Because I do want the world to feel: 1) Extremely cohesive; 2) I want there to be weight behind your decisions.So, if you decide to attack a ship you may not immediately know that its' either an NPC or a PC.Now, the cool thing about not giving you obvious identifiers on a ship is that that then requires you to get a scanner. It adds to the gameplay loop. So, if you get a scanner and scan the ship. Then you might now have the information that you need to make that decision. So, I prefer going that route.Ultimately, it comes down to game design and they'll make the best decision for the game once it's playtested. But my vote is: Don't distinguish.

To add a little extra colour to that as well, I think that the lighting schemes on various style ships will also play a minor part in that. So, when we get down to a lot of the pirate ships, their visible markers at a distance based on the lights and any type of material use will show them as being a potential enemy at a glance.But, to "Daniel's" point, that you may not actually get a sense of friend or foe at a glance. Because... you want that interaction. You want that... little more thrill being able to sit back, watch before you engage. And... if you're engaged or if there is some other marker that comes at you that says... oh okay, they're firing on me... it's probably a bad guy. Then it triggers that engagement.The classic style gaming where it's like... you go to your nav point and all of a sudden there's four or five blips of red. It's a little arcadey and it's something we've been trying to avoid.

I don't want to say no. We haven't discussed that on the PU side. It's not something that potentially wouldn't happen in the future, but I can't say that it's happening now. There haven't been any discussions.

Well, right now the art team is focusing on building out the inhabited locations. We will have uninhabited locations as well.Further in the future once the game is released, I know that we will be doing R&D on potentially procedurally generated planets so that we can expand the number of locations. We will still have to create art of that as well, even if it's procedurally generated. So... the answer is yes. We will be building art for all locations.

Are you sure about that? Is that your final answer?

I don't know how else we would see art... even if the programming... it's just not the way our game is built. So, I am pretty convinced that we will have artists building art even for procedurally generated planets.

Yes.So, the methodologies that we're using right now are split between 90/10 and then 10/90 and that means that the majority of the encounters that you'll have on an auto-generated planet will be auto-generated encounters. Versus the other side... you go to a planet like Terra and the experience is going to be very well crafted. So, it depends on which planet you go to... which system you're spending your time around and so on.Something that was also brought up in the question which is really interesting... the breathing apparatus, how is your ship impacted by planets with higher gravity... those conversations have been discussed and they're in the works. The details are to be determined.

I mean, one easy way that we could... for the examples you mentioned, how ships might be affected by different atmospheres and temperatures and things like that... because of the way we're building our damage system, we may be able to leverage that in order to apply effects to the ship based on the experience that the ship is getting. Right, so if you go through an especially hot environment and that's peeling off your paint or whatnot. We have the technology built in to leverage that in order to actually affect your ship in that way, so if you go to a crazy hot planet and then leave... now you may look scorched. The foundation for doing that exists.

So... I'll take a first stab at that. I think that "Dan" [Elwin] will take the second part of that.The short answer is going to be yes. The way that we're approaching the planets right now... through a lot of our sci-fi influences - and we're talking more desolate planets from Star Wars, Luke's home planet to Hoth. But we're also looking at components like Blade Runner. Basically we're drawing from all of our experiences and a lot of those are going to not just feed back into the persistent universe but we're going to have to continue to build out the persistent universe - the styles, the structures, the environments. Because you do want to show a cultural influence and how it has impacted planets.That said, the way that we've been approaching a lot of these things is through as much modern reason as we can. Which is, 100 years from now what happens to human space exploration. Well, we colonize the Moon. We colonize Mars. 200 years from now, what does it look like... okay now we've jumped out to maybe Ganymede or somewhere else. 200 years after that, we've gone out to maybe the edge of the solar system.What happens with planets like Mars is the next wave of construction. So the traditional cultural influences are really going to be determined by whoever is providing the finances to that location. But, I think more importantly, they will be building on top of the structures that have been put there. If you look at a base on the Moon or a base on Mars say in the next 100 years, you are going to find it's very modular... very container-style setup. It's more akin to Cowboy Bebop in a lot of ways or the movie Moon than almost anything else. But then say, 200 years from now you don't just scrap those structures... you now start building on top of it with something a little more modern.The art director who is driving that, Mark Skelton, and Corentin at the Montreal studio. - they are spending a lot of time focus on what those rings are and what happens when the humans leave our system and move out to the next system and that first system they move out to is a terraformed planet. Now you've got jump capabilities. That planet is now a complete overhaul of something that we've seen before, so it might not have any of the flavour that you're used to... but it may take suggestions from Dubai or a couple of other ultra-modern cities. But a lot of those things are being explored and the art direction that we've got from that so far suggests that we're going to be taking nods from all of those components but it won't be exact.A good way of looking at that would be something like Naboo. Naboo had, you know, kind of a renaissance style architecture to it. At the same time it had, you know, a lot modern day Star Wars techie stuff as well. So, it depends on the lens that you're looking at the environment from but...Short answer: Yes.Long answer: It's a little more complicated but it's going to take nods from a little bit of everything.

We have several locations on Earth, so we will probably draw directly from the cultures at those locations. We have landing zones in Russia, China... I would expect that those are influenced by those cultures. So... yeah, definitely.

Daniel Kamensky: So, right now we actually have our 'shears' set up so you can, theoretically, tint stuff with the diffused channel, specular channel, so we can do really big, significant material changes and colour changes, but it's yet to be implemented in programming, and a lot of the older ships that have yet to be updated with physically accurate textures still need to be brought to that system. But once it's all brought into place, you should be able to take like, the M50 for example, and make it black, or you have a Constellation, you want it blue, you should be able to do that. it's still yet to be pushed through design, but I think it's definitely a possibility.

Would you say it's a lot like buying a car? The question's a lot like buying a car, right> This person wants full control of, full RGB control, but as a manufacturer and the artist for the style guide, you'd want to limit the range. Can you talk a little bit about that, plus also the various material types? Gloss vs. Pearl and so on?

So, it's a little bit complicated with physically accurate textures, and you do want to keep design consistency throughout your game, like, it'll be a little distracting if someone flew through the Universe with a pink Retaliator that'd be weird, but what we'd probably end up doing is giving you different surfacing types, and different gloss values maybe, different colour values as little swatches you could see. Almost as if you've ever looked at car paint. They have orbs that you can see the surface on before you get your car coated, and you know, you probably will see your ship, and we'll give you a really wide range, so it's not like we're limiting you too too much, but you know, I don't want pink Retaliators in our universe.

Daniel Kamensky: Planets are a little bit...I can talk about what I use when I'm doing surfacing on ships and normally what I go to is I have, one of the popular resources for a lot of artists, especially at our company, is Pinterest. We have running galleries of a lot of stuff, and I'll look at a lot of planes, a lot of tanks, a lot of cars, I just slowly, whenever I see a surface I like, I grab it, I put it in a folder, and I save it for later. So I have a library in my head of, if I was going to build an Aegis ship, I'd be like, so Aegis is kind of militaristic, scary, industrial, panzer. That black, slightly glossy paint, you know, that kind of thing. So it's not so much a matter of texture reference for photo source, it's building up a reference, and one of the things I keep catching artists doing is they will constantly look at other computer graphics to draw inspiration from, and the key to creating believable materials is drawing all your reference from real world things.

Exactly. I think, to add to the question, and round out the PU, you also touched on it. We're building a Universe that's meant to be accurate. So, if there's a red giant, or there's a brown dwarf, or there's a white dwarf, we're shooting for something that's meant to be plausible. I think that from the concept creation side, the concept artists go out there and create the look they want based off of a feeling they're trying to capture, but then the production artists get their hands on it, and we dial it in towards the real world.

So, it influences both the interior and exterior, in different ways. So, smaller ships that don't really have interior spaces, the components that the ship carries influences directly the shape of the ships. So, the bigger a component, the larger that section of the ship has to be in order to house the component. So, good ships to look at that would have that would be the Hornet, the 300i, the upcoming new version of the Merlin, basically we have to shape the hsip to make sure that it can house all the components that its' supposed to house. So that's the exterior. For the interior, it depends on what components are going to be accessible to the player from the interior so, lets say for example something happens to your powerplant and you're on a Constellation for example, there's a space inside the Constellation where the player can go and interact with that object, which means we have to create a hallway that's wide enough for the player to go into, that we have panels that open up and there's enough clearance space and things like that, so the spaces will change in size depending on the things you interact with. So all the components will shape the ships in every way.

So I can't help but notice you had a little gleam in your eyes when you mentioned the Merlin. Can you talk about that ship and specifically where you started, and how you got to where you are with those volumes, keeping those volumes in mind?

Sure, so, getting the concept model of the Merlin, which I think is what's in Arena Commander right now, that's actually the concept model, that's not the final one, so I had to sit down and get all the components that the Merlin's supposed to house, get all proper sizes for them and then plop them into the ship, and then realize that none of them actually fits correctly, which means i have to go through a process of changing the shapes, making certain sections fatter, certain sections thinner, to make sure it all fits, and then once that's done I have to go through a pass of actually finessing the shapes, making sure it communicates the right personality and things like that, so I use, lets say, a Mustang or traditional muscle cars as inspiration for that, on top of making sure that all the components work, so yeah, we went through a lot of pains to make sure that functions, cause the Merlin is an incredibly small ship. You don't really have a lot of room to play when it comes to that, but we made it happen, and it looks pretty awesome.

You talk like a man who's been on your 10th date with the ship, and things are going well.

Do you walk around the office, surf the internet, watch Star Trek...?

Sure, sure, well the absolute first thing that I tend to do, is find out how the thing works. That's number one. Does it fold in this way, do things deploy from this location...

Form follows functionEB: Exactly. So then we'll go ahead and do a reference dig, for things that do the same thing. Like, landing gears for example, or how guns will deploy, what does the housing actually look like, so we have tons of references to help us actually figure out those sections, and then we start figuring out how do we communicate the personality of the ship, and that'll come through, getting old Russian helicopters for MISC for example, or stealth actual contemporary stealth planes, like the SR-71, for Aegis, things like that, or like I mentioned before, Mustangs or muscle cars for things like Kruger, so we have a language that we want to define for each manufacturer, so we'll go ahead and do reference digs for those, for the elements that we want to incorporate for that look. And it doesn't really, we'll look at sci-fi, we'll look at WWII references, so we'll grab whatever works, and take the elements that we really really like.

Right. I think to also round that out is the, now that the manufacturers and the ships are starting to fit into a manufacturer, we've had to start defining what those manufacturers actually look like, so, if you, for example, come up with a new ship that is from Aegis or Anvil, well, there's a distinct language that needs to be applied to those manufacturers that gives them that particular look. For example, MISC would be.

MISC would be old Russian helicopters, so it's ah, they have a lot of funky looking shapes, which is what they're basically known for, at least their older ships are like that Some of the new ones are a little bit more streamlined, but that's cause they're new. They're coming up with the times now. Anvil, for example, they have a lot of fighters, military ships, they have more of sort of a blocky look to their design, Aegis is a lot sleeker, things like that so, yeah.

So, we're taking things forward, and moving them forward is going to be a lot more refined by manufacturers. The ships will actually start becoming more distinct by that manufacturer type.

No, we hang out, we share ideas on a minute to minute basis. Basically, I'll call someone over and say, does this look like trash, does it look amazing, what do you think. I may love it, and someone else'll be like, that totally doesn't work, and I"ll be like, well, why doesn't it work? And I'll do it to them. So, you do it to me all the time.

The big thing is it's a team effort. You know, people are kind of tired of hearing this, but you know, there's no I in Team, and the reality is, the artist in me wants to own a thing. But not everyone's strong at everything, except for ElwinEB: [shakes head]

But, the idea is, you do want to play guys to their strengths. And, you don't want to be the case all the time, ultimately you want everyone to have the same set of strengths, but given that production, that rarely ever happens, we start spreading people around and making sure that what's getting the attention is the ship, which is what the priority is on, and not necessarily the individual. So that individual brings their best to that particular thing, and if it can't close out with that artist, we'll close it out with someone else on the team.

You can't take that one.

I can't take that one. I wish I could take that one, I'm actually, well, I can't. I don't know the answer. But I want to know too!

Okay, so the long and short of it is, the alien races are being fleshed out as we speak. Their home planets are being fleshed out by the writers as we speak. The details of those alien races are they're...they're as complex as I think you'd expect them to be, given the scope of the project, but... by that I mean, every alien on Star Trek comes from the same gravity style planet. In our world, we've got a handful of races that come from heavier G planets, so that impacts the way they look, some come from lighter G planets, which affects how they look. Something we've been kicking around for a while, and is starting to reflect the way that they look is the Vanduul, they operate on much higher spatial function than humans. They think very 3D, they operate very 3D, their entire environment's very 3D, and by that i mean we walk on a 3D plane. We usually drive on a 2D plane. Everything we do tends to be very 2d. If you remember the Wrath of Khan, the way they beat him, is, the guy operates 2d, in other words he's going to attack, and then circle back and attack again, and they went in depth. So these things are starting to manifest right now. Plants are being worked on by the PU team, which is manned by Mark Skelton, and we should start seeing some of the PU stuff come on-line within the next month, month and a half. PU and, I'm drawing a huge blank on the other component of the game which is the...Social module. The social module is coming along also in a month, and that's where the audience is going to have the first opportunity to see a lot of the plants. The animals are something we've been kicking around for a while.

cause we do have petsLP: We do have petsEB: I want some alien, alien pets.

We're going to have alien pets. We're going to start concepting those out, and that is something that I think, once the PU puts a nail in a handful of environments, they'll slowly start working on that.

That's a good question. So far we have done it simultaneously. So a lot of the ships, the Merlin's a great example, I did the modelling for the exterior, where Paul Forgi, which is another artist, is working on the cockpit, and he's continuing to work on it now. So basically what we do is we define our boundaries, and we say hey, don't cross this boundary or you're starting to clip into the exterior, or on my end, don't cross this or I'm clipping into the interior, so we basically just define the line. We draw the line in the sand and say, don't go over that side. And then we can basically work in isolation in our different scenes, and we'll go back and forth daily just to make sure things are working properly, but that's basically how we've handled it so far.

How do you bridge the gap? Once you meet in the middle, how do you say pull the influence from this one into this one?

That's more of an organic process. It comes down to, we're working from the same base of references to begin with, so we should already be starting in a good place to begin with. then what happens is it depends on what's going ot be leading the charge in terms of the shape language. SO if the exterior's going to be leading the charge, which in a lot of ways it usually is, that will then influence how the interior must change its shape languages, so it looks like it fits. It's an organic process. I'll do something and I'll say Paul, what do you think of this, and if he likes it, cool, lets make this change to the interior so it fits with the exterior, and we'll go back and forth.

What phases do you go through, to get them done?

So, ideally, the process is we get a concept done, generally we have a couple of concept artists in house, but a lot of our concepts are getting done out of house with outsourcing, david hobbins, doing some great stuff. He basically defines what the ship looks like and if it meets all the gameplay requirements, then it becomes a process of getting that concept to work in game. IN situations where that isn't such a smooth transition, cause for gameplay reasons things don't actually work or we have to make changes, at that point we have to pivot and say, okay, we'll start doing some concept ourselves. And at that point, it's us, re-concepting certain sections, making sure it works, sometimes it leads to an almost complete redo of certain ships, and then we'll go to the full modelling process where we basically do all of our geometry, after we do that we'll do something called custom normals, which basically makes our geo look better without using as much geo, so it's a cheaper way of making our ships look betterLP: Circling back to our first questionEB: Right, Then we'll go through our material pass, where we basically define what the surfaces are made of and how they look and how light reflects off of them, then we'll go through the process of making them totally destructible so that you can blow holes in all our beautiful hard work! Oh wait, there's one more, we also at some point in there have to make sure that animation gets a hand on it, so that all the panels open, the landing gear deploys, a character actually sits in the cockpit and plays with the joystick, theres a huge amount of steps.

I'm a huge fanboy of David Hobbins.

I've seen your desktopEB: You've seen my desktop, exactly.

It's pictures of David Hobbins.

On the beach. No, I wish I had that. It's the Reliant, which is one of our new MISC ships, which hasn't been revealed yet, and I love that ship. I hope I get to work on it. Really excited for it.

Yeah, I heard you call dibs on it.

Well, I tried to, but ultimately it's not about me right?

You know, under the table, cash...works.

Well, there's one other thing. We see concepts every day coming in, and just some of the bigger ships, some of these gigantic capital ships, I literally can't wait to be able to fly my small ship into the hangar of a bigger ship, hop out, start blasting fools, steal one of their ships, and fly it back out. The moment I can do that, that's it, I'm done, that's what I've been waiting for.

Right. I think in my case it's got to be almost the exact same thing. Going back to the Vanguard, It's just such a sexy ship, and it does everything that I want to do in the type of ship that I can fly. So, getting that form the stage where we're going from concept to in-game, that tiny little window is what I'm looking forward to, cause that's where the magic happens. Tiny little secret, Elwin's doing some tweaks to theEB: The Freelancer.

And it's looking sexy. Something you wouldn't normally say about the Freelancer.

Well, not something I would normally say about the Freelancer, but. I may say it after this. Hopefully.

the short answer is yes. Those are things we're going to be doing...customization across the board is something we've been focused on for a long time. So, the ability to change your skin, the shape of your body, the clothing from the shoulders down to the ankles, the types of accessories, those have been on the books for a while. The challenges we've come up with so far aren't with the customization per say, but it's how we're using the technology and the customization. So for example, a lot of the technology that we're using for cloth simulation is from Ryse. Ryse did some things beautifully, and to take that to the next stage means we have to encounter brand new tech issues. So the nod that we're taking from film is to take basically a normal type pattern for a shirt for example, not just the textural pattern but how is it cut, how is it stitched, so as you're doing your simulations, it actually starts to fold and sit as you'd expect it to. Something we're actually starting to look at at this particular moment.

And are we going to be doing that real-time?

Real time. So that's another thing we're looking at, which is the fidelity of the cloth simulation. The portions of the game that are coming out soon won't reflect that, but the long term picture will have that stuff. So the characters will be completely customizable, the simulations that the characters have on them will be a mixture of something very simple and something very complex, like the eyeballs looking at center-mass chest, we'll probably put some more fidelity into those areas, but those are still up in the air. But, in terms of the ability to fine tune your character, you're going to have a lot of flexibility.

Yes. The PU team is working a lot at creating a huge mix of environments, spaces, that reflect various cultures. The distance between the culture and the widely populated system so, for example, if you're from Earth, everything around Earth will be built up and bustling, the further you get from Earth you'll start feeling a little more rough and tumble, the further you are from Earth's influence you're much more on that edge. Names of the NPC's right now that we're working with are, as boring as they are by name, 'Frontier', and it is, the types of frontier. Are you an outlaw, a pirate type person. A good description of Frontier could be Luke's home planet. Serenity could be Frontier. But it's the opposite of Star Trek, which is close-knit, the home planet which looks nice and shiny. Graffiti is really interesting. It's something we talked abou with one of the teams, that you wouldn't expect traditional graffiti, at least on a space station. SO the question becomes, if everyone has these digital components, this digital stuff, where do they get the spray paint? And then what kid is running around tagging on a space station? So we do have a case with the Nyx space station, which is a derelict asteroid space station that's been run down, it's got a feel of Akira, the question comes back to the environment, it's where do they get the spray paint. SO how we go forward is we have a digital spray paint, it's something we haven't really explored yet, so. We do know it's something that we have to do, there may be an opportunity where people can actually put their own tags in the future, so we have to solve that problem.

So the first thing is, when I was first starting to learn Maya, which is the tool of choice for me, some guys here like to use 3DSMax, and we always bicker about it.

Just, for the record, we actually have one guy in house who's actually using Softimage.

What?

Yeah.

Oh wait, yeah, you're right. That guy.

That guy.

So, the great thing about the world we live in right now, is that you can almost get every question that you have about how to do something from Youtube or online. When I was first learning how to do it, the way I did it was I went to the help page on Maya, and went to every tool one by one, and figured out what each one did by actually failing at it nonstop. I didn't have this beautifully edited video showing me how stuff works. So step one is literally get a copy of it. They have student versions that are free, and start doing it. Start from step one. Just start doing it.

I started in an era that was a little bit different. Mine was more CAD drawing on paper. Scan that in, plot your points out...no it wasn't that bad. But you're spot on. I think there's great schools that can train you in how to be a very solid artist, they'll train you specifically in the use of the tool as an artist all across the board. The ability to bring stuff to the table, the talents that the individual ahs is going to be different. People show up with interests that lean them towards a little more technical, a little more artistic, those things, depending on the type of person you are, will almost govern your interest and your focus. But I think to Elwin's point, there's enough material on youTube at the very least to get started. The things you can't measure ever are passion, drive, and personal ability to grow, and those are independant of school. SO I think the question, from my perspective, is always as an artist, am I proficient with the technology and the tolls that I'm going to be using, but more important thing is, do I give a damn about what I"m working on and the stuff I'm doing, because that's what makes the difference between decent, good, and great.

Right, you make a good point, just being proficient at school is just step 1 to be able to actually produce work. It doesn't necessarily mean the work will be good. So, being an artist, and knowing Maya are actually two different things, two very different things. So, the easiest one of those to get good at is just learning the tools, which you can easily do through youtube or any online resource. Becoming an artist, that's much, much harder.