Character Tech Team AMA Recap - [Comm-Links](https://api.star-citizen.wiki/comm-links) - Character Tech Team AMA Recap Character Tech Team AMA Recap ============================= Undefined Undefined None [Previous](https://api.star-citizen.wiki/comm-links/18039) [Next](https://api.star-citizen.wiki/comm-links/18041) Content ------- English Character Tech Team AMA Recap Each month we host an open submission live Q&A on Spectrum joined by developers from various specialties across CIG. These questions and answers were collected from the Spectrum AMA on March 16, 2021. This time, we welcomed four guests from the Character Tech Team, which is the link between purely code-focused programming and creative art. They’re currently working on the character tech pipeline, providing the artists with the tools they need to achieve their visual goals. Andreas Rohr – Principal Technical Artist Hey guys, my name is Andreas Rohr and I’m a principal character tech artist/technical animator/tools programmer based in the Frankfurt office. I’m part of the Tech Animation Team, which is split between our Wilmslow, Derby, and Frankfurt studios. Besides working at CIG, I’m a proud veteran Star Citizen backer who hasn’t missed a single Wingman’s Hangar, Around the Verse, and Inside Star Citizen episode since our humble beginnings. My main focus over the past years has been developing our in-house facial rigging pipeline/toolset and improving our DNA character customization system. I also push our next-gen cloth and hair simulation tech and generally strive to ensure all our animation and deformation systems are both easy and efficient to work with and reach near-filmic quality levels when the big day comes. Chris Van Compernolle – Technical Artist Hi, my name is Christopher Van Compernolle, but call me CVC for short. I am an embedded technical artist for the Character Art Team. My specialties include rigging, skinning, and coding tools. This includes modular armor, hair creation pipelines, and character optimizations. So if you have any Python tools questions, let’s chat! James Ku – Principal Character Artist Hi, my name is James Ku and I’m a principal character artist at CIG. I work in the LA studio with our great group of character artists on the Character Tech Team. My job is to create characters, R&D new tech and software for the character creation pipeline, and set a high quality bar for the look of our characters. In the last few years, my primary task has been to focus on Squadron 42, specifically the faces of the main characters. I’ve been working on things like the skin, eyes, and hair of these characters to try to make them more realistic and appealing. Forrest Stephan – Principal Technical Artist Greetings citizens! Forrest Stephan here reporting for duty as a principal technical artist at CIG. I am a pipeline supervisor that helps our talented artists bring you the best darn looking pixels possible. I am heavily embedded in the Character Team and support the needs of departments scattered across the globe with character-related requests. I have a long investment in development and a huge love for the project as I have been working on Star Citizen since the beginning, starting way back on the original crowdfunding campaign. So whether you want to go down memory lane or chat about the latest and greatest in our character art pipelines, I’m here for you! This AMA is complete but keep an eye out for upcoming ones for your chance to ask us anything! Will backpacks also have exterior slots, with visible content (just like the armour)? Chris Van Compernolle: Yes, we are planning on having physical components on backpacks, just like we do with armors. The backpack itself is actually getting treated as attachable to an armor. Beards? Chris Van Compernolle: We do plan on including beards and other facial hair in the PU at some point down the line. However, they have many other things in front of it. Any new about the cloth tech animation we saw in a CitizenCon for characters? Andreas Rohr: Many thanks for this great question and for remembering our little presentation back in 2018 – always happy to see people care about our characters, their animation and deformation quality – and cloth simulation in particular. The vcloth (vertex cloth) simulation tech is a great example of priorities shifting over the course of production – which is perfectly normal in game development. In the case of vcloth, the successful roll-out of the feature depends on three main pillars: 1) The basic cloth solver needs to be implemented by our physics team, needs to have all the core features like tweakable dynamics parameters, collision, self-collision etc. and needs to run fast enough so it can be applied to a reasonable number of characters simultaneously. Apart from that it also needs to be robust and ‘stable’ in the sense of not ‘exploding’ due to the extreme accelerations that can often occur from one frame to the next in the context of games. Lastly, it needs to support the needs of the (tech) art and content centric teams and give them full control over how the cloth behaves and its look and feel, under all the drastically different conditions you’ll end up seeing it in, from fps fights to slow-paced hero cinematic close-ups. 2) An efficient pipeline between DCC (digital content creation) applications such as Maya and our engine needs to be established, as well as tools on the DCC side that allow efficient setup and markup of the simulation assets. The sheer number of assets in our game requires these solutions to be scalable since once the tech comes online, most existing assets (that are deemed worth it) will need to be moved over, i.e. all current assets that use the old ‘pendulum sim’ system, and then some. Good tools and pipelines glue everything together, it’s where our productivity lies. 3) Lastly, the assets themselves need to be there and need to be suitable for simulation in terms of how they were built and their structure. If you model, say some trousers that are rather baggy you’ll find that they end up looking pretty bad and unnaturally stiff/rigid in the game if they ‘don’t have sim’ because the solver and pipeline aren’t ready yet. But if you need the outfit for an upcoming release you’ll likely concept and model them with a tighter fit so the deformation/movement will match the expected behavior in motion. However, once the vcloth tech does come online you’ll obviously want assets that allow it to shine and look super cool. You’ll want cloaks and trenchcoats and cool leather jackets and all kinds of dynamic attachments – you’ll want players to want to take off their armor in the landing zones cause it looks 10x cooler and more individualistic. But it’s a all dependency on the solver and pipeline being fully ready. At CitCon 2018 we were at a point where they were only about halfway there but initial results already looked so excitingly cool and promising that we wanted to share them with you. What happened then is simply game development. The same physics wizards that can give us fancy cloth solvers for cool looking assets are also the folks that implement some core features of our engine which are the foundations for actual gameplay. They work i.e. on physics grids and spatial query acceleration structures which keep track of where objects are in space and whether they collide, are hit by projectiles etc. They are a core component of all AI path-finding logic without which all AI, both NPC ships and agents, would not have any awareness of their environment whatsoever – nothing that could even trigger a behavior/action in the first place. They would just ‘T-pose’, even outside of server perf being an issue, and I guess nobody wants this. So in this case progress on some of the most fundamental systems our games are built upon, was prioritized over the cool shiny stuff, for more than two years. As much as the visual tech nerd in me that hand-optimized the config.sys and autoexec.bat files on his DOS-PC in the 90s in order to see the fancy additional effects this enabled in the early Wing Commander games – as much as this part of me would have loved to bring you vcloth on characters by now – the other part of me that wants to see our game come together and Chris’ vision realized, is fully convinced that this was exactly the right thing to do. And to be clear – we’ve obviously already tried to clone our physics peeps in order to speed up the process, but it didn’t quite work out, sadly. That being said, work on ‘vcloth’ has been picked up again and will continue, gameplay-related physics-duties permitting. It’s a highly complex technical challenge and we look forward to sharing more visual/tangible progress with you at some point. Bear in mind that not all the teams that take part in this initiative are currently represented on the public roadmap yet, which is due to change though. Are ya’ll committed to making GOOD Black (4C) hairstyles available, besides just afros and braids, such as high-top fades, curly tops, and waves? Tired of my character lookin’ like he permed his hair straight like it’s the 50s. Chris Van Compernolle: While we havn’t had the opportunity to implement any of these hairstyles just yet, this is definitely something we want to do and is very important to us. We want to make sure we achieve a good representation of these types of hairs styles. Layered armor anytime soon? I would love to use my helmet with my regular clothing or my jacket with my flight suit. Chris Van Compernolle: Currently there are no plans to do anything like this. Our armors and clothing adhere to a strict set of rules defining how they interact with one another. To allow for the layering of these two systems will require a major refactor of those rules. Hi James Ku, you mentioned R&D’ing new tech. Is there any tech in particular we do not yet know about you could tease us a little on? James Ku: Sorry I cant post any spoilers, but an example of the r&d that was done in the last two years is the new hair that you’ve seen in SQ42. That involved creating an in house custom art tool to create the hair and new shader tech in the game engine. Good morning Character Tech team! What is the current status of being able to remove/put on our helmets in-game? Chris Van Compernolle:: We are currently in the process of researching how best to handle helmets. There are a lot of dependencies from the artwork, to animation, to UI. Once we have all of dependencies defines, we will begin refactoring all of previous assets to utilize the new tech. Is the new hair tech coming to the PU ? Forrest Stephan: Hair tech is built to support both SQ42 and PU. Are there plans for deeper customisation options like sliders for each facial feature? DNA blending system is great, but sometimes you just want to fine tune a specific feature. Andreas Rohr: As a general answer to this and other PU character customizer related questions: We acknowledge the fact that the current PU customizer is limited in terms of usability and choice, i.e. face options, hair options, beard options and other things. It can be considered a v1 of the system – and wherever there’s a v1, there’s likely gonna be a v2 if and when it can be put on the schedule. The current PU customizer uses a very old system for drawing and interacting with the UI elements since the new building blocks system wasn’t ready by the time the v1 customizer was implemented. As a result we didn’t get the interaction model to be as easy and intuitive as we had wanted. The quality of assets in there is not up to the same standards we can achieve internally by now. Can you tell us anything about the progress on alien characters? James Ku: Once again sorry I dont wanna post spoilers, but as you’ve seen we have worked on the Vanduul. I can say our character artists are always excited to work on creatures and aliens. I believe it’s been said there are problems with creating tattoos. Do you have ideas on how to overcome those problems? Do you face the same difficulties with badges for clothes and decals for armor / gear / vehicles or would those offer different problems? Forrest Stephan: There are two types of decals our character’s shader supports. Stencil decals and diffuse decals. Stencil decals work similar to real-life stencils, think screen-printing or stickers. Stencils do minimal color with a mask to determine where the color is visibly projected. For more detailed art, such as tattoos, diffuse details are required which provide a fuller color and detailed spectrum. The challenge with this is they are projected through UV’s onto the skin diffuse texture. This diffuse decal system requires material variants to support the extra texture slot. This can exponentially increase material counts. How to minimize physical material variants is a challenge we are continually trying to solve. Any update on the holo-skull helmet blockers? Forrest Stephan: The initial blocker with the hologram helmets was related to the shader’s original design which was built for static objects or RTT projections. We tried it on the skin files and it was unable to animate with the character’s skeleton/rig. We decided to take the shader back to the drawing board and ensure it supports the needs specific to the characters. Hello the team, First of all, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. Simple one, what is your top priority at the moment concerning character art ? Do you plan to add more diversity into the character creation tab ? If so, what can we expect in the coming year ? Regards James Ku: Hi, thanks for taking the time to ask us questions in the AMA. I can tell you that my top priority in regards to character art is quality. When I build a character I’m always trying to push myself in terms of quality and set a good example for the team. What lessons have you learned from players using the current character creator? How did they compare to your original assumptions and how will they change what you do going forward? Forrest Stephan: We learned how important the heads are that make up the pool. The initial selection of heads where arbitrary without taking the customizer into account. Once the customizer was fully functional, we quickly learned the importance of having a variety of shapes since the customer allows interpolation between DNA head shapes, “ex: ears, eyes, nose, etc.”. Having a bigger DNA pool has necessary benefits; The more heads, the larger the variety options between the heads. Will we be able to equip armour for our left and right arms separately? Forrest Stephan: The armor is broken up in 5 items: core, arms, legs, hands and helmets. There is no armor a-symmetry due to increasing customization further can cause both texture memory and draw call implications which we decided to avoid for performance reasons. What major tech or pipeline improvements are you most excited for to improve your work? James Ku: Personally, I’ve been recently trying improve my skill with using this art software called Marvelous Designer. We use it a lot to make clothing for our characters. Forrest Stephan: The authoring of character assets uses a combination of traditional sculpt and baking for normal maps with a shared PBR material library to define the surface of the character using blend masking texture techniques. The authoring of the blend maps required a more intuitive visual workflow than the current Photoshop to engine pipeline. In order to solve this we are implementing a Substance Painter and Substance Designer pipeline for surfacing to allow for 3d painting while being able to visualize the final look of the character simultaneously. This is an exciting pipeline improvement for the artists to allow a nex-gen texturing system to now match a nex-gen authoring workflow. Can we have navy / UEE uniforms please? and berets? James Ku: Unfortunately I don’t decide what uniforms the players get in the PU. I can say that I worked on a few uee uniforms and I liked working on them a lot. Procedurally generated clothing/armor? Forrest Stephan: A procedural approach to spawning NPCs built on loadout modularity using a system called “spawn closets” is in the works. In addition, we are expanding the ship tinting system onto the characters to allow for color palette customization. Disclaimer The answers accurately reflect development’s intentions at the time of writing, but the company and development team reserve the right to adapt, improve, or change feature and ship designs in response to feedback, playtesting, design revisions, or other considerations to improve balance or the quality of the game overall. Charakter Tech Team AMA Recap Jeden Monat veranstalten wir auf Spectrum eine offene Frage-Antwort-Runde, an der Entwickler aus verschiedenen Fachbereichen von CIG teilnehmen. Diese Fragen und Antworten wurden von der Spectrum AMA am 16. März 2021 gesammelt. Dieses Mal begrüßten wir vier Gäste aus dem Character Tech Team, welches das Bindeglied zwischen rein codeorientierter Programmierung und kreativer Kunst ist. Sie arbeiten derzeit an der Character Tech Pipeline und versorgen die Künstler mit den Werkzeugen, die sie brauchen, um ihre visuellen Ziele zu erreichen. Andreas Rohr - Principal Technical Artist Hey Leute, mein Name ist Andreas Rohr und ich bin ein Principal Character Tech Artist/Technical Animator/Tools Programmer mit Sitz im Frankfurter Büro. Ich bin Teil des Tech Animation Teams, das zwischen unseren Studios in Wilmslow, Derby und Frankfurt aufgeteilt ist. Neben meiner Arbeit bei CIG bin ich ein stolzer Star Citizen Backer, der seit unseren bescheidenen Anfängen keine einzige Wingman's Hangar, Around the Verse und Inside Star Citizen Episode verpasst hat. Mein Hauptaugenmerk lag in den letzten Jahren auf der Entwicklung unserer internen Gesichts-Rigging-Pipeline und der Verbesserung unseres DNA-Charakteranpassungssystems. Ich treibe auch unsere Next-Gen Stoff- und Haarsimulationstechnologie voran und versuche generell sicherzustellen, dass alle unsere Animations- und Deformationssysteme sowohl einfach und effizient zu bedienen sind als auch eine nahezu filmische Qualität erreichen, wenn der große Tag kommt. Chris Van Compernolle - Technischer Zeichner Hallo, mein Name ist Christopher Van Compernolle, aber nenn mich kurz CVC. Ich bin ein eingebetteter Technical Artist für das Character Art Team. Zu meinen Spezialgebieten gehören Rigging, Skinning und Coding Tools. Dazu gehören modulare Rüstungen, Haarerstellungspipelines und Charakteroptimierungen. Wenn du also Fragen zu Python-Tools hast, lass uns chatten! James Ku - Principal Character Artist Hi, mein Name ist James Ku und ich bin ein Principal Character Artist bei CIG. Ich arbeite im LA Studio mit unserer großartigen Gruppe von Character Artists im Character Tech Team. Meine Aufgabe ist es, Charaktere zu erstellen, neue Technologien und Software für die Charaktererstellungspipeline zu entwickeln und eine hohe Qualitätsmesslatte für das Aussehen unserer Charaktere zu setzen. In den letzten Jahren war meine Hauptaufgabe, mich auf Squadron 42 zu konzentrieren, speziell auf die Gesichter der Hauptcharaktere. Ich habe an Dingen wie der Haut, den Augen und den Haaren dieser Charaktere gearbeitet, um sie realistischer und ansprechender zu gestalten. Forrest Stephan - Technischer Hauptzeichner Grüße Citizens! Forrest Stephan hier meldet sich zum Dienst als Principal Technical Artist bei CIG. Ich bin ein Pipeline Supervisor, der unseren talentierten Künstlern dabei hilft, euch die bestmöglich aussehenden Pixel zu liefern. Ich bin stark in das Charakterteam eingebunden und unterstütze die Bedürfnisse der über den Globus verstreuten Abteilungen mit charakterbezogenen Anfragen. Ich habe eine lange Investition in die Entwicklung und eine große Liebe für das Projekt, da ich von Anfang an an Star Citizen gearbeitet habe, angefangen bei der ursprünglichen Crowdfunding-Kampagne. Egal, ob du in Erinnerungen schwelgen oder über das Neueste und Größte in unserer Character Art Pipeline plaudern möchtest, ich bin für dich da! Dieses AMA ist abgeschlossen, aber halte Ausschau nach den nächsten AMAs, damit du uns alles fragen kannst! Werden Rucksäcke auch Außenslots haben, mit sichtbarem Inhalt (genau wie die Rüstung)? Chris Van Compernolle: Ja, wir planen, physische Komponenten an Rucksäcken zu haben, genau wie bei den Rüstungen. Der Rucksack selbst wird so behandelt, als ob er an einer Rüstung befestigt werden könnte. Bärte? Chris Van Compernolle: Wir planen, irgendwann einmal Bärte und andere Gesichtsbehaarung in die PU aufzunehmen. Allerdings haben sie noch viele andere Dinge vor sich. Gibt es etwas Neues über die Stofftechnik-Animation, die wir auf der CitizenCon für Charaktere gesehen haben? Andreas Rohr: Vielen Dank für diese tolle Frage und für die Erinnerung an unsere kleine Präsentation im Jahr 2018 - es freut uns immer wieder zu sehen, dass sich Leute für unsere Charaktere, ihre Animations- und Deformationsqualität - und insbesondere die Stoffsimulation - interessieren. Die vcloth (vertex cloth) Simulationstechnik ist ein großartiges Beispiel dafür, dass sich die Prioritäten im Laufe der Produktion verschieben - was in der Spieleentwicklung völlig normal ist. Im Fall von vcloth hängt der erfolgreiche Rollout des Features von drei Hauptpfeilern ab: 1) Der grundlegende Cloth Solver muss von unserem Physikteam implementiert werden, muss alle Kernfeatures wie veränderbare Dynamikparameter, Kollision, Selbstkollision etc. haben und muss schnell genug laufen, damit er auf eine vernünftige Anzahl von Charakteren gleichzeitig angewendet werden kann. Abgesehen davon muss es auch robust und 'stabil' sein, in dem Sinne, dass es nicht 'explodiert' aufgrund der extremen Beschleunigungen, die im Kontext von Spielen oft von einem Frame zum nächsten auftreten können. Zu guter Letzt muss es die Bedürfnisse der (technischen) Art- und Content-Teams unterstützen und ihnen die volle Kontrolle darüber geben, wie sich der Stoff verhält und wie er sich anfühlt, und das unter all den drastisch unterschiedlichen Bedingungen, in denen man ihn am Ende sehen wird, von FPS-Kämpfen bis hin zu langsamen, filmischen Nahaufnahmen von Helden. 2) Eine effiziente Pipeline zwischen DCC (Digital Content Creation) Anwendungen wie Maya und unserer Engine muss etabliert werden, ebenso wie Tools auf der DCC Seite, die ein effizientes Setup und Markup der Simulations-Assets ermöglichen. Die schiere Anzahl an Assets in unserem Spiel erfordert, dass diese Lösungen skalierbar sind, denn sobald die Technologie online ist, müssen die meisten existierenden Assets (die es wert sind) rübergeschoben werden, d.h. alle aktuellen Assets, die das alte "Pendel-Sim"-System nutzen, und noch einige mehr. Gute Werkzeuge und Pipelines halten alles zusammen, darin liegt unsere Produktivität. 3) Schließlich müssen die Assets selbst vorhanden sein und für die Simulation geeignet sein, was ihre Bauweise und Struktur angeht. Wenn du z.B. eine Hose modellierst, die ziemlich ausgebeult ist, wirst du feststellen, dass sie im Spiel ziemlich schlecht und unnatürlich steif/rigid aussieht, wenn sie nicht simulationsfähig ist, weil der Solver und die Pipeline noch nicht bereit sind. Aber wenn du das Outfit für einen kommenden Release brauchst, wirst du es wahrscheinlich mit einer engeren Passform konzipieren und modellieren, damit die Verformung/Bewegung dem erwarteten Verhalten in der Bewegung entspricht. Wie auch immer, sobald die Vcloth-Technologie online ist, wirst du natürlich Assets haben wollen, die es erlauben zu glänzen und super cool auszusehen. Du wirst Umhänge und Trenchcoats und coole Lederjacken und alle Arten von dynamischen Anbauteilen haben wollen - du wirst wollen, dass die Spieler ihre Rüstung in den Landezonen ausziehen, weil es 10x cooler und individueller aussieht. Aber das hängt alles davon ab, dass der Solver und die Pipeline vollständig fertig sind. Auf der CitCon 2018 waren wir an einem Punkt, an dem sie erst etwa zur Hälfte fertig waren, aber erste Ergebnisse sahen schon so aufregend cool und vielversprechend aus, dass wir sie mit euch teilen wollten. Was dann passierte, ist einfach Spielentwicklung. Die gleichen Physik-Assistenten, die uns schicke Clothesolver für cool aussehende Assets liefern können, sind auch die Leute, die einige Kernfunktionen unserer Engine implementieren, die die Grundlage für das eigentliche Gameplay sind. Sie arbeiten z.B. an Physik-Gittern und räumlichen Abfrage-Beschleunigungsstrukturen, die verfolgen, wo sich Objekte im Raum befinden und ob sie kollidieren, von Projektilen getroffen werden etc. Sie sind ein Kernbestandteil aller KI-Pfadfindungslogik, ohne die alle KI, sowohl NPC-Schiffe als auch Agenten, keinerlei Bewusstsein für ihre Umgebung hätten - nichts, was überhaupt ein Verhalten/eine Aktion auslösen könnte. Sie würden einfach nur 'T-posten', auch außerhalb von Server-Perf, und ich schätze, das will niemand. In diesem Fall wurde also der Fortschritt bei einigen der grundlegendsten Systeme, auf denen unsere Spiele aufgebaut sind, über zwei Jahre lang gegenüber dem coolen, glänzenden Zeug priorisiert. So sehr der visuelle Tech-Nerd in mir, der in den 90er Jahren die config.sys und autoexec.bat Dateien auf seinem DOS-PC von Hand optimiert hat, um die ausgefallenen zusätzlichen Effekte zu sehen, die dies in den frühen Wing Commander Spielen ermöglichte - so sehr dieser Teil von mir es geliebt hätte, euch jetzt schon vcloth auf Charakteren zu bringen - der andere Teil von mir, der sehen will, wie unser Spiel zusammenkommt und Chris' Vision verwirklicht wird, ist völlig davon überzeugt, dass es genau das Richtige war, dies zu tun. Und um das klarzustellen - wir haben natürlich schon versucht, unsere Physik-People zu klonen, um den Prozess zu beschleunigen, aber das hat leider nicht ganz geklappt. Nichtsdestotrotz haben wir die Arbeit an 'vcloth' wieder aufgenommen und werden sie fortsetzen, sofern es die Gameplay-bezogenen Aufgaben der Physik zulassen. Es ist eine hochkomplexe technische Herausforderung und wir freuen uns darauf, euch irgendwann mehr visuelle/greifbare Fortschritte mitzuteilen. Bedenke, dass noch nicht alle Teams, die an dieser Initiative teilnehmen, auf der öffentlichen Roadmap vertreten sind, was sich aber bald ändern wird. Setzt ihr euch dafür ein, dass es neben Afros und Zöpfen auch GUTE schwarze (4C) Frisuren gibt, wie z.B. High-Top Fades, Locken und Wellen? Ich bin es leid, dass mein Charakter aussieht, als hätte er sich die Haare wie in den 50er Jahren dauergewellt. Chris Van Compernolle: Wir hatten zwar noch nicht die Gelegenheit, eine dieser Frisuren umzusetzen, aber das ist definitiv etwas, das wir machen wollen und das uns sehr wichtig ist. Wir wollen sicherstellen, dass wir eine gute Darstellung dieser Art von Frisuren erreichen. Gibt es bald eine geschichtete Rüstung? Ich würde gerne meinen Helm mit meiner normalen Kleidung oder meine Jacke mit meinem Fluganzug verwenden. Chris Van Compernolle: Derzeit gibt es keine Pläne, so etwas zu machen. Unsere Rüstungen und Kleidungsstücke halten sich an strenge Regeln, die definieren, wie sie miteinander interagieren. Um die Überlagerung dieser beiden Systeme zu ermöglichen, müssten diese Regeln grundlegend überarbeitet werden. Hi James Ku, du hast die Entwicklung neuer Technologien erwähnt. Gibt es eine bestimmte Technologie, die wir noch nicht kennen, über die du uns etwas erzählen könntest? James Ku: Tut mir leid, dass ich keine Spoiler posten kann, aber ein Beispiel für die F&E, die in den letzten zwei Jahren gemacht wurde, sind die neuen Haare, die man in SQ42 gesehen hat. Das beinhaltete die Entwicklung eines hauseigenen Art-Tools, um die Haare zu erstellen und eine neue Shader-Technologie in der Spiel-Engine. Guten Morgen Character Tech Team! Wie ist der aktuelle Stand, dass wir unsere Helme im Spiel abnehmen/aufsetzen können? Chris Van Compernolle:: Wir sind gerade dabei zu erforschen, wie wir Helme am besten handhaben können. Es gibt eine Menge Abhängigkeiten von der Grafik, der Animation und der Benutzeroberfläche. Sobald wir alle Abhängigkeiten definiert haben, werden wir damit beginnen, alle bisherigen Assets zu überarbeiten, um die neue Technologie zu nutzen. Kommt die neue Haar-Technologie auch in die PU? Forrest Stephan: Die Haartechnologie ist so gebaut, dass sie sowohl SQ42 als auch PU unterstützt. Gibt es Pläne für tiefere Anpassungsmöglichkeiten wie Schieberegler für jedes Gesichtsmerkmal? Das DNA Blending System ist großartig, aber manchmal möchte man nur ein bestimmtes Merkmal feinjustieren. Andreas Rohr: Als allgemeine Antwort auf diese und andere Fragen zum PU-Charakteranpassungssystem: Wir erkennen die Tatsache an, dass der aktuelle PU Customizer in Bezug auf Benutzerfreundlichkeit und Auswahl begrenzt ist, d.h. Gesichtsoptionen, Haaroptionen, Bartoptionen und andere Dinge. Er kann als eine v1 des Systems betrachtet werden - und wo es eine v1 gibt, wird es wahrscheinlich auch eine v2 geben, wenn und sobald sie auf den Plan gesetzt werden kann. Der aktuelle PU Customizer nutzt ein sehr altes System zum Zeichnen und Interagieren mit den UI-Elementen, da das neue Bausteinsystem noch nicht fertig war, als der v1 Customizer implementiert wurde. Das Ergebnis war, dass wir das Interaktionsmodell nicht so einfach und intuitiv hinbekommen haben, wie wir es uns gewünscht hatten. Die Qualität der Assets darin entspricht nicht dem Standard, den wir mittlerweile intern erreichen können. Kannst du uns etwas über den Fortschritt bei den Alien-Charakteren erzählen? James Ku: Nochmals sorry, ich möchte keine Spoiler posten, aber wie du gesehen hast, haben wir an den Vanduul gearbeitet. Ich kann sagen, dass unsere Charakterkünstler immer aufgeregt sind, an Kreaturen und Aliens zu arbeiten. Ich glaube, es wurde gesagt, dass es Probleme bei der Erstellung von Tattoos gibt. Habt ihr Ideen, wie man diese Probleme überwinden kann? Habt ihr die gleichen Schwierigkeiten mit Abzeichen für Kleidung und Abziehbildern für Rüstungen / Ausrüstung / Fahrzeuge oder würden diese andere Probleme bieten? Forrest Stephan: Es gibt zwei Arten von Abziehbildern, die der Shader unseres Charakters unterstützt. Stencil-Abziehbilder und diffuse Abziehbilder. Stencil Decals funktionieren ähnlich wie Schablonen im echten Leben, man denke an Siebdruck oder Aufkleber. Stencils machen minimale Farbe mit einer Maske, um zu bestimmen, wo die Farbe sichtbar projiziert wird. Für detailliertere Kunst, wie z.B. Tattoos, werden diffuse Details benötigt, die ein volleres Farb- und Detailspektrum bieten. Die Herausforderung dabei ist, dass sie durch UV's auf die diffuse Textur der Haut projiziert werden. Dieses diffuse Abziehbildsystem erfordert Materialvarianten, um den zusätzlichen Texturslot zu unterstützen. Dies kann die Materialanzahl exponentiell erhöhen. Wie man die physischen Materialvarianten minimiert, ist eine Herausforderung, die wir ständig versuchen zu lösen. Gibt es ein Update zu den Holo-Schädel-Helm-Blockern? Forrest Stephan: Der anfängliche Blocker mit den Hologrammhelmen hing mit dem ursprünglichen Design des Shaders zusammen, der für statische Objekte oder RTT-Projektionen gebaut wurde. Wir haben ihn an den Skin-Dateien ausprobiert und er war nicht in der Lage, mit dem Skelett/Rig des Charakters zu animieren. Wir entschieden uns, den Shader zurück auf das Zeichenbrett zu bringen und sicherzustellen, dass er die spezifischen Bedürfnisse der Charaktere unterstützt. Hallo das Team, Zunächst einmal vielen Dank, dass ihr euch die Zeit nehmt, unsere Fragen zu beantworten. Ganz einfach, was ist im Moment eure oberste Priorität in Bezug auf die Charakterkunst? Habt ihr vor, mehr Vielfalt in die Charaktererstellung zu bringen ? Wenn ja, was können wir im kommenden Jahr erwarten ? Mit freundlichen Grüßen James Ku: Hi, danke, dass du dir die Zeit genommen hast, uns im AMA Fragen zu stellen. Ich kann dir sagen, dass meine oberste Priorität in Bezug auf die Charakterkunst die Qualität ist. Wenn ich einen Charakter baue, versuche ich immer, mich selbst in Bezug auf Qualität zu pushen und ein gutes Beispiel für das Team zu sein. Welche Lektionen hast du von Spielern gelernt, die den aktuellen Character Creator benutzen? Wie haben sie sich im Vergleich zu euren ursprünglichen Annahmen entwickelt und wie werden sie euer Vorgehen in Zukunft verändern? Forrest Stephan: Wir haben gelernt, wie wichtig die Köpfe sind, aus denen sich der Pool zusammensetzt. Die anfängliche Auswahl der Köpfe war willkürlich, ohne den Customizer zu berücksichtigen. Sobald der Customizer voll funktionsfähig war, haben wir schnell gelernt, wie wichtig es ist, eine Vielzahl von Formen zu haben, da der Kunde die Interpolation zwischen DNA-Kopfformen erlaubt, z.B. Ohren, Augen, Nase, etc. Einen größeren DNA-Pool zu haben hat notwendige Vorteile; Je mehr Köpfe, desto größer die Variationsmöglichkeiten zwischen den Köpfen. Werden wir in der Lage sein, die Rüstung für den linken und rechten Arm getrennt auszustatten? Forrest Stephan: Die Rüstung ist in 5 Elemente aufgeteilt: Kern, Arme, Beine, Hände und Helme. Es gibt keine A-Symmetrie der Rüstung, da eine weitere Anpassung sowohl Auswirkungen auf den Texturspeicher als auch auf den Draw Call haben kann, was wir aus Performance-Gründen vermeiden wollten. Auf welche größeren Tech- oder Pipeline-Verbesserungen freust du dich am meisten, um deine Arbeit zu verbessern? James Ku: Ich persönlich habe in letzter Zeit versucht, meine Fähigkeiten im Umgang mit dieser Art-Software namens Marvelous Designer zu verbessern. Wir benutzen es oft, um Kleidung für unsere Charaktere zu entwerfen. Forrest Stephan: Das Authoring der Charakter-Assets nutzt eine Kombination aus traditionellem Sculpting und Baking für Normal Maps mit einer gemeinsamen PBR-Materialbibliothek, um die Oberfläche des Charakters mit Blend-Masking-Texturtechniken zu definieren. Das Authoring der Blend Maps erforderte einen intuitiveren visuellen Workflow als die aktuelle Photoshop-to-Engine-Pipeline. Um dieses Problem zu lösen, implementieren wir eine Substance Painter- und Substance Designer-Pipeline für die Oberflächengestaltung, um 3D-Malerei zu ermöglichen und gleichzeitig den endgültigen Look des Charakters zu visualisieren. Dies ist eine aufregende Pipeline-Verbesserung für die Künstler, die es ermöglicht, dass ein Nex-Gen-Texturierungssystem nun mit einem Nex-Gen-Authoring-Workflow übereinstimmt. Können wir bitte Marine / UEE Uniformen und Barette haben? James Ku: Leider entscheide ich nicht, welche Uniformen die Spieler in der PU bekommen. Ich kann sagen, dass ich an ein paar UEE Uniformen gearbeitet habe und mir die Arbeit daran sehr gefallen hat. Prozedural generierte Kleidung/Rüstung? Forrest Stephan: Ein prozeduraler Ansatz für das Spawnen von NSCs, der auf der Modularität der Ausrüstungen basiert und ein System namens "Spawn Closures" verwendet, ist in Arbeit. Außerdem erweitern wir das System zur Einfärbung von Schiffen auf die Charaktere, um eine Anpassung der Farbpaletten zu ermöglichen. Haftungsausschluss Die Antworten spiegeln genau die Absichten der Entwickler zum Zeitpunkt des Schreibens wider. Das Unternehmen und das Entwicklerteam behalten sich jedoch das Recht vor, Features und Schiffsdesigns als Reaktion auf Feedback, Spieltests, Designüberarbeitungen oder andere Überlegungen zur Verbesserung der Balance oder der Qualität des Spiels insgesamt anzupassen, zu verbessern oder zu verändern. Character Tech Team AMA Recap Each month we host an open submission live Q&A on Spectrum joined by developers from various specialties across CIG. These questions and answers were collected from the Spectrum AMA on March 16, 2021. This time, we welcomed four guests from the Character Tech Team, which is the link between purely code-focused programming and creative art. They’re currently working on the character tech pipeline, providing the artists with the tools they need to achieve their visual goals. Andreas Rohr – Principal Technical Artist Hey guys, my name is Andreas Rohr and I’m a principal character tech artist/technical animator/tools programmer based in the Frankfurt office. I’m part of the Tech Animation Team, which is split between our Wilmslow, Derby, and Frankfurt studios. Besides working at CIG, I’m a proud veteran Star Citizen backer who hasn’t missed a single Wingman’s Hangar, Around the Verse, and Inside Star Citizen episode since our humble beginnings. My main focus over the past years has been developing our in-house facial rigging pipeline/toolset and improving our DNA character customization system. I also push our next-gen cloth and hair simulation tech and generally strive to ensure all our animation and deformation systems are both easy and efficient to work with and reach near-filmic quality levels when the big day comes. Chris Van Compernolle – Technical Artist Hi, my name is Christopher Van Compernolle, but call me CVC for short. I am an embedded technical artist for the Character Art Team. My specialties include rigging, skinning, and coding tools. This includes modular armor, hair creation pipelines, and character optimizations. So if you have any Python tools questions, let’s chat! James Ku – Principal Character Artist Hi, my name is James Ku and I’m a principal character artist at CIG. I work in the LA studio with our great group of character artists on the Character Tech Team. My job is to create characters, R&D new tech and software for the character creation pipeline, and set a high quality bar for the look of our characters. In the last few years, my primary task has been to focus on Squadron 42, specifically the faces of the main characters. I’ve been working on things like the skin, eyes, and hair of these characters to try to make them more realistic and appealing. Forrest Stephan – Principal Technical Artist Greetings citizens! Forrest Stephan here reporting for duty as a principal technical artist at CIG. I am a pipeline supervisor that helps our talented artists bring you the best darn looking pixels possible. I am heavily embedded in the Character Team and support the needs of departments scattered across the globe with character-related requests. I have a long investment in development and a huge love for the project as I have been working on Star Citizen since the beginning, starting way back on the original crowdfunding campaign. So whether you want to go down memory lane or chat about the latest and greatest in our character art pipelines, I’m here for you! This AMA is complete but keep an eye out for upcoming ones for your chance to ask us anything! Will backpacks also have exterior slots, with visible content (just like the armour)? Chris Van Compernolle: Yes, we are planning on having physical components on backpacks, just like we do with armors. The backpack itself is actually getting treated as attachable to an armor. Beards? Chris Van Compernolle: We do plan on including beards and other facial hair in the PU at some point down the line. However, they have many other things in front of it. Any new about the cloth tech animation we saw in a CitizenCon for characters? Andreas Rohr: Many thanks for this great question and for remembering our little presentation back in 2018 – always happy to see people care about our characters, their animation and deformation quality – and cloth simulation in particular. The vcloth (vertex cloth) simulation tech is a great example of priorities shifting over the course of production – which is perfectly normal in game development. In the case of vcloth, the successful roll-out of the feature depends on three main pillars: 1) The basic cloth solver needs to be implemented by our physics team, needs to have all the core features like tweakable dynamics parameters, collision, self-collision etc. and needs to run fast enough so it can be applied to a reasonable number of characters simultaneously. Apart from that it also needs to be robust and ‘stable’ in the sense of not ‘exploding’ due to the extreme accelerations that can often occur from one frame to the next in the context of games. Lastly, it needs to support the needs of the (tech) art and content centric teams and give them full control over how the cloth behaves and its look and feel, under all the drastically different conditions you’ll end up seeing it in, from fps fights to slow-paced hero cinematic close-ups. 2) An efficient pipeline between DCC (digital content creation) applications such as Maya and our engine needs to be established, as well as tools on the DCC side that allow efficient setup and markup of the simulation assets. The sheer number of assets in our game requires these solutions to be scalable since once the tech comes online, most existing assets (that are deemed worth it) will need to be moved over, i.e. all current assets that use the old ‘pendulum sim’ system, and then some. Good tools and pipelines glue everything together, it’s where our productivity lies. 3) Lastly, the assets themselves need to be there and need to be suitable for simulation in terms of how they were built and their structure. If you model, say some trousers that are rather baggy you’ll find that they end up looking pretty bad and unnaturally stiff/rigid in the game if they ‘don’t have sim’ because the solver and pipeline aren’t ready yet. But if you need the outfit for an upcoming release you’ll likely concept and model them with a tighter fit so the deformation/movement will match the expected behavior in motion. However, once the vcloth tech does come online you’ll obviously want assets that allow it to shine and look super cool. You’ll want cloaks and trenchcoats and cool leather jackets and all kinds of dynamic attachments – you’ll want players to want to take off their armor in the landing zones cause it looks 10x cooler and more individualistic. But it’s a all dependency on the solver and pipeline being fully ready. At CitCon 2018 we were at a point where they were only about halfway there but initial results already looked so excitingly cool and promising that we wanted to share them with you. What happened then is simply game development. The same physics wizards that can give us fancy cloth solvers for cool looking assets are also the folks that implement some core features of our engine which are the foundations for actual gameplay. They work i.e. on physics grids and spatial query acceleration structures which keep track of where objects are in space and whether they collide, are hit by projectiles etc. They are a core component of all AI path-finding logic without which all AI, both NPC ships and agents, would not have any awareness of their environment whatsoever – nothing that could even trigger a behavior/action in the first place. They would just ‘T-pose’, even outside of server perf being an issue, and I guess nobody wants this. So in this case progress on some of the most fundamental systems our games are built upon, was prioritized over the cool shiny stuff, for more than two years. As much as the visual tech nerd in me that hand-optimized the config.sys and autoexec.bat files on his DOS-PC in the 90s in order to see the fancy additional effects this enabled in the early Wing Commander games – as much as this part of me would have loved to bring you vcloth on characters by now – the other part of me that wants to see our game come together and Chris’ vision realized, is fully convinced that this was exactly the right thing to do. And to be clear – we’ve obviously already tried to clone our physics peeps in order to speed up the process, but it didn’t quite work out, sadly. That being said, work on ‘vcloth’ has been picked up again and will continue, gameplay-related physics-duties permitting. It’s a highly complex technical challenge and we look forward to sharing more visual/tangible progress with you at some point. Bear in mind that not all the teams that take part in this initiative are currently represented on the public roadmap yet, which is due to change though. Are ya’ll committed to making GOOD Black (4C) hairstyles available, besides just afros and braids, such as high-top fades, curly tops, and waves? Tired of my character lookin’ like he permed his hair straight like it’s the 50s. Chris Van Compernolle: While we havn’t had the opportunity to implement any of these hairstyles just yet, this is definitely something we want to do and is very important to us. We want to make sure we achieve a good representation of these types of hairs styles. Layered armor anytime soon? I would love to use my helmet with my regular clothing or my jacket with my flight suit. Chris Van Compernolle: Currently there are no plans to do anything like this. Our armors and clothing adhere to a strict set of rules defining how they interact with one another. To allow for the layering of these two systems will require a major refactor of those rules. Hi James Ku, you mentioned R&D’ing new tech. Is there any tech in particular we do not yet know about you could tease us a little on? James Ku: Sorry I cant post any spoilers, but an example of the r&d that was done in the last two years is the new hair that you’ve seen in SQ42. That involved creating an in house custom art tool to create the hair and new shader tech in the game engine. Good morning Character Tech team! What is the current status of being able to remove/put on our helmets in-game? Chris Van Compernolle:: We are currently in the process of researching how best to handle helmets. There are a lot of dependencies from the artwork, to animation, to UI. Once we have all of dependencies defines, we will begin refactoring all of previous assets to utilize the new tech. Is the new hair tech coming to the PU ? Forrest Stephan: Hair tech is built to support both SQ42 and PU. Are there plans for deeper customisation options like sliders for each facial feature? DNA blending system is great, but sometimes you just want to fine tune a specific feature. Andreas Rohr: As a general answer to this and other PU character customizer related questions: We acknowledge the fact that the current PU customizer is limited in terms of usability and choice, i.e. face options, hair options, beard options and other things. It can be considered a v1 of the system – and wherever there’s a v1, there’s likely gonna be a v2 if and when it can be put on the schedule. The current PU customizer uses a very old system for drawing and interacting with the UI elements since the new building blocks system wasn’t ready by the time the v1 customizer was implemented. As a result we didn’t get the interaction model to be as easy and intuitive as we had wanted. The quality of assets in there is not up to the same standards we can achieve internally by now. Can you tell us anything about the progress on alien characters? James Ku: Once again sorry I dont wanna post spoilers, but as you’ve seen we have worked on the Vanduul. I can say our character artists are always excited to work on creatures and aliens. I believe it’s been said there are problems with creating tattoos. Do you have ideas on how to overcome those problems? Do you face the same difficulties with badges for clothes and decals for armor / gear / vehicles or would those offer different problems? Forrest Stephan: There are two types of decals our character’s shader supports. Stencil decals and diffuse decals. Stencil decals work similar to real-life stencils, think screen-printing or stickers. Stencils do minimal color with a mask to determine where the color is visibly projected. For more detailed art, such as tattoos, diffuse details are required which provide a fuller color and detailed spectrum. The challenge with this is they are projected through UV’s onto the skin diffuse texture. This diffuse decal system requires material variants to support the extra texture slot. This can exponentially increase material counts. How to minimize physical material variants is a challenge we are continually trying to solve. Any update on the holo-skull helmet blockers? Forrest Stephan: The initial blocker with the hologram helmets was related to the shader’s original design which was built for static objects or RTT projections. We tried it on the skin files and it was unable to animate with the character’s skeleton/rig. We decided to take the shader back to the drawing board and ensure it supports the needs specific to the characters. Hello the team, First of all, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. Simple one, what is your top priority at the moment concerning character art ? Do you plan to add more diversity into the character creation tab ? If so, what can we expect in the coming year ? Regards James Ku: Hi, thanks for taking the time to ask us questions in the AMA. I can tell you that my top priority in regards to character art is quality. When I build a character I’m always trying to push myself in terms of quality and set a good example for the team. What lessons have you learned from players using the current character creator? How did they compare to your original assumptions and how will they change what you do going forward? Forrest Stephan: We learned how important the heads are that make up the pool. The initial selection of heads where arbitrary without taking the customizer into account. Once the customizer was fully functional, we quickly learned the importance of having a variety of shapes since the customer allows interpolation between DNA head shapes, “ex: ears, eyes, nose, etc.”. Having a bigger DNA pool has necessary benefits; The more heads, the larger the variety options between the heads. Will we be able to equip armour for our left and right arms separately? Forrest Stephan: The armor is broken up in 5 items: core, arms, legs, hands and helmets. There is no armor a-symmetry due to increasing customization further can cause both texture memory and draw call implications which we decided to avoid for performance reasons. What major tech or pipeline improvements are you most excited for to improve your work? James Ku: Personally, I’ve been recently trying improve my skill with using this art software called Marvelous Designer. We use it a lot to make clothing for our characters. Forrest Stephan: The authoring of character assets uses a combination of traditional sculpt and baking for normal maps with a shared PBR material library to define the surface of the character using blend masking texture techniques. The authoring of the blend maps required a more intuitive visual workflow than the current Photoshop to engine pipeline. In order to solve this we are implementing a Substance Painter and Substance Designer pipeline for surfacing to allow for 3d painting while being able to visualize the final look of the character simultaneously. This is an exciting pipeline improvement for the artists to allow a nex-gen texturing system to now match a nex-gen authoring workflow. Can we have navy / UEE uniforms please? and berets? James Ku: Unfortunately I don’t decide what uniforms the players get in the PU. I can say that I worked on a few uee uniforms and I liked working on them a lot. Procedurally generated clothing/armor? Forrest Stephan: A procedural approach to spawning NPCs built on loadout modularity using a system called “spawn closets” is in the works. In addition, we are expanding the ship tinting system onto the characters to allow for color palette customization. Disclaimer The answers accurately reflect development’s intentions at the time of writing, but the company and development team reserve the right to adapt, improve, or change feature and ship designs in response to feedback, playtesting, design revisions, or other considerations to improve balance or the quality of the game overall. 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