Secret stuff. I don't know if I'm allowed to say what I've been working on. I would love to talk more about it, but I don't know yet. I should have prepared to see if I could talk about it before I came in here.
He's been working on Squadron 42 stuff. One of the things you've been working on is that Mark Hamill flight suit that was on the cover of that magazine, right?
Yes. That was completed. Maybe I'll go back for a little bit more revisions now that we changed the material system. So that's going to look a lot better and should actually run in the game a lot smoother. We've been working on a lot of memory issues and that kind of stuff, making everything as optimal as possible.
Character stuff. Well, I guess Shane's working on just a casual jumpsuit that's going to be used for the Navy. I guess the deck crew could have already been released, but we're switching up some of their outfits to be more of a jumpsuit-variant related thing. I don't know what Justin's working on.
TL;DRBoth are working on Squadron 42 characters: one has finished character art for one known actor's character, and the other is working on Marine concepts, with the Marines getting a full revamp and the Heavy Marine coming soon.
Well, obviously, Old Man, Colton, is not Gary Oldman, but Mark Hamill's character. It's the most confusing thing when we're naming files. I'm like, oh, I've got to open this one. Oh, wait, that's the wrong Oldman. But so far we've completed the character art on Mark Hamill, he looks pretty good, so he is going to be looking pretty sharp in Squadron 42.
Yeah, I'm working on... So in the monthly update, we had my Medium Marine concept up. And there were a little bit of notes that I was given from Rob McKinnon. And I did the cardinal sin, which is I jumped on Reddit and I started answering questions. I took a break for lunch, came back, I had like 200 messages in my inbox. So I spent 30 minutes, and then Gurmukh was sitting next to me and looked at it and was like, what are you doing? He's like, you've got to just answer not all of them, just the important ones. But I just had a meeting with the lead design team, with Steve and Rieger, Forrest and Rob and Mark Skelton, regarding the Heavy Marine. And so we have a really solid, legit gameplay design spec. And also the Heavy Marine will be coming soon. So that will be in the pipeline. So it will look a lot, a lot better. The Medium Marine looks a lot better now, I think, personally, compared to what we have in the game. And so the Heavy Marine will be getting that same treatment. In case people didn't know, the Marines are getting a complete revamp so that we can actually start fitting form and function to them and see about their gameplay mechanics and that kind of stuff.
That is a railgun. No, that is like a shoulder-mounted anti-spacecraft weapon, and it's going to be really cool once it's in. So imagine sitting on Port Olisar with this big missile-packed railgun thing.
I think a lot of times what we do is we'll have multiple concept artists create something, and then we'll see, okay, this is how the mass driver works, this is how this kind of weapon works. So it's kind of hard to say exactly who designs what, because someone might design a look and then that person might take that exact look and then kind of form-fit it to be a handheld weapon or something like that. So Jeremiah sometimes works on concepts of Rob or Rita's old ones. So there's a lot of artists involved in the art process. I think more often than not, it's a team effort.
Certain helmets have different functions. I do know that we're doing a deck crew EVA suit that has almost full glass visibility. So if that's what you're looking for, then yes, that does exist.
TL;DRCharacters go from a prioritised shot list through concept discussions with design and animation, sketches and callout sheets, then sculpting, retopology, material passes and optimisation with engineers so many characters can run on screen.
Well, normally we would have the writers... We have a shot list, we call it a shot list, so we have a list of characters that are in the entire game, or outfits. And then we have the producers and the leads kind of figure out which one's the higher priority, so we get a priority list, and so we just pretty much go down the list. And what we'll do is the concept guys will talk with the animation team and the design team and also the art director and the lead, and we'll discuss kind of what the visual look and also the function of the character would be. So we'll talk about, will the players have access to them, or is it an NPC character, or is there a restriction on visibility or movements, all that type of stuff. And then once we lock down on a direction, someone like myself would come do a bunch of sketches, take them to final and then get approvals. And then normally I'll do a callout sheet for a character artist like Omar. Oh, this is the gloves, the front, side, and back. And this is what the helmet looks like from the side.
Well, then once he gives me a drawing, I will sculpt it on our characters, and depending on: is this going to be PU, does the player have access to it, what kind of rig is it on, is it custom, each one of those has its own set of issues and problems to solve. And then we sculpt the character, get the sculpt approved, it matches the concept as much as we can. And then once the high-poly sculpt is approved, we retopo it and we do a lot of stuff to optimize it for the game. And then we find out what kind of metals, what kind of materials, we do a material pass, we talk to the engineers: how can we make sure that this character is running as smooth as possible? So that, hopefully, if all our characters are optimized to the best of our ability, we can have more and more people on screen, so we can have a better MMO experience. And that is usually when it's completed.
TL;DROmar isn't familiar with that system and avoids promises, saying cloth physics and blended maps are being tested against the memory limits of an MMO.
Well, I don't think we're necessarily supposed to talk about it right now, only because we have to see. If we start talking about it, making promises, we have to see how much we can use the amount of memory, because it still is an MMO. So there's a lot of things we're testing out, but at the same time, we have to consider memory limits. So you can do a whole bunch of stuff, but we need to see what we can do using the amount of memory we have in our game. So we're doing a couple of tests to see what we can do with physics and cloth sims and blended normal maps and all that stuff. So we're looking into it. We just got to see, because essentially if you want clothing to fold as it's moving, there's three more maps that need to be loaded. That's only if you're using three blending maps, and you can use four, you can use five. When that is taken into place, that means there's less customization, but a higher quality bar. Because we want to give a lot of customization, we need to determine what really is our importance.
TL;DRYes, in-fiction corporations will have distinct design styles and logos or tags, so players should be able to recognize clothing from companies like Shubin or Microtech.
There will be. There are designers. He's been working on a few things for certain types. I think Jeremiah can talk more about it. You also know about Megan's concepts, like Terra fashion casual and that kind of stuff. You'll be able to understand the designer and that stuff.
Yeah, we've got Terra Casual, there's high fashion. We did a couple of sneak peeks about a month or two ago where we showed a bunch of different outfits in the Terra [style]. And people love those.
For example, I've been working on the Shubin for about a good month and a half. And we've come up with a style that fits just the Shubin Corporation. So now that process is applied to all corporations. So a Shubin shirt will not look identical to a Terra Casual. There'll be different design cues for each shirt. So if you see someone on the street wearing a certain look, you'll most likely be able to identify, oh, he's wearing a Microtech t-shirt or a Shubin or whatever.
TL;DRLegacy characters had exposed necks because EVA capability wasn't yet decided, but a collar system now locks with the helmet, so characters who go into space will not have exposed necks.
Essentially what happened is, with these legacy characters, we weren't 100% aware of what was going to be EVA capable and what was not going to be EVA capable. That is something that has been developed and thought about and then reconcepted. So with the characters who have exposed necks, we assumed that they were going to be just in combat. So now we have a collar system that works. If your suit is EVA capable and you put on a helmet, it will lock and it will not expose your neck. So the reason for the exposed necks was because we wanted to demonstrate something and we didn't have a character ready to go to demonstrate that kind of technology. Because when we were doing the light marine and that kind of stuff, there wasn't 'this one should be EVA, this one should not be EVA'. So, yes, all characters who will be in space will not have exposed necks.
Even in concept phase, they ask us those questions. There has to be a purpose for the suit; I can't just make an astronaut suit and not have seals on it, right? So we have to do callouts on our concepts to say, this is where the seals are, this is where the helmet attaches to the suit, this is where the boot seals, this is where the glove seals. So we do take it into consideration. So that was just an early-phase thing.
BL
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement and Online Strategy
So we've come an awful long way from the original Wing Commander, where you could bail out of your ship wearing a leather jacket.
TL;DRFashion should hopefully track technology a lot, with expensive places like Terra getting more tech and military gear mixing high tech with a grungy look, depending on planet and system.
Hopefully a lot. A benefit of working on characters is that some of the concepts you can actually develop while you're modeling them, because we kind of have more of a liquid pipeline; things can change. So when people have ideas, you can kind of implement it further along in the process. So really, if Jeremiah has a really good idea about how he wants to do technology and that kind of stuff, we'll do our best to kind of implement that. So right now, I think a lot of the fashion is not high tech, but at the same time, you're in ArcCorp, right? So when you go to a place like Terra, where it's more expensive, we're going to start implementing that a lot more in just the regular fashion. When it comes to military outfits and pilot suits and that kind of stuff with the UEE, obviously the style that we go for is extremely high tech, but also a little bit of a low-tech, grungy, alien kind of feel, which is essentially the style of our game. So we're going to definitely blend the two a little bit more, but it really depends on what kind of planet you're coming from, what kind of system you're in. All that stuff has been pretty addressed.
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.