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When I look at the before and after shots between the painting with the new tools today versus the tools from just a year ago, it seems like there's much better diversity in the elements and much better breakup between the rocks, plants, foliage and ground coverings, and the textures, like the gravel, seem greatly improved. Am I imagining this or am I right?

TL;DRThe speaker says the improvement isn't imagined: every terrain texture was replaced with new photo-scanned ones that are more consistent with the improved rocks, and faster painting leaves more time to iterate and polish.

Patrick GladysEnvironment Artist

No, actually not. We have actually gone through, I think it was two or three weeks, and we have reworked every single terrain texture that we had before and replaced them with, I think it was 80 or 90 new ones that are not just reworked, but they are based on realistic data, like photogrammetry data. It is actually photo-scanned, real-life material that is now in our libraries that we can use. And it's much higher quality. The definition on the ground is much higher now, so it's more consistent and coherent with what you see on the rocks, which has also been improved and updated. And it's one of these things: we are always picking a couple elements of our entire pipeline and thinking about how can we improve this? How can we raise quality, make this look nicer, more consistent, more coherent and such? And when it comes to the painting tools, one important aspect that probably not many people think of right away when we mention it like this: a speed increase for us means that we have more time to iterate, right? If I have to do one paint pass instead of five paint passes, that means I have five times as much time to spend on this content and really polish it out until it works the way I want it to, and spend more time raising quality, polishing things out, tweaking things, adjusting and so on.

Star Citizen Live›Making Mountains·
Published on this date.2 Oct 2020