Star Citizen Live Interview: Vehicle Concept Team

They do all spaceships for video games.

Well, that's a concept artist for video games for spaceships, but a concept artist is broader than that. Talk to me about the position itself.

I'd say translate the words to visuals.

I would say in addition to that, problem solving for sure, because usually those visuals aren't correct right away. There's a lot of problems to solve, especially with Star Citizen, where components, metrics, stuff like that.

So unlike in other projects, with Star Citizen you have to work to very specific rules. A door has to be as big as a door needs to be. Whoever concepted the Millennium Falcon way back when didn't have to worry about the inside fitting inside the outside. You certainly do.

I would say that it is that figure between the ideation of a product and the final result of it, the one that explored all the different ways something might go and decided, we'll do this because, and can tell you why it made those choices.

I think we're the most important people in the pipeline. We make the things that go in. So without us, all the things that go in look pretty naff.

It's taking the words, taking the ideas of somebody else, of a designer, for instance, and giving them form, giving them shape, giving them color, giving them personality. It's finding out if this idea is actually viable, can actually exist. It's literally taking thought and bringing it into reality.

I always liked to draw, and then I wanted to draw properly, got into the loop, learned what concept art was, and just liked it, started studying it by myself.

So no formal official training, just nose to the grindstone?

I graduated in product design. I started working in the product design and transportation design industry in a pretty famous car design company, manufacturer in Italy. I understood that it wasn't for me, really. Nothing particular. It was just too real, and I really like the virtual world a little more, so I did a master in concept art, still in Italy, did some indie work in Germany, moved here in production, became concept artist, became senior and lead.

They actually had a university program that you can master in for concept art?

No, it was a private academy. It was a very small course. The best thing it did was really introducing me to the people in the industry and motivating each other. The industry in Italy is not very big, so moving out was almost mandatory.

I'm self-taught as well. Mostly because concept art, I would say, is a bit more of a niche job, at least for now. So where I'm from, Germany, there are not really any, at least not any good schools that have concept design courses. There are some around the world. There are some very good ones. Usually they're quite expensive, though. I'm not saying they are bad, but I'm saying the schools are not as good as ones in other countries. So self-taught, was working freelance for a while, and at some point joined Star Citizen, and it's been very nice so far.

I have a degree in games art and design, which I call a gaming license. And I got that six years ago now. And I worked at Frontier for a bit, so I actually worked on Elite Dangerous for a bit. I was at Frontier, but the work they were giving me was not very exciting, because I was on F1 Manager as well. And if you're thinking, what on earth do you design in a Formula 1 management video game? It's a great question. I also didn't know what the hell I was doing. And then I messaged this guy, and he was like, yeah, OK, we'll let you in.

The guys at Egosoft. So I worked on two DLCs for X4: Foundations, Split Vendetta and the Terran one. I forgot the name of it, sorry. And it was an indie experience, a very ambitious game for a lot of things. Comparable with Star Citizen because it's a space game, space exploration, there is first person, there is interior of ships. So a lot of overlapping, a huge difference in budget. So there were different problems. At the time I was both concept artist and production artist. We had a lot of limits in terms of how many materials we could use, how many polygons we could use, limits that we don't have here because we use different tools. At the time they were 17. Now they grew up a lot. I'm still in contact with them. They are really lovely.

I worked before in freelance too. I had a couple of freelance gigs when I was still learning and got the skill to work on this. And then a couple months later, I messaged Alberto and he had the kindness to give me feedback on personal projects that I was doing. And we started talking more, and one day he asked me if I would like to work with him. I actually asked first. I asked because I didn't know the difference between a vehicle artist and a vehicle concept artist. And I asked him, listen, if I apply for vehicle artist, I'll do a concept. And he said, no, because that's not a concept artist.

So about four and a half years ago, when I was 20, my first job after graduating from high school, doing my final exams, was on a Hollywood production for Sony Pictures Entertainment, which was pretty terrifying, but also pretty exciting. And I did a spaceship for a movie called 65 starring Adam Driver, which I don't think is a good movie at all, but it was fun to work on. I did the spaceship that crashes. After that I did a bunch of freelance jobs for a variety of projects, some stuff for Riot Games outsourcing, as well as about a year of work for 1047 Games, working on Splitgate 2, the sequel, which is in beta right now, I believe. It was a pretty fun time. But at some point Alberto told me that he was interested in getting me on the team.

I would say it's who you do it for, and that was my main concern with the luxury market. So I was working for a lot of yachts, planes, politicians, billionaires around the world. The public you do a video game for is generally a very different public from the one you would do the most expensive bracelet in the world for, or an 80 million yacht for. I did a yacht that was consuming as much as the city we designed it in. So that's why. And I wanted video games, not really for video games themselves, but for Star Citizen. That's the reason I chose to go to Egosoft first, because it just made sense if I wanted to end up here, as I was a fan from a long time.

So you actually plotted a path to Star Citizen.

And I plotted a portfolio for Star Citizen.

I got into games on my university course in the first year. They have people doing 2D animation, 3D, games. So you try stuff for a whole bunch of different fields, and I dipped my feet in each of them. But video games were the one that spoke to me most, and also because I actually play games in my spare time, so obviously I care about them, so I'd like to make them good. So for me it just makes sense to be doing concept art for games. And also I hear some horror stories about how designs can go in the film or TV industry, where directors can have influence they maybe shouldn't, and it leads to some very bad things happening, is what I've heard. So I thought, let's go with games, and games have been good to me.

I would say for me it's the level of interactability that people have with what you make. It's really cool that in a video game, especially a video game like Star Citizen, a player can really look at every nook and cranny of the design, can walk around, open up all the component bays. I think it's just a lot cooler than seeing the design you made for maybe half a second in a movie, just fly by in a specific shot from a specific perspective. It's an interesting challenge. I think the end result is just more impressive though, usually.

I get inspired a lot by music. It all depends on the design that I'm doing.

What music is influencing your work right now?

I'm listening to the soundtrack of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

And how does music influence your visual art?

That's something really personal, because I hear the sounds and the scenes and everything, and I imagine how this ship will look with this as a soundtrack, and it will sound cool and look cool. So it needs to match the coolness.

So for me, it's a lot of real-world influence. I was always very obsessed with aviation, still am, and car design. So a lot of product design, sleek forms, stuff like that. In terms of media, I would say a lot of Japanese stuff. So classic anime like Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor, Evangelion, that kind of stuff. I would say the media I like is disproportionately from Japan.

I also get inspired by some anime stuff, a lot of the same stuff that Jacob's mentioned, but also just space in general is pretty cool. I like to look at real-world spacecraft where I can, because even though the stuff we do is obviously very far removed from anything that NASA is doing right now, it's still good to understand a lot of the principles going on there. Understanding why real-world rockets and ships and cars and whatever look the way they do, I think that's very helpful.

Coolest real-world spacecraft?

Saturn V is pretty good. It's kind of hard to beat the Saturn V.

Favorite fictional spacecraft?

Oh, I like the Venture Star from Avatar. It's like a full 10 seconds of screen time. It's pretty cool. It's just a big, long tether.

I don't know my influences. I guess there is a lot of Japanese stuff. There's definitely a lot of chevrons. I always get to put chevrons everywhere.

What is a chevron?

Warning stripes.

Big white-red stripes. The chevron technically is the one that is directional, but I put them everywhere. I just like chevrons.

Alberto, your Instagram profile name is literally Nostromo Industries.

I'm doing a vertical slice for different areas of the interiors of the Pioneer, to understand better how the Pioneer works, what rules it should follow in production, and how to help the production guys towards the final art.

So this is a common misconception I see. When we do a ship concept, not every single area of the interior is fully mapped out, is fully figured out. We do enough to get an idea, enough to get a concept of it and understand what it is, but after that's done and before it goes into production, you guys have to then go back and revisit and flesh out all of these major internal areas that are never seen. So that's what you're doing with the Pioneer.

Yes, we do this mostly for old concepts. We're trying to fix it with the internal team right now. Smaller ships, of course, allow us to dedicate some time to fully understand interiors. We did this with the Syulen. But bigger ships need a vertical slice. So we try to pick the types of room that are most different from each other and figure them out, so that the 3D artists have a solid reference to translate to the other areas that we don't have the time to work on.

We're looking at the refinery of the Pioneer. And this was one of the rooms that recently changed a little bit. So the 3D artists wanted to know: okay, what should we do here? What color should we use? How should we approach the color palette? How should we approach the way the room is built? Ben was focusing a lot on how a ship this big is built. So there is a hierarchy between the structures that create these rooms. There are secondary beams, secondary bulkheads that are attached to the first ones, and the floor is attached over the structure, so there is space below the floor. How do you approach all this layering? We compartmentalized the different functions of this area with the color palette. For example, we have the crafting stations in yellow, we have the cargo area and the passage in blue, something a little more calm because there is not a lot of movement. And where there is a lot of movement, like the elevator, we use red, so we try to be bold and catch attention towards indication and direction. All stuff we're trying to implement from feedback from the other capital ships we did. We're looking at the bottom floor of the refinery.

Is there any significance to the numbers, or is that just random numbers?

No, I just literally smush my hand on the keyboard.

So what is this room?

This is the crafting station, so all of these are crafting pods, and we try to give every area its own personality and try to be very bold with colors. This was inspired by a current called Graphic Realism that uses a lot of graphics to point out points of interest: how to attract the attention of the player towards where you can actually interact, how to not get lost in such a big ship.

These are concepts. These are explorations of what the interior will be. What we're going to look at today, none of these are approved. That's what the concept phase is. So we are literally exploring, the same exploration that's going on right now. This is what concept phase is for, is exploration.

It's not easy to convey the art direction for something so new, because we don't have any comparison with other ships. We have one CNOU ship that is completely different in terms of function and size. So you have to come up with ways to understand that this is high-tech yet industrial. We don't want to let it look too fancy, but we have to let it look high-tech. It doesn't have to be over-designed, doesn't have to be luxury at all. It has to still be a working industry ship made for a B2B type of industry, part of a pipeline. So all these details, even if they don't have particular functions, help me to convey what kind of details we need to put there, how to distinguish it from Crusader, how to distinguish it from RSI, how to distinguish it from Argo. It's research just based on finding the personality of CNOU in the industrial part.

I like the little perforations in the floor.

All the perforations are meant to show a little bit, with the parallax, the maglev cargo plates, so that we can show with subtle details where the cargo is going to be and where it's not, where you can pass with all the lines and where you can't. Basically, what I'm doing right now is trying to find out the rules for the Pioneer.

And by extension, CNOU, Consolidated Outland.

I'm working on a fighter.

A heavy strike fighter?

Yes, sir. And it's based on the Mantis.

Based on the RSI Mantis. So taking that beautiful, gorgeous, sleek silhouette of the Mantis and giving it a new life.

Giving it a new life. A new look. Hopefully a better look.

There's a reason we're not using the word variant. It's not a variant in the traditional sense. You're going to see car manufacturers who share a lot of the same language and stuff. This is something like the Centurion and the Atlas platform, not the Atlas mech. The Ballista, things that are built on the same platform. This is a new vehicle based on the Mantis platform, so it will share a lot of the same shape language and stuff with the Mantis.

I chose this one because it's way cooler than the Mantis.

Obviously, like I said, this one's super early days, which is why we don't have anything to show. The Mantis is one of the coolest looking ships we've ever made, and I hated the purpose of it. The Mantis was so cool looking, I would fly it as my daily driver, but I don't enjoy interdiction gameplay. So this idea that we get to revisit that platform and revisit that kind of aesthetic and do a new ship that somebody like me would fly every day is really exciting to me. So that's in development. No timetables or anything right now, but that's something you can look forward to.

This was meant to be similar-ish to the Mantis, actually, so it had some inspiration from that. So on the front, it's got its little grabbies for doing its salvage stuff.

So the salvage arms will come out of these things here in the front?

Yeah, they'd either come out or... We're not sure how much movement it's going to have on it yet, so there's still a lot of interpretation there. But it's also got the little frilly bits on the side, like what the Vulture's got for the scraping stuff.

And then there's this guy.

This guy, he's a much more stereotypical RSI, I guess, because it's got a Zeus-y silhouette. So it's a lot flatter. But it's also got its big salvage grabbies on the front. It wasn't exactly meant to have the same sort of Zeus look at first, but then I looked at it and I was like, hang on, looks quite similar. So I'm going to say it was on purpose, actually.

And again, the brief here is a salvage starter. So this is the entry-level ship. You could start your Star Citizen journey with this one, and obviously you would upgrade to things like the Fortune or the Mole and stuff later on. But a place to start with salvage. And then our third and final look.

I quite like this one personally. This one was my favorite of them, but it's not up to me. I just make the pictures. It's quite sharp, maybe a little too sharp, some people might say, but I think it's pretty cool. I think it's pretty RSI. You can't see it from this view, but the cargo comes out the back. It only holds a few cargo, so don't expect to be hauling massive claims in this, but I think he's neat. We'll see how it goes.

The brands shouldn't stay completely stagnant, because, as you say, real-world car manufacturers don't stay the same forever. I can see where people come from, where stuff doesn't look like a given manufacturer from a set time, but you can think of stuff like the Constellation, the Aurora, that was designed well over a decade ago. So naturally the stuff we do now is going to be different, and we always want to try and improve on the manufacturer aesthetics.

Even we've changed. Changed during a decade. Changing fashion, changing cars, real cars. So it will change even in the video game aesthetic. A good-looking game from 10 years ago looks different from a good-looking game now, not just because the graphics are better, but because we keep changing the taste. Someone will come and do something completely groundbreaking, and everyone will start copying. This happened all the time in cars: [someone] removed the grille on the front and everyone started removing the grilles on the front.

I'm working on something that I think and hope some people might be kind of excited about, because the manufacturer only has one ship in the game so far. Okay, fair enough, two, but they look pretty much the same. But it's been a while since those came into existence. And when I got the brief for that ship, someone outside our team actually told me that I should be pretty excited, because it's kind of a big deal. It is a Kruger ship, a new Kruger Intergalactic. And it is a light fighter.

I'm seeing some strong 1950s retro sci-fi vibes here.

Yeah, for sure. Some of the ref that Ben and John picked out was old cars, retro cars, '50s hot rods, World War II planes especially, like the Spitfire, P-51 Mustang, Me 262, stuff like that. So very sleek, very chrome, spiky, rounded forms. And that's just the scale comparison here.