June 22nd, 2021 Livestream

Snutt & Torsten Talk: Concept Art - The Blender™

https://youtu.be/-Z7MfVopphg

Topics

• Features > Buildings > Blender
• Concept Art
• Satisfactory Updates > Released > Satisfactory Update 4

Transcript

the blender the blender yeah there was also a really fun building, the blender yes in all its glory I mean it is so this is from the test level I think we have like a scene that we use for testing and it's just like flat ground with nothing on it and just like some nodes in a big white wall somewhere yeah I don't know if it's still there or not but yeah exactly so, and it looks yeah it looks very ominous but the blender yeah it's, it was it was pretty interesting because we were very very much, very much restricted by of course, like every building- I should probably start by explaining that like every building every new factory building that we do has is of course, has its, visual foundation in the idea of what recipes does it have what does it produce what does it consume how big is it how modular should it be and when you have all these filters already, you you cannot go completely crazy anymore you have to design something fitting to that so, we had this very weird building that ate up solid stuff and fluid stuff and created both fluid and solid, products, which was which was really fun to figure out, and by fun I mean partly fun and partly was a pain in the ass to figure out because what is this thing, and, we we, we thought of the name was actually pre there pretty early the blender because it blends different materials and different resources and we thought well why the hell not do a blender because, personally I'm a big fan of just using like smaller things that, no play on like experiences that people have in the real world and taking it over into like the sci-fi fantasy whatever crazy world so, we thought well let's make it a blender then and, we partly looked into like existing mechanical stuff like giant blender tanks in, in factories smaller home blenders for your kitchen and all that stuff but at the same time we had to look into the size restrictions game design sets two inputs two fluid inputs and a fluid output and a solid output so that's already kind of a big building so we did these blockers that you see here and all their glory, we usually do that in the editor in unreal and just block out using basic geometric forms and, just to come up with yeah with the size and essentially the boundaries for the building and it's interesting because you can definitely see the blender there even in the block attic totally that's the building essentially yeah it's like a silhouette yeah it's the base the basis is usually there using the block out it's just a reality to check to see is that that's that size even makes sense, and, is that was that block out like playable or was it just for visually testing it it was just for visual tests right we did it in the editor and it was just there it was not a buildable you could not interact with it you could not attach anything to it it was pretty much just yeah just a visual blob of basic geometry, and on that basis we went to the next phase and thinking okay what does it actually do so we where are the because most buildings we want to have a direction where do the resource inputs go what does it do and where is it processed and where does it come out so you need to have like a feeling of it goes through direction, it goes along a path along a production path so to speak in a building so there were these concepts until we finally settled for this one and you may know that some things are a bit different from the final product because, the concepts we do are not, engineering blueprints there are concepts there are concepts so the 3d artist fills in any gaps or corrects any rough edges along the way in the model and we also look along the way of the 3d production we see we have we have certain stages where we see does this still make sense and do every once in a while do like reality checks to have like these stage gates there's someone sometimes called like projects where you say okay this is cool we all agree this is cool let's keep going, so we don't end up having like a final product and say yeah maybe not let's start from the concept phase again because that would eat would eat up way too much of our time, and then the next stage after that was to well we need cool animations so how does everything get pro processed, and especially in that building we decided we want to have like some nice robot arms because the world of satisfactory is so much about factory so much about buildings so much about cold machines, it's nice to have a little bit of a little bit of personality and also satisfactory has a lot of I mean more it it's it has a lot of goofy stuff going on here and there overall it's an engineering game but, we like to throw in a little personality and humor every once in a while without there's like one example is the like personal minor right there's there's still like a lot of personality in in various places in the, buildings so yeah the personal minor absolutely lost yeah and I wish we had more of that it's really really nice it's really cute and yeah cool