Teo · VFX Artist

Before you answer, I wasn't going to mention it, but one of the things that is difficult, based on the previous answer, is making sure the reason for the effect is understood and seen, and on the atmospheric entry effect that Leo and I worked on, that glow is a big part of that.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Well, I mean, it is still planned. That's the short answer. We did indeed do it and we showed it. We haven't taken it off the table. We're definitely planning on doing it when we can. The issue there is that, again, I'm probably just going to be repeating myself a lot, but it's the collaboration. It's not something that we as a VFX team can implement. We need to get time from the graphics team, so Ali and his team, to actually work on the shader itself. We then need to collaborate with the ship people. So you mentioned John Crew. So John's been in conversations about this. It's just getting everyone together at the same time to make sure that all priorities are aligned to actually be able to do that. So definitely still planned. I can't commit to when, but it's certainly on the table. And we're also going to be needing something similar for the fire propagation as well.

Teo · VFX Artist

It will be needed for the fire propagation stuff.

Leo · VFX Programmer

Yeah. So the reason why it didn't really work was that we have the glow on the ship itself with the damage map. So if you shoot the ship, you get the glowing. So we could use that for making the ship glow, but all the items attached, such as the landing gear, the glass, even the doors, they didn't glow with it. And basically, we need the same kind of glow tech on all those other objects. So one of the things we're requesting now from the graphics team is a more generic glow shader, so that we can use that same shader on the material for fire. So if an object is hot enough for it to glow, then we can use that same kind of system to make an object glow. So it's probably going to be a while, but it's going to be something used for different systems as well, which is nice.