Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse 2.16 - ATX

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

Oh, well, if you mean ejecting, yeah, you can totally eject in space. As long as you're wearing a helmet, you don't die, right?

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

Most complicated animation? I have to think about that one. Everything has its own complexities, right? And there's different ways of solving these problems. I'd say probably the most complex ones have to deal with the ships. The way the ships animate, they're super challenging, just super challenging because they're still building the ship half the time. You're getting the ship to animate it and then they're changing things and renaming things and pivots are getting moved and it destroys your animation. So that's really challenging, just getting the ship animated and then getting the character animated on top of that, because characters got to get in the ship, right? And I remember back when I did the Hornet, I believe Hannes did the first Hornet enter maybe? I can't remember if it was him or if it was somebody from CGBot. I went in after I started and touched up on the animation to make it a little bit nicer. And one of the things I did when you hopped in the Hornet was grab ahold of the yoke, which meant when you grab ahold of it, it's animating with the character and you got all this movement in it and everything like that. And it's like, hey, it's great until they decide to change something. It just completely destroys the animations, and things don't line up. And you're like, why is this not lining up?

Tyler Witkin · Host, Community

So it's like a whole other layer there, because you don't just have to worry about the character, but then the ship's animating, and that's where metrics come into play, right? That helps a lot.

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

Totally. Metrics come into play. One of the challenges that we have right now with our metrics, and again, things that are going to be challenging: one of our animators is doing all the sitting consoles. In order to get the character to sit in the sitting console and look natural, you actually have to pull the chair. Just like if you were to sit at your desk, you don't just sit down at your desk and you're out like this, I'm working at my desk like this. You sit down and you got to scoot up to your desk so then you work comfortably and naturally. Same with getting out of it. So what we need to do is we need to sit that character in the chair and we need to slide that chair forward in order to have the character feel like they're naturally sitting in this workstation. We call them sitting consoles, but just computers. Like you go on the bridge of the Idris and you see all these AI navigating to these seats and sitting down and working these computers. So how do we do that? We got to sit them down. We got to animate the prop to move forward at the same timing. We also don't want to create like 500 chair animations of them sliding forward. So we can't have a unique animation for each sit-down animation. What I had Vanessa do, she's the one working on this, what I had her do is I had her take what's the average time of the character to sit on the chair. That's when the chair starts to move forward. Make every character fit that template. It's basically an animation metric. So hopefully we only have to animate the chair twice, enter and exit.

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

It saves a lot of time. A lot of time. Memory. It saves a little bit of memory, but it saves memory as well. The more we can reuse an animation, the better.

Tyler Witkin · Host, Community

I think the throttles and joystick thing we do have.

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

Yeah, so those are programmatic, right? So when you throttle forward or you're banking or whatever you're doing, dogfighting, what's happening is your character's hands are IKed to that throttle.

Tyler Witkin · Host, Community

What does IK stand for?

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

Inverse kinematics. Forward kinematics is I grab my arm, I move it, I grab my elbow, I move it, I grab my hand, I move it. That's forward, right? So what we want is we want inverse kinematics, where you grab the end and you pull it. And so I'm grabbing the hand and I'm pulling it out. So what happens is they grab ahold of the yoke and then IK turns on, which now the yoke's in control of the arm. So when you're flying with your joystick at home or your mouse and keyboard or however you're flying, when you're banking and everything, it's saying, hey, I'm going this way. Code says, hey, yoke, you're moving in this direction. And then because your character's hand is IKed to it, it's being pulled with it. So again, back to metrics and making sure things work. If things don't fit and things are not built correct and things are not set up to fit with human proportions and human anatomy, when that thing goes forward, there's a chance that you can IK out, which is joint locking. You see the arm just kind of stretch out like that. Looks really bad and ugly. But yeah, so those are things that we kind of have to watch out for.

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

Absolutely. We're actually working on that right now. There's a little hitch in the AI code, if I'm remembering correctly. Right now, we're having a little bit of trouble. We can get into this usable. We can sit down to sit at the bar or at a mess hall table or on the toilet. And then you can play a series of animations within that. If you want to do something else, for example, a work zone: we have these AIs walking around ships and they want to go up to this, we call them work zones. Really it could be anything, it could be a damaged panel, it could be something that a little AI has to repair or fix. So they walk up, they're gonna enter this, they're gonna look around, they got some fixing animations, but then if they want to do something like pull out our paw tool, which is like a welding tool, now they have to go into a whole different state of, I'm going to grab this usable and I'm going to use this usable and weld. I'm going to holster that usable. Then I'm going to maybe grab another usable like a datapad, pull it out and analyze, put it back, maybe fix something. So there's this whole series of things that the AI will be able to do within this work zone. And we have all these animations. Right now we're just trying to work on the code to allow AI to navigate and do a plethora of things within this usable. So sitting on the toilet, absolutely. Sitting on the toilet with your mobiGlas, nothing better than checking Spacebook on your wrist.

Tyler Witkin · Host, Community

I think we showed in this week's episode, actually, the combat speed exits. What else is there?

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

No, I think that's pretty much it. You kind of have three speeds, right? Think of it as a walk, jog, run.

Tyler Witkin · Host, Community

So it's the emergency exits, which we haven't really shown yet.

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

Yeah, the emergency, I mean, they're flying. One actor actually broke his ankle or twisted his ankle or did something to his ankle really bad jumping. This guy's a stunt guy too. I think Steve Bender was like, hey, do you really want that pad there? And the guy goes, yeah, that's okay. And he totally missed the pad, off center, and he hit it wrong and he messed up his ankle.

Tyler Witkin · Host, Community

I don't want to be insensitive, but that seems like a perfect opportunity to record mocap for the injured states.

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

Well, that was there, so I'm sure we could probably use that for something, right?

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

Oh, yeah. Motion capture is very interesting. It's like in a movie, right? You have these prop departments that build all these really cool things for the actors to use on set. We use PVC pipe and duct tape and gaff tape and plywood and everything else imaginable. We use scaffolding for climbing up onto stuff, and ladders that are strapped to it if you've got to go up a ladder, and things like that. If you want to do something on the fly, I want to do this, you go out there and you put out a bucket and a piece of plywood and you hammer it together. You can do a lot with motion capture because you never see it, right? All you care about is the metric. Is it this high? Is it this wide? Is it this far out from this other thing?

Tyler Witkin · Host, Community

And I remember seeing, we released the video for Andy Serkis a while back showing a lot of the Vanduul mocap. And they go all out with some of that stuff. They had him wired up, so when he would jump, he would fly across the room.

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

Oh, yeah. Totally. He'd totally do wire work.

Tyler Witkin · Host, Community

That's probably more of a design question.

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

That's kind of a design question. I don't see why not, though. I mean, it's possible, right?

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

Well, a lot of it's production and whoever the upper echelon of management is at the time for that particular feature. So they'll say, hey, these are our goals that we got to hit by this release or 3.0 or Gamescom or PAX or whatever thing that we're pushing forward, and say, these are what we want. What do we have in our current library of animations? If we have something that fits it, then we'll go and we'll draw from that and we'll make it work. And if it's not there, then we go, okay, these are what we need to shoot. And then we spend a lot of time actually saying, all right, because a lot of times you're not only thinking, what do I have to shoot? You have to think, how am I going to shoot this? If it's something that requires a metric, you have to make sure, okay, we got to go to a cafeteria line and we got to get your tray and you got to put on the thing and slide it down and grab the apple and this and your pie and put it on there and grab the tray and walk over and set it down, because you want this incredible mess hall animation of cool interactivity and stuff like that. So you've got to think, all right, how big is this tray? How high is this thing? What are the elements that design needs to be able to hook this up? We need to enter this particular line. And how does it work from there? We've got a bartender scene coming up and we're talking about how does the bartender function behind the bar? Well, we're going to have these zones, and these zones are going to be shot this way. And so you have this zone for mixed drinks. You're going to do the mixed drinks. You have this zone for taps. You can pour beer into a mug from a tap. Where are the glasses? The glasses are kept under here. We have to figure all this stuff out in advance before we can go to the stage, or we could just capture a bunch of stuff that can't be used. And we don't want to do that.

Tyler Witkin · Host, Community

Pre-production is super important.

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

Pre-production is super important. To the point where, going back to your cockpits, the full-size cockpits that these actors are jumping into for the ship animations, right? All that stuff was measured out and it went to a prop master over at Imaginarium. Him and his team built out these really nice cockpits. I mean, they look like skeletons, like things that you're climbing up onto, but they build all that out and then we show up. And the actors show up and they break their ankle. Or they get on there and they play with it. They figure out how to get in and get out, and then we shoot.

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

That's a good question. I think the goal is you want a male and female character that feel unique. I've seen a lot of games in the past where they don't have the footprint that we have, right? So the female shares the male skeleton, they share all the male animations, they do little tricks like offsetting the female with additives so she's not flat-footed, but she's up on heels. But it never feels 100% natural. It always feels awkward and weird. And they look like guys walking around, really. Because unfortunately, half the time you're not working on a Tomb Raider game where the lead is a female character. You're working on a heavily populated male game where the guys are walking everywhere. I've worked on a ton of games in the past where we really want to get a female in and we just run out of time. There's not enough space. We've blown our footprint for data. But yes, so our goal from now on, since we now have a female that works in game, is anything we do on a guy, if we want to do a certain animation or animation set on a male, we then quickly retarget to the female, which makes her functional in game. So now she's doing everything that the male can do. Sometimes it's kind of ugly animation, because if they batch the retarget... It's never good to do something that extreme and just let it auto-batch. You really want to go in there by hand and make it look good. But our goal is not necessarily just to batch everything so she's playing guy animations on a female skeleton. We're going to go in later and replace those animations with animations specifically shot for a female. Biggest problem is just time. I mean, it takes time. You see how long it takes for us to get all these male animations in-game. Multiply that by two if we want to do female. I don't think everything is going to be a unique female version. I think there are going to be certain animations that we're not going to be able to, for whatever reason, shoot. So she'll have a male version of it, maybe a modified male version, so she feels a little more feminine walking around or doing whatever that task is. But for something like dancing, we have females dancing. One of our actresses here did some really, really good female dances. I really want to get those in. Well, right now, the female plays male dances, the frat boy dances. So as soon as we get an opportunity, when we get some free time to go in and update the female with female animations, we're totally going to do that. For example, all these work zone animations I told you about, we shot them for the male and for the female. We've done all the male. We've retargeted it to the female. Female's functional. As soon as we get an opportunity, we're going to go grab what we shot for the female and start replacing the animation that's already there.

Chris Smith · Lead Vehicle Artist

Well, mainly I've worked on the Hornet, that was the first one. Then the 300i, I worked on the Constellation, the Mustang, M50, a lot of the smaller ones. But yeah, Constellation is probably the biggest one.

Tyler Witkin · Host, Community

And that one was recent. And then after that, I think it was your most recent one, the F7A Mk II?

Chris Smith · Lead Vehicle Artist

Yes, I did the Mk II for the Hornet recently.

Chris Smith · Lead Vehicle Artist

Soon. Very soon. I can tell you the F8 is sort of going to happen first, I think. But pretty much right after that, I'm going to jump onto the 300 series. I can't wait for it myself.

Tyler Witkin · Host, Community

I know you're excited to revisit it.

Chris Smith · Lead Vehicle Artist

That one's been a long time now. It's been about two and a half years, or two years. I don't know. Seems a long time, but it's been a while for that one. And the one I recently did, the Hornet, the Mark I Hornet, was recently just kind of polished up and brought up to standards. That was a long time coming as well.

Chris Smith · Lead Vehicle Artist

The main thing is it doesn't take quite as long. So the F7A, the new one, the Mark II, was from scratch, sort of redesigned as I went. It was redesigned from scratch. And this one was merely taking the ship itself and making the mesh, cleaning up the mesh, cleaning up the UVs, adding smart normals, the POM detail, the new material buildup, and the way we sort of break up the materials now. It's set up for custom paints and stuff like that. And of course, the new damage system and everything. So the Mark I Hornet, while it's still flyable, was still using a lot of old tech. And so that had to just be updated, more or less. While the new one, again, you had to redesign it from scratch. So this one, I basically took the existing one and just modeled it, updated it on top of it. So it was a little bit quicker. It goes quicker.

Chris Smith · Lead Vehicle Artist

Oh, yes. Well, again, so we're sharing all these. The mesh is being shared throughout all the different variants, and it's a material slot mainly, and some added meshes on top, like the radar on that version. And the F7C-M is the same, but it's gonna take a little bit more, because we have the double cockpit, the dual-seat cockpit, and then some of the other features are modeled more and stretched out more. So that one is not quite a direct transfer like the other ones, because I updated the F7C, which was our base model, and that just propagated to the other ones almost automatically, just because I updated that mesh with the new one. But the F7C-M was using a completely different one. So I have to go in there separately and just update it, which will happen eventually.

Chris Smith · Lead Vehicle Artist

What is my favorite ship? Good question. I haven't really thought... I mean, I like, actually, the new F7A, I like that one a lot.

Chris Smith · Lead Vehicle Artist

The 350R was awesome. It was always one of my favorites, for sure, and once it's redone, maybe it goes back to the top of the list.

Chris Smith · Lead Vehicle Artist

Like I said earlier, we did the Wildfire version recently, which was part of the lore and the story, a Wildfire version. And so we came out with that first. And that sort of is a start. It's sort of the beginning, to show you, hey, yes, eventually we'll be able to do other versions, just like we did this one with the custom decal and custom colors and stuff like that. So, yes.

Chris Smith · Lead Vehicle Artist

No, I don't think we're thinking quite that far ahead. We're at this moment thinking, let's just get this out.

Tyler Witkin · Host, Community

There's a lot of ships still to work on.

Chris Smith · Lead Vehicle Artist

Yeah, there's still a lot of ships that we have to make that are still just the base ships that we have to release. And the Mark II was sort of born out of the thought of... First we did the Constellation redo, because it was just unflyable on the ship. So we had to redo that, which was a free upgrade. And so the Mark II Hornet was the first time we sort of thought of it that way. Like, hey, the Hornet needs a redo. And I was sort of like, hey, I think the Hornet looked sort of old school and a little bit out of date compared with some of the other ships. When we did the Mark II, we were like, well, let's keep the Mark II. The Mark II was, I think, more or less maybe going to replace the old one at first, but then we thought, let's keep the old one, because a lot of people like the old one and the old style and everything. And since it is flyable, we'll just update it and bring it up to standard. So then we just kind of thought of that, like, hey, let's make the Mark II be a new ship, with updated lines and everything. It was sort of born out of that. And we haven't really thought of, hey, we're going to... I mean, since we have thought of that, now, when the game comes out and we keep updating, that's definitely a possibility now, right? We can just take a line and every year, or every other year, however it works, we update the line. And at that point, we'll probably think about design and stuff like that. It's kind of nice, because you can kind of base it off the old one. You can bring out something totally new or you can update the lines. So there's a lot of options.

Chris Smith · Lead Vehicle Artist

Yes, for sure. The new model is definitely a lot more efficient. That's part of the reason why we remodeled it and cleaned it up. The old process of the work, the way we were doing things before smart normals essentially, it's because we're using, it's called triple loops. When you try to get a smooth edge, we're essentially using an extra loop on every chamfer, and so that's all been eliminated. So it's definitely fewer polys, and the material is more efficient.

Chris Smith · Lead Vehicle Artist

No, the functionality is not changing at all. All the ships will stay the same, and I've only worked on the aesthetics.

Chris Smith · Lead Vehicle Artist

Well, it's something that's yet to be implemented by design. But yes, we've set the materials up to have a wear and tear state. So as you're going out there and you're battling, you're flying, and you take damage, even damage, I think. But we also have a dirt slider in the material.

Tyler Witkin · Host, Community

We also have that on our FPS weapons as well.

Chris Smith · Lead Vehicle Artist

You can just slide it down and it makes the thing all grungy. Stuff's coming from the edges and it makes it look like you've been out there for quite a while, collecting dust. But I think that's definitely a feature that's going to come online very soon.

Chris Smith · Lead Vehicle Artist

Well, what's next is the 300i redo. The F8 Lightning will be on my plate, and we'll be sticking with Anvil for a little bit. And one little thing in between, which I'm not sure I can even announce yet, but...

Tyler Witkin · Host, Community

No, not yet.