Star Citizen Live Gamedev: The Pyro Proposition

As usual, this is one of those kinds of things we end up repeating quite a bit over the eight years that I've been doing this here at CIG. We allow most of our artists to work in the tools with which they're most proficient. So we have a marvelous tools team here whose job is to create all of these importers and exporters and bridges and stuff between all these softwares, so that when we bring folks into the project, if their primary experience is in 3ds Max or it's in Blender or it's in Houdini or whatever, we support that and let them work in the aspects in which they are most familiar. If they want to learn other softwares, like he was just saying that he's trying to learn Blender right now in his spare time, that's fine. But one of the things that I think we're really proud of is how we support our artists and let them work in the software that is most native or comfortable to them.

We had a guy on the team that literally worked in Blender, and then when he was finished, he'd move his assets over to Max just to use the tools that we use to export them and stuff. So it's really flexible, to be honest. It's just whatever works fastest, because that's what you want really, fast.

Unknown, I think.

I think it's safe to say that we would all prefer that you can. Does it make things seem more diegetic? Does it make things act like we expect them to act? The answer is always going to be yes. That's what we want to do. But it always comes down to priorities and time. It's just, do we have a spot to take the people necessary and assign them to that task? Yeah, we want to, but.

Yeah, for us, usually we're just making the geometry and plugging it into something that's already been programmed, and then just configuring it and tweaking it. But I know we're always very, very busy. So I can only imagine the programming side creating these features, and there's a hell of a lot that goes into it. It's all good for me to come and just create a variant, but someone's already come and paved the way for me to do this in a big way. It's been developed over a long time. When I first joined over a year ago, that was when this was being worked on, and there was a good few months where I joined in just to help support the development of the trolleys. And there was a lot that went into it, a lot of stress, a lot of pain. But no, it's good. We love this.

I had to do a test for two weeks. So you get the concept art. Corey was just saying that they want you to track your time, of course, and don't worry about this. Just work like you would do and show the steps that you did. So, for example, on my art test, I just showed that I went to white box at this stage, I went to detail at that stage, and worked on the final art at that stage, while showing it in my time tracking. And it gives you all the details of what you need to know for your art test. And basically you have fun with it and show your artistic side. That's the thing with concept art. Even working every day, you have to kind of have an artistic side of things. You don't do from A to Z what you see in the concept art. Just have fun with it. Try to adapt the shapes or adapt the props to what you feel like it could be. So it is kind of interesting to see how you see the props being interesting, basically. And that's one thing that I think we value a lot, seeing that you can have an artistic point of view on things. And it's really, truly fun. It was a great test, in my opinion.