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Are there plans for ship trailing, like in quantum, when inside a gas cloud?

TL;DRYes, the team plans ship trailing in gas and planetary clouds, using signed distance fields and per-cloud-type effect templates that put mist or matter streaming across the hull.

Mike SnowdonVFX Director

Yes, there are. So ship trailing like in quantum, so all of the effect that we've got where it looks like the ship is displacing matter and causing a trail. Yeah, absolutely. That was one of the things that we... we've talked about signed distance fields probably a million times, and we use it a lot, or we plan to use it a lot more. And that's the kind of thing that the signed distance fields would allow us to do. When we're in gas clouds, when we're in planetary clouds as well, we have template effects that are spawned from the cloud data. I know that we said don't talk about clouds, that's another team. The actual creation of the clouds is being done by the art team and, on the code side, Karsten, as I think Ali might have mentioned actually in his Inside Star Citizen. But the VFX team work on the interior effects for gas clouds and clouds. So as part of that, we think of it like templates. Different types of clouds have a different set of effects, like a different template for the VFX inside it. And one of those categories of effects is mist or matter, depending on which kind of cloud you're in, going across the hull of the ship and creating trails for that reason. So yes, we plan to do that.

Star Citizen Live›VFX Team Q&A·
Published on this date.11 Mar 2022