Star Citizen Live: The Big Benny's Proposition

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I don't know, D.Davis. Let's see what we can crank out. When we do the streams where we make things, not always, but oftentimes they will get submitted for various review and approval and they'll either go forward and change drastically or they'll go, no.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

I think for something like this, it depends really. I personally think that having a 3D Big Benny's logo in the game would be quite fun. Of course, I'm going to say that because I'm the guy making it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Or maybe even like a hangar flair for subscribers or something.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

That would be cool.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

That's a good question. I recently got to do my first ship weapon. That was quite fun.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

That's right, because a lot of the weapons have moved over to the props team recently.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

Exactly. So we're kind of taking on that responsibility a bit more, which is great.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

Obviously. Actually, the overlap between props and weapons, that's an interesting one in itself, right? Technically, I don't know. I should be able to hit people with whatever I want if you ask me. It's my right.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Just bring all the existing subscriber flair physicalized into the Persistent Universe and watch people run around with the Gamescom 2015 trophies, just bludgeoning people.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

That's the dream. I like the idea of having more physicalized props in the game. It's just a matter of figuring out the technicalities really. But we're trying to push it a bit more that way sometimes. You'll probably notice there's a lot more physicalized entities in the game now. That's because any way we can introduce interaction into the game through props is something we love doing.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

There are things you can eyeball, things like this where the player or NPCs don't necessarily interact with them. So metrics-wise, things like consoles that players and NPCs interact with, things like tables, chairs where you're dealing with animation and stuff, it's very important that we have a rigid, well-defined metric. Things like drinks, we try and unify things like the dimensions for bottlenecks or can radius, stuff like that really. We have got a more flexible grip system now. Say for instance, I've got my little Big Benny's box here. The new grip system we have allows me to define that width for that asset. So the grip sizes now are a little bit more flexible. So yeah, there are metrics. They do exist. We try our best to obey them.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

At least every five minutes. Sorry, at least every 30 seconds. I also have my autosave feature set to every two and a half minutes, so we're safe.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

That is a very good question. Putting it plainly, our pipeline is a little bit different from some other games, where we use a... You've probably heard it spoken about, the custom normal pipeline. Essentially, we don't actually bake a normal map for every single individual object. A normal map is a way of transferring details from a piece of geometry with a high triangle count to a lower triangle count. We just use bent normals on the edges of chamfers to replicate that smoothing. So we have a higher triangle count than what games typically do because of that. But it also means that we have less of a texture footprint as well. So our triangle counts are, I would say for an asset like this, take the hot dog for instance. I'll tell you how many triangles it is. It is 1,300 triangles. This guy's probably coming in way high at the moment because that's just a little debug. This guy's like 24,000 triangles, which is very high. I would probably say I would be happy with like...

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

I don't know if that was a good answer, but yeah, triangle counts. We try to set ourselves limits. However, we try and think about an asset relative to the player's camera rather than the actual size of the object. So we may have an object like this Big Benny's noodle box that someone picks up and puts in their face. We want to put as much detail in as we can relative to how close it is to the camera, right? So we'll actually put quite a lot of detail into those smaller assets because of that. Whereas in a lot of video games, you see the props and they're like, oh, we can only make this like 10 triangles, so it has to look a bit sad.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We also utilize things like object streaming and culling and stuff like that. So it allows us to have higher poly, higher fidelity items in there because we're much better about getting it out of memory when you don't need it. Well, getting there anyway.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

With the server-side object container stuff as well.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We already got it with client-side, it already does a whole bunch of that.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

You have to look at the old Intergalactic Food Delivery webpage. We researched them and brought them up on that page. So you can check the Intergalactic Food Delivery page. There's even a menu, if I remember correctly.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

I don't actually know the flavors. I did do the Pips flavors. I came up with those. Pips Stealth. I don't know why we made Pips Stealth. I just thought it sounded cool.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

You won't see the calories, but they're there.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

Exactly. It's like the diet version.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

No, we use whatever tools the artists need to do the job. Just speaking for the character team alone, sometimes things are modeled in Modo. Sometimes things are modeled in 3ds Max. Sometimes they use things like Marvelous Designer. They use Marvelous a lot. It's about finding the right tools to do the job.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

We use Maya a lot for a lot of the animated assets just because the animation tools in Maya are a bit more suited to that side of things. We use packages like Substance Designer and Painter for our materials. But in terms of 3D, our primary 3D package for just polygon modeling like this is 3ds Max, or Maya depending on if you need animation stuff as well.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

People. Everything that's useful is a tool in one way, shape, or form. My job relies entirely on people and relationships. I can't do anything without the participation of our developers. Without them, ISC would basically be me just standing up there every week, reading a news report and stuff like that, which would be boring. Plus, it's too much me.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

I think ideally it's served hot. However, I think that when you have your noodle stands in the PU, I don't necessarily think they've all got a five-star hygiene rating. So they may not be served hot. I would recommend it be Benny's hot.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

That would be a question for the actor status team. As more of that system comes online and they actually introduce more to the actor status system with the need to eat and drink to keep stamina and stuff up, who knows?

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

We'll treat this guy more as marketing material for the Big Benny's company for now, I think. I'm imagining this is like, they'll make toys of this kind of thing.