Star Citizen Live: Talkin' VFX

Let's do a Tuesday. What's a Tuesday like? Tuesday, well, I get in very, very early in the morning, check all my messages. There's usually a few, although to be honest, I'll probably check them the night before. Just check through the emails, check through the team's messages, see what kind of things need dealing with instantly. Do a little bit of editor work on the side, because as the director, I sort of don't really do as much of that. But play around with the editor, test things out, test the builds, make sure that they're working for when everyone else gets in. By that point, people have started to come in themselves, and then inevitably people in the team will be coming with questions and they'll be needing things reviewed. And before you know it, you're in the meetings that are the established meetings of the day. And eventually it's the end of the day. Typical day.

Basically, with particles there's a high transparency cost to them, because there's opacity or there's lack of opacity, and that incurs a cost. That's the transparency cost, but there's also the overdraw aspect of it, and Leo will explain it in a more concise way, but for me it's basically: we can quickly blow the budget, we can really hit the frames per second with our transparency costs if we get too carried away with adding particle after particle. So it's how they all stack up over each other. And the overdraw preview basically just shows a heat map. It's a toggle and it just draws the screen as a heat map. And it's got a guide showing you basically if it gets to this color, it's too high, so the overdraw cost is too high. You're wasting particles that can't be seen because there's something else in front of it. It's great. You just toggle it on and off. You can see, 'Oh, wow, great. I can't really see many effects on the screen right now. There's maybe some subtle dust scrolling,' but you stick it into the overdraw preview mode and it's fully white, and that's just too expensive and we need to dial that back.

So it's a great way to see things hidden behind other things that don't need to be there because you can't see it from that perspective.

Exactly. And like Leo says, the great skill that Leo and his guys have got is that they make our lives easier. They do as many things as they can to make our job easier, to help us stay within the limits of, again, the budget.

We try to. But for the overdraw visualizer, shout out to Alejandro. He's one of the graphics programmers; he did a side project and he basically gave it to us. We've taken it over and we'll maintain it. This is a nice collaboration again with the graphics guys.

Well, there's a massive crossover with graphics and VFX programming anyway. Don't want to sound too cheesy, but it's almost like the same family, isn't it? And you're a niche part of that department. So shout out to them.

From my point of view, there's a lot of similarities, but they do have very different challenges. Squadron 42, obviously I can't give away spoilers, but everyone knows it has VFX. It's got lots of them, lots of destruction, but more importantly, as a game, it's more traditional in that there's a series of levels that you linearly progress through. And with that, there's a lot more control. So the effects can be controlled much more. And when I say control, I mean we're much clearer on camera positions and things like that. Cinematic sequences, we know that the camera may or may not be fixed at certain points. And therefore, again going back to the overdraw thing, we can look at it specifically at a frame, a point in the location, and we understand that that's what we're working with, and we can start to dial in the effects to suit those specific viewpoints. Whereas having some kind of similar sequence in Star Citizen, which is much more modular and much more free and not at all linear, you've just got to be able to factor lots more things in. And I guess that's why the tools that you provide to help us have as much information as possible are super useful for it. Again, talking about budgets in Star Citizen, we don't really know how many ships are going to be in any one place. It could be hundreds, could be dozens. All of them, right? And inside a gas cloud, which is full of all kinds of other things. The scalability of Star Citizen is a vastly different challenge to the Squadron 42 cinematic experience.

I'll start with our producers. Without our producers, we couldn't get anything done. So Mark White, Colin Whiteley, this is for you guys. Thank you very much for producing us. And then we've got our senior VFX concept artist. And by the way, I know everyone. It's just hard to remember them all on live TV. So we've got Rob Lujan, who's our senior VFX concept artist. So Rob, you're awesome, so keep being awesome.

What's he working on though?

Oh, sorry. So Rob, at the moment, he's working on... am I allowed to say what he's working on?

Well, say it and then I'll tell you.

Okay, he's currently working on some quantum travel improvements. So he's working on concepts for different types of quantum travel.

No, you can't share that yet.

Okay, so that's that. And Rob's also doing loads of weapon stuff as well, so he's doing great work. Then we've got the senior VFX artists. I'm just going to go with first names. We've got Rory, we've got Karthik, we've got Ali, we've got Guillaume. These are all our senior group. Rory, Karthik and Guillaume are all working on Squadron 42. You're doing a fantastic job on that. You know you are. Ali's working on Star Citizen, because we've basically got half the artists on Star Citizen, half the artists on Squadron. I can't really go into much about what they're doing because it's all spoilers, but they're doing lots of locations, lots of destruction sequences, et cetera. And then we've got VFX Artist 3s, Ryad and Diego. Ryad's working on Star Citizen, doing some Lorville skyline improvements at the moment. And we've got Diego, who is Mr. Houdini, so Diego's doing loads of amazing stuff with destruction for Squadron 42. Again, can't go into too much detail. Then at VFX Artist 2, we've got Joyce. Joyce is actually on maternity leave. Joyce works on Star Citizen and does everything: ships, locations, feature work, weapons, all sorts of stuff. And then at VFX Artist 1 level, we've got Will Wallace, who's just come back from a career break travelling the world, and Will is on Star Citizen, doing great work at the moment with the MISC Hull C. And then we've got Enrico and Nicolás, and they're both on Squadron 42. So I can't really go into too much detail about what they're doing, but there's lots of cool location stuff. And then we've got Ricardo, who has just joined us this week and is working on Star Citizen. So he's just onboarding. We do an onboarding process that lasts a couple of weeks. It culminates with doing a weapon effect. So welcome to the team, Ricardo. It's great to have you. And we've actually got four interns. All the way from Sweden, we've got David, Kevin, Axel and Nazir. Two of them, Kevin and Axel, are working on Squadron 42, and David and Nazir are working on Star Citizen. Nazir's doing GPU conversions, David's working on the MISC Fury. And then we've got Jake, who is embedded QA. Jake just keeps us all right. Anything that's not working, he highlights it. He helps us debug problems. So Jake, you're doing great. And then I'm going to hand over to you for the programmers, Leo.

So we have Kiran and Francesco, VFX programmers, and Alexander Meyer, also one of the interns from Sweden. Kiran has been working on the quantum travel effects. Then Francesco has been working on fire hazard visuals. And then Alexander has been working on particle tools, so he's more of a tools programmer. External Ref, it's called, the project, but it's something to organize our particle libraries a little bit better. But I appreciate you guys as well.

I was between jobs and Hollywood was in a strange time, so you took what you could get. And I was about to go to work with somebody who is written up in more than one book about Hollywood as the worst person in the world to work for. And I had met a guy named Hawk Koch. He was the line producer on the Schwarzenegger movie Collateral Damage that I helped produce. And Hawk called me up and said, 'You can't do that.' And he had just become a partner in Ascendant Pictures, which was Chris's film company, which was the venture that he did between the Wing Commander stuff. And so I met Chris and his partners at the time, and he brought me on as president of production at that company. It was a really interesting company. We were somehow the American agents for a German tax fund. And for anybody that knows about filmmaking, we had 20% first money in, last money out to contribute to movies, which made us incredibly valuable. And we did Lord of War and we did Outlander and Lucky Number Slevin and a bunch of interesting films. And then that company went the way of production companies. The distribution deals make it really hard to survive. And then after that went away, Chris and I had lunch once a month for a while while he was putting this together. Chris and me and his giant dog, Paddington, who we would walk to lunch and then feed bread, his favorite bread from the restaurant we always ate at. Anyway, at some point, Chris said he had put this together and asked me if I wanted to come run narrative. And I said, 'Yeah, sure.' That was 10 years ago.

That shoot was like nothing I think anybody has ever encountered. Actually, the first role I had on that shoot was that from Los Angeles I decorated a house in Ealing for Chris and Dave Haddock and myself and Hannes Appel to live in. So we had this sort of communal house. We had turned the living room into the face scan place, and I turned the garage into a clubhouse with a giant television in it. And we were about a block from the studio. So that was pretty wonderful. The conceit of that shoot was, it was 2015 and we were going to release the game in 2017. So we were in sort of a hurry. It was a 90-day shoot. We had, I think, three days of pre-production meetings, maybe. And we had, I think, seven out of what eventually became 21 or 23 scripts written. And so Hannes and Dave and Phil Meller and I basically built a schedule together based on an outline. We would go, 'Well, this is what's going to happen in this scene. Well, that'll probably take three days,' right? Insane. And then started making these giant cast deals, because we had that spectacular cast, but we were sort of guessing about how much time we were going to need for it. So it wasn't exactly relaxing, that process. I started there with just me and a production manager, and then Chris brought on this amazing line producer, Philippa Knott, and I'm going to say her name because she's amazing and she deserves employee appreciation. And the three of us ran the production office, and it was on fire most days, a metaphorical fire. And the goal was to not allow that fire to touch the set, so that Chris could have a relaxed set. But we were juggling actors and trying to make deals and script pages. I don't know why Haddock or Weissbaum are alive. Dave especially was on set all day, because he was valuable to Chris as a creative partner on set, and then he'd go home and write scripts, and then he'd show up in the morning with the pages they were going to shoot that day. It was nuts. But it was really fun. At the time we didn't really have much of an in-house mocap crew, so the Imaginarium crew were sort of half of the control area, and they were wonderful. And our side was Will and Dave and Chris and myself and Hannes and this completely irreverent script supervisor, whose name I will leave out, who would say anything to anybody. And we laughed for 90 days, basically. It was enormous fun, and we got great, great stuff. It was still early in the mocap technology life. So many of our actors, especially the name actors, had never done it before. And what they discovered was a kind of democracy on the set, because everybody was wearing the same not flattering suit, the jumpsuit with the buttons on it. There are no real sets on stage. Sometimes we would pull up a set from the game, but mostly you're working with plywood and two-by-four timbers, because the motion capture cameras don't see anything on set except the balls. So it doesn't matter what they look like. They just need to match the measurements in the engine so that people aren't leaning through a bar or sleeping in the middle of a bed or something. So they variously described it as kindergarten, as black box theater. But it required tremendous imagination on their part. And they mostly loved, not everybody, but mostly loved it.

It's a lot like doing a play, or rehearsing a play rather, because the audience isn't in the room.

It's a lot like doing a play. Well, and the other thing is that if you're doing a movie or you're shooting a television show... and this is part of the challenge of shooting it, of acting it, and of writing it: you don't have a focus. You're playing to the world, because everything in the environment is visible and possible. So you're playing for big, you're playing for small, you're playing for next to you, you're playing for somebody across. It's very interesting.