Star Citizen: July Subscriber's Town Hall feat. Character Art Team
The character art team covers head scans and a planned blend-shape customization system, clothing fit, wear and dirt maps, and Item Port 2.0 layering. They also cover hair tools and progress, the female body, AI archetype clothing, color variants and location-specific clothing lines like GrimHEX.
Yes. So the way that works is AI is also built into archetypes, right? So you have characters that are just generic bad guys or they're a pirate or you have shopkeepers, civilians, all these different types of people. And so because AI is built into those kind of groups, the clothing that those groups are going to get is going to usually be specific, so there won't be a shopkeeper wearing full marine or pirate armor. Each group will get its own type of clothing.
The biggest ones right now is mostly for the shopping stuff that we have in, right? So we're getting into civilian, like basically people who are going to give you quests or you can talk to. Then there's going to be just civilians that are kind of moving around. We have the pirates or the bad guy kind of group, which is built into lots of small groups, but that's a big clump. And then we have the military and all that kind of stuff. So we have a few different small ones right now. Well, some are really big, like the bad guys and the military, but then shopkeepers and stuff like that.
TL;DROver 100 scanned heads will let players choose from a large selection at the start, with plans in the future to blend between heads so pieces of different ones can be combined.
So as I'm sure most people who are especially watching this know, we've scanned a ton of actors and heads and people and stuff like that. So by the nature of that, we have over 100 heads, individual heads. Some of them you won't be able to play as; you're not going to be able to play as Gary Oldman, sorry. But what we'll be able to do is take all those heads and at the start, we want to be able to let you choose from a vast selection of them. And then in the future, turn it into a blend shape. A blend shape, in case you don't know, is basically you have object A and then you have object B, and a blend shape kind of creates this in-between that would kind of be this middle shape, right? So we can do that with heads, where you'll be able to choose pieces and parts of a different head, and that will be a much larger customization for the character heads.
Behind the scenes, right up front, there's these, let's say there's 50, just choosing a big number. What's going to happen is eventually we're going to take those 50 away, but they're not going to be gone. They're just going to be in the background, and we'll give you one, and with that one, we'll give you a slider, and you can choose to make the eyes bigger. You can choose to change the brow shape, and what it will really be doing is blending between 50 of those heads, but you'll be able to create in-between variations of those.
TL;DRClipping is prevented by building clothing with enough polygon density to match the underlying base body, and they are looking into larger cloth simulation and, hopefully, wrinkle maps.
So what we do, since everything that we make is built off, like Josh was saying, a base character that might blend in between 50 other characters, which in this example could be 50 different t-shirts. So in order to prevent that, you really have to take the base male that we use for our game and match whatever assets or clothing that we have on top of them as close as possible one-to-one with what's underneath it, because the male body will always be there or the female body will always be underneath the armor or the clothing or whatever. So you really have to build or create enough polygons or density in your assets to prevent anything from clipping. Because usually when that happens, it's because you don't have enough topology or polygons in your clothing to support what's underneath it. So to really prevent that with modern games now, you can add so many polygons. It's really just a matter of supporting whatever's on top of your base model to follow the underlying structure of your model to prevent that from happening.
And then on top of that, we have a basic way to do it now, but we're looking into a much larger cloth sim. We want to try to expand on that further so it gets into a much more immersive look. We've also been looking into, hoping, crossing our fingers for wrinkle maps. There's a lot of games where you'll see when somebody lifts up their shirt or they twist, the wrinkles in their shirt change completely. Whereas the old gen of games would have the same wrinkles, but when they would bend, it would just twist into this weird shape. So we're looking into getting that as well to push the immersion a little further.
TL;DRClothing doesn't blow apart like ships; wear and dirt are hand-painted masks that blend in gradually as an item is worn, differing by material such as cloth, leather or metal.
So right now our clothes don't blow apart like they would if you shoot a ship, which would be pretty cool. But the way we do wear and dirt for clothing or armor is kind of more of an artistic approach. When I say that I mean we have to hand paint or generate these black and white maps that kind of blend in as the character is wearing their clothing. So when you first start, that map will be turned off completely, so it'll be completely white. And then as you wear it, whatever marks we made with wear and dirt or painted in, it'll blend in slowly over the course of time, ranging from a white where there's no dirt to a black where it's just full dirt, full wear. So the way it wears is we look at what we're making, if it's leather or cloth. We paint that stuff in: how would this actually look if it was fully worn? So we have to go in there and actually hand paint these masks that dictate the level of wear that they would have. So it's kind of a zero to one kind of effect.
I think it would be a really cool thing to have. If you have a dirty shirt, or you go out to a desert planet and all of a sudden it's all dirty, right, and you come back and you clean it up. I think that'd be cool to be able to make things more pristine.
I think that's also partially a design question. We have spots for most of those items, where they should be going. And so when we're making a costume, we're setting it up so that it's definitely possible to have that happen. Or if you're using a mining tool or a pickaxe or something, it goes in a specific place.
TL;DRItem Port 2.0 allows layered, nested clothing and armor, where items worn on top can hold further items, and mixing armor pieces from different sets is definitely the plan.
Sure. So depending on what it is, if it's armor, we have a couple different ways to go about it, but basically you have skin and then you have clothes that go on top of that. After that, you can put on additional layers. So let's say I'm wearing this t-shirt and I want to put a flak jacket on. That's another item that goes on top. Now let's say the flak jacket has four open spots. Okay, now you can put four things on that jacket, right? So each thing is going to have this nesting approach, where you put on one thing and that has potential to do more. For armors it's kind of the same, so rather than going from clothing to a flak jacket, it would just be you put on maybe a full undersuit or something that's going to let other things get put on top of that. So we'll put some shoulder pads on that. You can swap out your different shoulder pads for whatever variation of armor that you want.
That's the limitation now. If you can't play as a kid and get into a cockpit, I don't think that's really a problem, right? Which probably shouldn't happen anyways. So I don't see that being wrong.
The quality that we make everything in is all relatively on the same level, to be honest. It's more when it comes to the actors scanning heads, we have a tier system. So the Bishops and the Oldmans and the Gillians, those are the top, top tier. But as far as the rest of the characters, they're all pretty much on the same level, to be honest.
Yeah, they're pretty high. If you're in-game looking at any of these heads, it's going to be really hard to tell how low they are, just because they're pretty dense.
And the biggest difference really isn't a visual difference. It's an animation difference. So they have less animations or less blend shapes, but the models themselves should stand up really well next to each other.
Yeah, I've actually been in the process of getting a lot of hair in engine, so we can start to do the tweaks we need to do and get it to where it needs to be. So that process is starting now. It's coming.
So a bone is what most of the skeletons are made of. Our skeleton, the joints are also sometimes called bones. So yeah, what that means is sometimes you take a coat or a long trench coat, and it's going to hang like this, and you put a string of things in there so that when it moves, it kind of does this thing, right? So we can take a bunch of those. We don't, but the riggers do. They take a bunch of those, and you can put them all down the back of the coats or in areas where there's going to be a lot of cloth. And so right now, that's one of the ways we use, like I was talking about earlier, to do cloth sim.
TL;DRThe main challenges are learning the pipeline and tech, keeping all character artists' work looking like one universe, and balancing massive open-world customization with the close-up quality needed for Squadron 42.
Making just characters in general? For this game? Well, coming on, learning the pipeline, the tech of where to start and where you finish, and what makes up our characters, since there's the high poly, which as a character artist is kind of a general thing that everyone really knows how to do, but how to implement your clothing that you make, and what the tech that we use can make it different. How do we switch up materials? How do we do color variance? Stuff like that. The challenges are really just learning the tools and getting, I would say, a similarity between all the character artists, and all coming out looking like the characters all belong in the same universe is probably the hardest trick to do, really.
Yeah, the tools might differ slightly between if you use Max or use Maya, but those tools do the same thing. So it is the same process, but the tools can change out. It doesn't matter as long as you're getting the result that's necessary. That's important.
I think the biggest thing, just to go back to the question, the biggest challenge that I see is balancing making a huge open world game where you want to have massive customization, and then doing Squadron as well. Where at Naughty Dog, I would imagine the amount of character heads and stuff was a lot, but the amount of ones that were really going to be close up and in cinematic, close-up ready, was probably a handful, maybe 10, maybe 20. Whereas we have 120, 130, 150, 200, like how many heads are we going to have, right? Nobody knows. We're just going to keep adding stuff to it. But to start with, an average game has this many. We've got a plan though. Definitely. We've got a plan. It's just that's the challenge of making a game that's pushing it both on the tech and the gameplay.
TL;DRA shirt took about five days for the show filming and could take about that long unrushed, though reviews, other tasks and the materials library affect the time.
Well, when we did that shirt for the filming of the ATV show, that one was about, I think, five days. I think I was told on Monday, okay, this needs to be done. And you also have to record yourself while you're doing it, which is kind of intimidating. It's kind of like writing in my diary and people are looking at what I'm writing. It's like, oh god, I better not mess up. But yeah, for a shirt you could spend more days depending on how much you want to polish your asset, because for a t-shirt a lot of the detail comes from the high poly sculpt and everything else is just kind of material, which you can always change up on the fly, especially with our system. But if you're not rushing it, maybe five days to do a t-shirt from start to finish.
Yeah. And it always kind of takes longer, too, because everything you do has to get reviewed. So if no one's reviewing your stuff and you're just going from beginning to end, it would be a lot faster. But since we have to work as a team and get stuff to work well, it takes a little longer.
The other thing is there will always be things that come up while you're creating an asset, where it's, oh, it'll take five days, but for Thursday, I had to do the other thing, and Wednesday, this popped up. There's always little things that require attention.
It's good. I think it's coming along really good. As you saw a month ago, I think it looks really good. We're working on now matching up, like I talked about, heads to that new body, clothes to the new body. So there was a little bit of a blocker, something we call it here, when somebody can't work or you can't do something because something's in the way. So until we got that body done, there was a lot of things that were on hold or stuck until we could finish that one.
Yeah, and we've already been working on a few. If you're African or African American or whatever, I assume that's what his question is referring to, there'll be specific haircuts that are to that. Even if you look at a Caucasian guy versus an African American guy, if they have shaved heads or short hair, it's totally different looking, right? So yeah, there's different variations for those.
I guess I would have a follow-up question: what part is this, on the face or on their costumes? In the costumes, we already have wear and dirt, right? But I don't know if you want a custom smear. We don't have plans for custom things like that yet.
For customization, it's definitely something we want to look into, what we want to push for. Because we have decals on all of our, like the Marines have their own decals, so it's definitely not impossible to have that. It just turns into a much larger question, because then it's design and UI and tech, and everybody needs to kind of be like, can we do this? Is it feasible to add a customization for that?
TL;DRResource costs are hard limits that come late in production, and features like custom logos multiply unique textures in crowds, so the heaviest worst-case character must be tested.
I haven't run into it yet here. I definitely will. But at Naughty Dog, yeah. It comes to a point in production where it's, these are the hard limits, and now make everything work with that. And that becomes the hard part, especially when you have a lot of great art. And you've got to figure out the smart ways to preserve that, but allow the game to run.
It turns into one of those things where it's like, okay, I think it's a great idea. You're able to put your own logo. Okay, cool. Now we've got to imagine a crowd scene for 50 people. So that means we have to add an additional texture. That doesn't sound like a big deal. But now you have 50 people in a room and they all have their own. Now you added 50 unique textures. Whereas 50 people in a crowd might be wearing the same jeans, or they might be wearing some of the same shirts, or there's a chance, right? You don't get to share that stuff if everybody's put on their own custom logos. So it's much more of a resource question than it is an art question.
And that's not something you can predict at the beginning. That's something that comes later on. You design and you build out for everything that you want. And then there comes a point in production when all the systems are in and you have to start balancing between them.
That's where you figure out the worst case. What is the heaviest character? What if everyone is that character? That's the test, because that could happen.
TL;DRThe speakers name favorites: Shane's first jumpsuit, unreleased work they can't discuss, and past projects like Groot and the Avengers Iron Man suit, with no specifics on upcoming Star Citizen work.
Well, I'm working on something pretty cool right now that's not out yet, but I think that's going to be my new favorite thing. But I've been doing a lot of t-shirts and stuff like that. The first thing I did, which is a jumpsuit that a lot of the characters wear, which I've been seeing in a lot of our videos, was probably my favorite thing, because it's the first thing I've created here. Also something I've actually seen in game. So that's pretty cool. Every time I make something, I'll be like, oh, this is my new favorite thing.
I am currently working on my first asset, and I can't talk about it. I'm enjoying it. It's been fun working with our concept artist, Jeremiah. At Naughty Dog it was probably any time, because I led the multiplayer team there for characters, and we had a few opportunities just to make up our own stuff, and that was probably my favorite things to work on, just because it's, all right, here's a loose idea, and just sculpt and make something and then carry it through the whole production and it ends up in game. Stuff like that is really fun.
Favorite thing here is I was just doing some concept art for some alien races, which I cannot talk about. I think it's going really well. It is really cool. Can I even say what the races are? What races do we know?
My favorite thing aside from that would probably be, it's a toss-up between Groot for Guardians 1 and Guardians 2, because I consider them kind of the same thing, but they're not. And then I think the first Iron Man suit I did on Avengers was my favorite. It's still got a special place right here.
That was the Mark 7. When he gets tossed out of the building and he flies down and it goes around him in a circle. The first one that really goes on to him without him having to step into a suit-up sequence.
I think it's getting to a really good place. There's a lot of different styles being worked on, and right now it's just a process of seeing where it's at and then seeing what tech we're missing to improve it to the point that it needs to be. That's the biggest process right now.
Yeah, because we haven't had hair for so long, some of the shader work, it's hard to evaluate an asset when you don't have all the tech for it. So as we're working on all these samples, it's like we don't quite know what we don't have yet. So it looks good, but we want to push it just a little bit further.
It's mostly ZBrush and then Photoshop stuff. Individual hair planes, and that's done in Max or whatever. Whatever the individual artist prefers, it doesn't really matter at that point.
That's because what if you want to change their hairstyle? Or what if you want to take that hairstyle and then put it on somebody else later? Or you want to mix and match? You kind of get locked in if they have the hair. You can't adjust it from there.
It was like your fourth day here, right away. And I'm like, hey, character art director, we've got some real-world shirts that would be great in the game.
I still have that. He came into my office and I said, you know what, that's a great idea, and put it on a sticky note. I have like hundreds of sticky notes; that's my way, if something comes up, I put a sticky note. Yours is the only one that's left. So we'll get it done. Some of them I just threw away, just because I didn't want to do them, so yours is still up there.
I don't know, you see quite a few of us already. There are times when you want to jump in with your character because you want to do something special. You want people to see that there are CIG people in there and whatnot. And that's a nice thing to see. But most times we jump in on characters with no identifier whatsoever, because that's the best way to observe behavior. There's always that thing where observing a thing changes the thing. So a lot of the times when we're in game, we're on characters that would have no relation to us whatsoever, because we want to see how you guys are actually reacting, how you guys are actually performing, how you guys are actually playing in the game.
TL;DRColor variations are definitely coming and already visible in the RSI flight suit; CryEngine supports layer color changes, so the remaining work is an in-game interface and persistence.
That's definitely coming. You can already do that. You see that a little bit right now with the RSI flight suit, how there's multiple variations of that.
Yeah. So we're going to have a lot of that. A lot of the clothes and armors you're going to see, there's going to be a lot of different color variations of that stuff.
And CryEngine's really good about having that kind of stuff built in. You set the layers and you can adjust the RGB. Folks who make Star Citizen machinima, like Bulkhead, or the work Torellian's doing, or going all the way back to the old-school FPS days, it's very easy to go into CryEngine, select the different layers, and change the RGB and stuff. So really for us, it's more a matter of building a user interface that allows people to do that within the game. And then, of course, building that into persistence so you don't have to continuously redesign your clothes every single time you log in. But definitely something we want to do.
As previously discussed, the process will expand to several heads that have been scanned in, and then eventually we want to go to a blend shape. Blur the lines between, take aspects of stuff, and then eventually, much further down the line, we're hoping to have a fairly robust character customization that will let you change color, hair.
Yeah, once they're all in the blend shape system, I would think with the implementation of that, you would already be able to put different hairs on, to choose different eye colors. Everything else that's going to go with that, if you had different hair versions before, you'll have it with the blend shapes.
TL;DRThis doesn't really answer: they say there are many unannounced things, and they avoid sharing features they aren't certain they can deliver, partly because some tech is too early.
There's the things that we want to do and the things that we can actually accomplish. We do try very hard not to get your hopes up for things that we're not 100% certain we're going to be able to include in the game. So that's a lot of where the 'we can't talk about that' comes from. There's a very robust list of features and things that we want to include in Star Citizen. Like I said, the character team is growing. It's on its way, and as time goes on, we'll know a lot more about what we can share and what's likely to come in.
It's also when do we want to... Some of the tech is super early for stuff. Like I said earlier, you can't always evaluate something until you've seen it kind of working, so we don't want to promise something that we can't give you.
TL;DRBeards and hair probably wouldn't simply vanish under helmets but would use trimmed versions, since gameplay and fun take priority over strict realism.
I wouldn't say it necessarily has to disappear. I think situations like that, you need things. Same for hats. If you have long hair and you put a hat on, they need a version of the hair that is cut off at the hat line to fit it. So beards, I imagine, would just be the same.
Quite often in Star Citizen development, we work towards the realism, making things as real as possible, and then you have to adjust for proper gameplay.
So it has to be fun and reasonable to have it. Because realistically, if you had a giant beard, it probably wouldn't fit in a helmet, so it's just that guy does not go in space.
Size-wise, the female's a little shorter. It has obvious problems when you get into, just using the example of cockpits and cars. For example, my wife and I, I'm taller than her, so when I get into my car, and she gets into it, she can't really reach the steering wheel, and vice versa. If I get into her seat, I'm crammed like this. So there's problems with that, like ergonomics. But when it comes to creating the clothing, it's not actually that big of a deal, because you have to make different versions anyways for the male and female. Almost every time.
I would say probably 90% they should have a matched version of that. You probably want some special versions for the guys and special versions for the girls.
Yeah, I would equate it kind of like, nowadays it's easier, but 50-plus years ago, if you wanted nice Italian shoes, you might have to go to Italy. Or you want a Persian rug, you might have to go to...
It's yet another reason to travel around the galaxy kind of thing. That's not to say there might not be a Terra Prime outlet store on Earth or whatever.
There's also, like, the Gap is everywhere, right? Or McDonald's, if you want to use a fast food analogy. Those places are everywhere. So maybe there are some places where you can buy some of the more broad, generic clothes. But the special ones should be unique to a location.