Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Adding Life to Space

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

I guess I can start that one off. To state the obvious ones: when the ship explodes, you've got what we call the death mask. That's all particles, that is VFX. So all of the particle system stuff, that's all VFX. Oh man, there's so many things. VFX isn't just a case of adding sparks to a level, although that's part of it. There's also implementation, gameplay implementation as well, using VFX to give the player readability on gameplay inputs and things like that.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Yeah, but essentially if you're looking at a game and you're thinking whether it's VFX or not, probably if it's not a character and it's kind of like a sprite thingy, it's VFX. So for example, sparks obviously are VFX.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Are you saying basically if it's stuff?

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

If it's stuff, but not geometry, it's probably VFX. But at the same time, behind all the VFX there is some graphics programming involved. Even putting a spark on screen starts with someone programming all that stuff, and then we have a tool that allows us to control all of it, and we literally have a list of parameters to control the movement of stuff. That's what we do, more or less.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

It's also dynamic as well, isn't it? Especially in our game, the VFX are dynamically controlled. The thruster effects, which is something that I've talked about in the past, the engine trails falling off from that, and the Coil presentation that we did, all of that is dynamic VFX. So it's sometimes used in our game to add extra detail to environments as well and give life to environments. It kind of touches a lot of things really, doesn't it?

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Yeah, but one thing that it's not is lighting. I see it very often. People think if there is a light, it's VFX, but we have dedicated people putting lights in a level. So if you're thinking, okay, there is too much light, there is strobing, that's not VFX. We do fire, we do smoke, we do sparks. We also do some more systemic effects that show gameplay: what's the boundary of this effect? For example, in real-time strategy games, very often you get very clear visuals, a shockwave that ends at this specific region. That's all coming from VFX, but not the light, not the general mood of the room or a space. That doesn't come from VFX, but VFX do add on top of it.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Although to add a bit of confusion, we do have lights in our effects as well. There's crossover, isn't there?

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

It's never a key light, because we don't cast shadows. It's not that precise. We never put so many sparks in that they light up a whole room.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Do you think it's fair to say we're somewhere in between the art and design teams?

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Yes, we bounce back and forth.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

We're serving both, aren't we? We're trying to make the environments look more alive, but equally we're trying to sell gameplay as well. Even for things like a muzzle flash on a gun, we help the feel of it as well.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Yeah, the gun is not ours, but the dynamics are.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

Most of the stuff to do with planets is handled by a distinct team in Frankfurt. I know that there's something on Carsten's schedule. He's got an idea for how to deal with the issue that planets have: they tend to have a cloud deck that extends a really long way away. It curves with the surface of the planet and that kind of thing. Also, I think planetary clouds have a very specific way that they tend to get lit. You have to skew much closer to reality than we had to for the space gas cloud. So I think he's cautious about just saying, yeah, let's just use the gas cloud tech, because if we did that right off the bat, it would look pretty terrible.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

They need to be dynamic as well, don't they, on the planets?

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

Yeah. I mean, there's still room, if when he's developing it he decides that he wants the nearest area, like the nearest so many kilometers, to be generated from the same source that his tech is rendering the rest of the clouds from. Suppose they look great in the distance, but when you get close they start to break down, or they don't solve all the problems you would see if you actually have to see a ship weaving in and out of them. If something goes off key like that, at that point I think it would make sense that we could generate from his source data, create on the fly some sort of procedurally generated gas cloud stuff. I don't know. It feels like these things should be able to work together.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

No, we actually are. Ben is talking specifically about the gas cloud stuff. My team does all the particle effects on planets, so all the dust that you see on the desert biomes and the pollen that you see in the air on the, I can't think what it's called, where all the forested part is. Yeah, we do all the effects in my team. Caleb in Frankfurt actually does a lot of the planetary effects.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

And I guess once we actually get these clouds, we'll have to do all kinds of rain and weather effects.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

So this is the thing. Clouds is an interesting one, but for me, I'm really excited about tackling the weather effects. And you can't have rain without clouds, or maybe you can, but in my head you can't. But yeah, there's lots and lots of scope for really cool stuff to do with effects with the weather.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Yeah, lightning. I really hope we're going to get some odd space weather on very odd planets, like acid rain or lightning rain. Why not?

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Why not? We've got the means to create those visuals, haven't we?

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Sounds like a wrong question, really, because gas cloud tech has nothing to do with it. Well, it has, but not directly. It doesn't directly do weather effects.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Well, except the clouds.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Well, yeah, you do the cloud, but weather effects are VFX, so they don't come from the gas cloud tech. We can drive some of the particles through the clouds.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Yeah, we can use the same systems. The input for the particles could be weather parameters, or whatever those parameters would be. We'll use those parameters to drive visuals for sure. I think there's a lot of similarities, at least from our side of things.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

Yeah, I was just thinking of all the work we're doing towards lightning strikes within the cloud as well. Presumably they'd work for planetary clouds.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Yeah, of course. And that's the point. When we make these kinds of systems, we're trying to make them in such a way that we get maximum usage throughout the game. It's not like this can only work with gas clouds. As long as it's got the input, whatever that input is, we can provide the output with the visuals.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

In terms of using the gas cloud for other environmental effects, I don't know, if we had dust storms or something. That would be an interesting one, in that you'd probably want the gas cloud in some ways because it's quite good at filling a space. So that can provide that kind of volume. But we don't really have the ability to update it every frame, so it couldn't be boiling away. But then when we go back to VFX, you guys could make the outer edge of it boil.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

This is exactly what we're doing with the gas clouds, isn't it? That's essentially a static thing, but we're using velocity fields to push those particles along the surface. You mentioned a dust storm. I know I've had conversations about that, and that's something we could definitely do.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

I think this comes back to that again, doesn't it? The actual core gas cloud tech couldn't swirl. For a start, its voxels are quite a lot bigger than a ship. I don't know how big one of them ended up being, but I remember that you managed to lose a Caterpillar. You put a Caterpillar in the level and then you lost it just by flying away from it.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Yeah, it's just there for like a pixel, isn't it? You couldn't even see it. We had a test video before we finished the whole trailer, and someone asked me, I think it was you, if we could have a derelict somewhere, just to sell the scale. And I had four or five Cats. They are actually in the video, but you don't see them because they're so tiny. But the point is, like what you're saying, a single voxel of the gas cloud is way bigger than the vehicle. So if that moved, you would essentially get a Minecraft type of effect where a block just moves.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

Well, just a very slow fade. But at the same time, if you put a layer of particles there, are we swirling them as the ships fly through them?

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

We do have gas cloud contrails. They were seen in the video. That's one of the things: the gas cloud itself has a bunch of data that we can use. So I don't think we're going to get swirls, but we do have contrails. So there are visuals. You're going to see something happening with the vehicle as you fly through the gas cloud, and possibly when you exit, while you're still in that transitioning area.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

Do you have physics effectors on particles? Some sort of entities or markup or something. If you've got some smoke coming up, you can wave a thing through it and it'll...

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Yeah, well, I don't want to commit to things that we haven't done yet, but I totally want that.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Yeah, that sounds like a pretty cool thing to have.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

In fact, weren't we just looking at a tech demo someone did the other day for that? There was a helicopter.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Ah, yeah, there was this video someone made with vector fields. Vector fields for the helicopter blades, and it was pushing the rocket trails. Everyone's looking at that because it's so cool.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

I'm just going to say now, yeah, I totally want that.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

That's a really good question. Actually, I think some people might find it boring, and maybe we've used the word boring, but there's nothing. In our game it's going to be really nice to have the contrast. I think I might have even said this in the presentation, but there might be times when you go into a gas cloud, say in the PU, and there's nothing there. It's just the VDB as it was, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's just going to be pretty. There's not going to be any kind of event with that.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

I've seen people on the internet, after seeing the gas cloud demo we showed, saying that maybe we want to fill every single area with all this stuff, which is not entirely true, as you mentioned. We want that contrast where you see a very dense area, like in real life. For example, you can have a very rich storm with wind and debris flying. We want that. But we also want empty places, so we can enjoy these areas with all this stuff. You need contrast to appreciate what you're seeing. If you don't have it, then it's all the same, so it's not really good.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

It's worth pointing out, going back to your presentation, that you just filled that area with all of the stuff.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

That's not like we're going to fill all ship interiors with everything.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

That's just like, this is all of the cool tools that we've got.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

That one specific room had so many things. It just felt right to have so many things in one engine room, but you would go to the following corridor and it's pretty empty, really.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

Oh, yeah. So that's not come online yet, has it? Flight Model 2. IFCS 2.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We're not calling it IFCS 2. We put too many 2.0s out there. We'll just call it the new flight model for now.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

Yeah, so we've had some discussions in terms of doing the gas cloud in Squadron. Do we get drag when you fly? If you fly too close to a wall, does it start to drag? And we've actually been told that you get drag, you get lift, all of the atmospheric flight stuff effectively. And that's tied in with data that says there's atmosphere. So I think there's a slider to distinguish how much is there for the visuals versus how much is there physically, because they're separate systems.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

So essentially, the denser it is, the more it's going to buffet you around.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

So yeah, we should get buffeting and lift.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

So theoretically, I guess we could make it so thick that it just chews you up.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Yes. That would be nice. I mean, we've technically got insects in the game.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Buzzing flies.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Yeah, Caleb did some. And I know it's been talked about, I don't know if it's ever been mentioned, but there's a boids system, which technically isn't particles. I think there'll be some crossover, with particles on a much smaller scale and then boids for, probably not particles for, electric eels.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

That would be how they'd be physically flying. I mean, you could do it.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

I do think that once we get geometry on the GPU particle system, we might do more animals. I've seen this example from, what was it, inFAMOUS Second Son, I think. They actually had fish driven by particles, and they did something very simple where they passed the position of the player to that particle system. So whenever you were close to the fish, they were pushed away. I think that's doable. Not saying we'll get to it, but why not?

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

That's the same tech that makes the sparks that fall in the Hammerhead engine room when it's damaged, hit the geometry and bounce off it. The same tech, but make the particles fish so that they swim around.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Yeah, we've got a bunch of different options to do different sorts of movements, and I believe we can mimic the movement of fish, especially since we've got curl noise, which essentially means that lines can never cross each other. That means you can spawn a bunch of fish and they're never going to go through another fish. I can't believe we're talking about fish so much. Which is cool. I like fish. I have an aquarium.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

Yeah, so we've had discussions about this on and off for years, in fact. For a lot of the static shadows work, we put a static shadow area around a hero location or something, to at least get the static shadows on it. We've had some discussions about trying to more easily support more of them, but also trying to support live ones that update. Within a certain distance, maybe you pick out where you need some dynamic shadows and you draw them over there. This is one of a dozen ways that we've talked about trying to claw back some resolution and not spend all the memory on the GPU on it. The reason we've not actually got onto it, though, is that, unlike a lot of the other things that we work on, it doesn't really block any of the other content teams. Nobody's waiting on us to make the shadows nice before they can implement something. It's always something that we could do and check in, and it would just be done.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

You bring up a good point. Folks who follow our development very closely, who watch ATV, RTV, Calling All Devs and stuff, can probably get a sense over the months of how often priorities shift. Oh, I thought you were doing this next, and now we find out that this isn't next, this other thing is next. And a lot of times that comes up because of what you just talked about: blockers. We were going to move to this thing next, but that work is dependent on somebody else finishing their work, and their work is not done yet. So things tend to get reprioritized quite often based on dependencies. It's the things that free up more people. If you could work on this and it allows three teams to do their job once you're done, or you can work on this and it allows one team to do their job, or you can do this and nobody else is affected by it, it makes it a pretty easy decision what you're going to be working on next.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

I mean, the static shadows work was in theory down at that priority. It's just that I think we reached a certain point where people were putting things in and it did just look terrible. And so we were like, okay, we can move this up the priorities just a little bit. We can at least get static shadows on a target location, because I guess partly there is a blocker there: the art team needs to see what they're creating. Does it look okay in game? They can't just put a load of stuff in and say, this is going to look great when shadows finally happen. So being able to see something in the distance with shadows on it, and see that it actually does look good, I guess that was kind of a blocker for them.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Well, I guess there's a couple of ways we could answer that. Do you want to talk about the stylistic side of it?

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Yeah. The first part of the question is what types of fire we have. We actually do have our internal style guide. We know that we should have classic fire, which is orange or red, and you get smoke and such, but we obviously also have other technologies, such as Xi'an, Vanduul or whatever. And these, as a race, as a technology that comes from a different kind of source, use different materials. And as in real life, different materials produce different colors and flames. For example, your hob in the kitchen will give you a certain flame color, and if you burn a torch, it's going to give you orange stuff. So we do have different varieties of fire, and it's not only about the color, but also about the amount of smoke, how quickly the smoke dissipates, how thick it is, how much light we emit, what textures we use, what it looks like, how many sparks we have, if any, stuff like that.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Yeah, we loosely tie that in with what we describe as the efficiency of the thing that's burning. A low-tech ship would be the oily, classic, smoky fire, as Michal just described. And then if there was a high-tech equivalent, well, it's kind of sci-fi. I think I'd describe it as sci-fi blue, classic. Far less smoke, in fact no smoke, much more lens flare style. So when we start to tackle a specific thing, like a specific ship, we know that the manufacturer, per our internal style guide, is a certain tech type, and that helps us define what those visuals look like. And even if that's not something that's totally obvious to people playing the game, I think it gives us a consistent visual language throughout the game, and it gives us our initial cues about what this thing is going to look like. I think another part of that question is quite interesting, because we're going to be working on hazard zones in the future, and we're going to be looking at the behavior of fire in the game as well. So with the room system itself, if there's oxygen, then it should burn more. The fire itself could contribute to removing oxygen from that room, propagating fire. I'm not saying that we'll be able to just set fire to the world, because that would be a stretch too far. But we've got a lot of plans in terms of the functionality of the fire as well.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Well, all our particles are built to work. We've basically got gravity scale on our effects, haven't we?

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Gravity is not something that really defines the shape of fire. If you look at the physical properties of fire itself, gravity does not...

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

I think there'll be people disagreeing with you in the chat.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

What I mean is there's more to it. There's pressure, there's the source and stuff like that.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

I think it ties in a bit with what you were asking before, Jared, about the balance between completely realistic and pure Hollywood. I know that there'll be people saying, well, why have you got a fireball in space? Because it's not technically possible. We straddle the line between Hollywood and real life.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

We haven't yet. People who've experienced the water in the game will know that there's no impact effects yet, and that's primarily because, again, the planet team have worked on that core tech. And yeah, for sure, we're going to be looking to add impacts to that. Bubbles, probably. Maybe even fish.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Splashing fish.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

Yeah, I mean, that is them, really, isn't it? We've got a whole bunch of hazards that we want to put in there. I think we've skewed away from the gas cloud itself damaging the ship. Flying into it slows you down. Indirectly, it could damage you.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

But you get struck by lightning. It's what's inside the gas cloud that kills you.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

I think we've had discussions about this. We really don't want to start an entirely new piece of tech just to do Crusader, obviously. I think the basic plan was literally to take everything that we're doing and throw it all at Crusader. These were very rough plans, as far as I remember them, but it was like, if we're doing separate planetary clouds and gas clouds, then we could have a layer of planetary clouds, we could have a layer of gas cloud, and for the deeper areas that you wouldn't get into, we could have a couple of layers of palm textures just moving around to give you the sense of all the extra layers. The gas cloud layer, you could embed the floating platforms and the cities and everything into, I guess. I think there would be a lot of extra things to solve along the way. Using gas clouds in atmosphere would be an issue at the moment. It might be a sorting thing. It's not just the sorting thing, though. People who've done quite nice cloud demos have some sort of solution for light coming from outside. The skybox needs to shine through the clouds to give it that rich lighting, which we don't have to deal with as much in space. But yeah, it's pretty much just layer up everything that we've got, see where the edge cases are or what's still missing, and then put VFX over them.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

It's going to sound like the same answer, really. There's things that the planet team are working on. There's a couple of things that are going to get done and finished that will then open the floodgates for us to do our thing, if that makes sense. We've got tons and tons of cool ideas for weather. It's one of the things that really excited me about planets in the first place. When I first talked to the guys in Frankfurt, I was like, oh wow, we could do tornadoes and dust storms and rain showers and all that kind of thing. So we've totally got plans to do all that. We're just waiting on a few key things first before we can really go for it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I need rain over Lorville to really get me to that Blade Runner level that I need.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

So the thing about that is, it's not purely a particles thing, because we could make a rain effect easily. We need to have rain affecting how the shaders look on the visor and the canopy and things like that. It's not something that the VFX team alone are going to be solving.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

It'll be the graphics guys. It's a big, complex system, really: getting the wetness, getting puddles and such, maybe even changes to the flight model during rain or storms, and possibly, if the storm's happening next to water, fish flying out of it.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

Not to mention that you can do particle rain close up, but if you're looking at a rainstorm coming in on the horizon, you can always see that there's rain. You can see this volumetric block of rain, and that eventually turns into actual rain. So we'd need something to do that. The thing that excites me, actually, is that it's volumetric, so it's probably going to be me.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

But imagine being up in space and seeing the rainstorm below you as you're going towards that planet. That's what excites me, seeing that storm happening while you're safe from it in space.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

But that does mean that it has to be seamless when we do it.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Well, everything does in our game. That's the exciting and challenging thing, isn't it? It's real. It's like, oh, that's a storm in the distance, and now I've flown in and I'm in the storm. Lots of stuff to get our heads around.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Are we even capable of getting that close to a star?

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Well, it's definitely on the list of things to do, to make the effects.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

We weren't doing that up close. I think this is well outside. Going close to a star is a huge technical task but doesn't give you a lot of gameplay. But I know it tends to be on people's lists to do regardless, just from the point of view of the effects themselves.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Yeah, it's definitely on our backlog. And I've chatted briefly to Todd regarding gameplay permutations for that, but I'm not going to speak for Todd. I'm not going to speak for design on what the gameplay implications are. But logically, you'd think the gameplay implication is that if you go towards it and get too close, you die.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

Yeah. Graphics-wise, there are many issues, but one of the significant ones is that we tend to treat the sun as a small ball in the distance. There are various equations that fairly reasonably approximate what that's going to do to the lighting. When you start flying right up to it, for a start, you have to dim it down, because the exposure adaptation on the camera isn't able to handle the brightness of landing on the sun. So you end up having to dim it down to what photos of the sun tend to look like. But then you're also landing on the surface of this ball, and some of those equations take shortcuts that don't really handle something bigger than the Earth that you're touching.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

Yeah, I was going to say that we can do all that VFX, but technically the sun is so bright that you should not be able to see anything happening on the surface. So is it worth it? It depends on what we want to show.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

I think I have a write-in answer from Ali on that one that says, yes, we are doing those effects.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

That's basically what I said at the start.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

Yeah, so mirrors are definitely something we've wanted. I think we need them for Squadron for a couple of scenes, so they're definitely on our roadmap. The caveat is that they can only really be used in some sort of controlled environment. They trigger a lot of extra rendering work. So if you're in the middle of Lorville looking at an advert somewhere, and we just replace that advert with a mirror, you've probably just halved the frame rate. The advantage of bathrooms is that they tend to be small. So we can set up mirrors in places where we can already afford the frame rate to include the mirror, basically.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And if one of them is small enough to be grabbed and moved, people will grab mirrors and put them in front of mirrors. The things that people will do with mirrors in an MMO environment will see no end.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

Yeah, movable mirrors would be a headache.

Michal Piatek · Senior VFX Artist

That's actually something I asked you not that long ago. What was the answer?

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

No. The exact technical reasons for that being difficult: we did a test that had something similar, for different reasons. We were trying to break up pixel edge detail. When we're ray marching, we have this big texture and we're reading through it, taking tons and tons of samples. If you introduce something where you have to read one thing to offset where you're going to read another thing, it introduces a small delay on the GPU. And if you do hundreds and hundreds of samples, and each one of them has a separate offset that has to be calculated from another texture, I think it did something ridiculous like multiplying the time it took to draw by about five. So in theory, you could have a vector field that we moved along each frame, kind of like the vector field stuff we do on particles. It's just probably not going to be feasible. Also, things like the shadows that we pre-calculate for those wouldn't update. So it's more likely that we'd use something static and then put particles on the outside. Maybe those particles have the swirls.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

So the end visual might actually look like what you're expecting it to look like.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

By using different techniques.