cloud Imperium games star citizen
If you have a passion for video games, there’s no better time to turn that love into a lucrative career. From ground-breaking new technology to innovative new titles, the video games industry is currently a very exciting place for digital artists.
“There are all kinds of exciting opportunities in games,” says Cloud Imperium Games character art director Josh Herman. “Games are such a massive part of our lives now and they aren’t going to go away – the industry is just going to get bigger and bigger and there will always be quality jobs if you have the skill and the drive to find them.”
And that is what the gaming world is full of: drive. An ever-evolving and fastpaced industry, video games companies and artists are constantly looking for new ways to entertain audiences and further charm existing players. Always moving forward, every day there’s something to learn. “There’s not one artist here who can say they know everything because the games industry is always moving at such a pace that it keeps you fresh,” says Cloud Imperium Games vehicle art director Nathan Dearsley. Film and Games Converge The challenging environment and development of innovative new workflows attracted Josh, Nathan and many other leading artists. Principal technical artist at Ninja Theory, Matt Stoneham, says: “Real-time renderers and game engines are really pushing the quality of artwork and that makes the games industry an attractive destination for artists to be.
“For a while now, the games industry has almost been seen as the poorer cousin to film and TV, with film and TV seen as the more serious and sexy destination,” Matt continues. “But I really don’t think that’s true any more.
“Games technology is becoming ubiquitous now. Real-time rendering as a core technology outside of games is a serious thing. The line between technology in film and games is continually blurring, and the pathway between games and film is now very much open. There’s never been a better time to get into this industry.”
As more ambitious titles are being developed and pioneering technology such as real-time gains momentum within the creative industry, wanting to work in the world of gaming is a goal shared by many. But, like other creative fields, it can be a tricky industry to break in to. Here we speak to artists at two world-class gaming companies, Cloud Imperium Games and Ninja Theory, about the innovative new titles they’re working on and the advice they have for aspiring games artists.
A games company that’s no doubt currently at the forefront of many a would-be game artist’s mind is Cloud Imperium Games (CIG), best known for its record-shattering crowdfunded title Star Citizen. Developed in Cryengine, Star Citizen combines classic space sim gameplay with Hollywood-calibre visuals, and has, so far, raised over $124 million from passionate fans.
An extremely high-profile project, CIG’S beginning was on a much smaller scale. Founded in Austin in 2012 by the creator of best-selling Wing Commander and Freelancer series Chris Roberts, Cloud Imperium Games started life with a staff of just eight. Now spread over five studios – LA, Austin, Wilmslow, Derby and Frankfurt – CIG has over 400 employees. Working tirelessly to develop the content and technology needed to nail down the scope of a game whose budget and ambition is always growing, the CIG team in Europe, under Foundry 42, are also developing the mission-driven experience in the industry, which includes seven years at Epic Games.
To successfully manage the quality and quantity of work needed for this epic project, the CIG team has had to develop
workarounds Allow us to Create Goodlooking Art with quite Simple Geometry Paul Jones, Squadron 42 art director, Cloud Imperium Games
Squadron 42, which is set in Star Citizen’s first-person universe.
“This is the most challenging company I’ve worked for in terms of quantity of content and quality of art we’re trying to hit,” says Squadron 42 art director Paul Jones, who has over 20 years’ several efficient new workflows. “Throwing million poly ships around just doesn’t happen any more,” Paul says. “We’re still dealing with a game engine and we’ve still got various performance issues to worry about. So, we’ve had to come up with workarounds that
allow us to create good-looking art with quite simple geometry.”
The man behind some of those workarounds is CIG’S vehicle art director Nathan Dearsley. Having worked for Crytek for approximately seven years previously, Nathan was already very familiar with Cryengine’s technology. “I was working at Creative Assembly when I watched Chris Roberts do a big Star Citizen reveal at GDC,” Nathan says. “Within about 20 seconds of him putting it on the screen I just knew it was Cryengine – it has a very distinct rendering style that I recognised immediately.”
Pipeline Solutions
Liking what he saw, Nathan reached out to the CIG team and, soon after, made the move across from Creative Assembly. Confident in his abilities with Cryengine, Nathan quickly offered new workflow solutions to the CIG team to help optimise the Star Citizen pipeline without compromising quality.
“When I joined CIG, they’d made two ships and had some small environments – the project had to start somewhere,” he says. “Although the ships looked promising they were expensive in the engine. Then I came in and said, ‘Let’s try to do it this way’. Workflows are different in different game engines, but I’d just integrated several art techniques and pipeline work into Alien Isolation workflows at Creative Assembly that would certainly help engines, which actually isn’t as important as your vertex count, as these suck memory. Because we use a weighted normal approach, we can, in essence, have one smoothing group on assets in most cases. So as long as we keep UV shells to a minimum, vertex costs become no more expensive than splitting your smoothing groups, yet you get lovely filleted corners and edges for free!”
we CAN MASS produce Stuff to A really Good quality efficiently By not Always using BAKES Nathan Dearsley, vehicle art director, Cloud Imperium Games
Star Citizen. Both were sci-fi titles, both had a hard-edged aesthetic at the time, so I’d be a fool not to try.
“We model everything,” Nathan says. “When you do this, costs can rise very fast, especially if you’re after a baked look with nice soft edges, but can’t afford a unique map per asset (we have tens of thousands of assets). A lot of people go on about triangle count in game
Not only does this workflow save the team money, it also cuts production time significantly. “If you were to develop this game in a more traditional sense, where you go down the route of baking everything, it wouldn’t be a very flexible workflow for this project,” Nathan explains.
“You can certainly get some amazing results from it, but we
needed things that we can iterate on and mass produce very quickly because of the diverse scale of models and the organic approach we have in making the whole universe. So, the feelers were put out for that and a lot of people were afraid of change but we stuck with it and it paid off. It means that we can mass produce stuff to a really good quality, efficiently, by not using bakes all the time. We’re reusing as much as we possibly can, which obviously helps with production time and frees up more creative time for my team as well as promoting visual consistency – something that’s very important.
“When you take the process of baking out of the chain, that’s a huge time-saver for the whole project. Because we have the vertex data there, and because we can have more vertices, essentially, we have more information in the mesh so we can do much more with blend shading, large scale ambient occlusion, vertex tinting and so on. Making this commitment at the very beginning of the art pipeline chain pretty much defines and carries through the whole process.”