Edit: This AMA has officially concluded! We've got to get back to work now, but we had a great time hanging out and answering your questions. Thanks so much to everyone who participated! Hello there, everyone! Today's AMA is going to be a little different from AMAs past. Instead of focusing on one specific feature, we're going to be chatting about Environment Art in general! Feel free to ask both general questions about the craft and the industry, or specifics relating to their work on Star Citizen bringing the 'verse to life. Here at CIG, our environment art team focuses on creating natural locations in the 'verse. From the large (planets & moons) to the small (details like the fields of flowers on microTech), this team does it all. I'm opening up this thread a little early to begin collecting questions, but the team will hop in at 8:00 AM PDT (3:00 PM UTC) and begin answering! They'll be sticking around for about an hour to chat before they'll need to leave us and get back to work. Just to give you a general idea on where to point your questions, here are some topics the team is excited to talk about today: Planet creation Planet tech Harvestables Mineables Caves Crusader & Orison Without further ado, meet the team joining us today! Maximilian Keilich @mkeilich-CIG | Senior Environment Artist | https://www.artstation.com/maxikeilich Hello! I have been in the industry for 5 years and joined CIG in 2017. You may not know me, but I am one of the people who tend to put too many rocks on the moons and planets, we will figure out the perfect amount of rocks, no worries! I have also worked on the mineable rocks and enjoy watching you guys blow them up Florian Sollaneck @fsollaneckcig | Environment Artist | https://www.artstation.com/florians I've been in the industry for 7 years and since I've started at CIG 4 years ago I've been working on planetary content as part of the DE Environment Team. Together with the rest of my team I've helped in the creation of your planet tools, the Stanton planets, moons and assets for them. Last year I've explored (hehe) our cave tech which was an especially challenging but enjoyable project. Pascal Muller @sunwu-CIG | Senior Environment Artist | https://www.artstation.com/schnibbsl I'm a senior environment artist in the organics team. I started at CIG almost 5 years ago. Have been working on the planet tech and the organics team since day one. Very proud of the team. Also I don't see why one should not like a good noodle soup. Vanessa Bölke @boelkev-CIG | Environment Artist | https://www.artstation.com/nes0815 Hi!! I've been working at CIG for 3 years now as an Environment Artist. I am working with the rest of the organics team on planets and helping to develop the planet tech. I am creating assets together with the team to populate the large planet and moon surfaces but I also did vegetation assets for indoor environments such as New Babbage. Sebastian Schroeder @divi-cig | Senior Environment Artist | https://sebastiansch.artstation.com/ Hi, I've been in the games industry for over 10 years and 3 years at CIG. I don't do much in terms of art anymore and focus mostly on improving our planet tech and associated pipelines. I might need a more fitting job title. Özlem Sagbili @oezlem-cig| Senior Environment Artist | https://www.artstation.com/miu Hi! I've been working at CIG for almost 4 years now and my main responsibility is to create anything vegetation related and distributing those on our planets. I really enjoyed creating different biomes for Hurston and Microtech. I also worked on harvestables and sometimes have to do some very weird (but funny) things that you guys can collect like the ranta dung for example. Patrick Gladys @patrickgladys-CIG | Senior Environment Artist | https://www.artstation.com/patgladys My career began at Crytek, where I contributed to projects such as Crysis 3, Ryse: Son of Rome, and others. In 2015 I joined DICE in Stockholm, Sweden to work on the visually acclaimed Star Wars: Battlefront. After completing Battlefront 2, I moved back to Germany for the ambitious Star Citizen at Cloud Imperium Games – building procedural content like planets, caves, and materials. We've attached images of their individual work below! The shots are examples of work from, in order, Maximilian, Florian, Pascal, Vanessa, Özlem, and Patrick. Expect input from the entire team on each question, no matter who is answering it. Feel free to address your question to specific members of the team, or leave it open ended and allow anyone to grab it. Got a question? Great! Drop it in the comments below! POSTING GUIDELINES Questions should be relevant to the topic of this AMA. Only one question per post. Do not make use of special formatting in an attempt to draw more attention, and therefore more votes, to your questions i.e. BOLD, H1, etc. No "when" questions. All information we have about the intended release of any feature is represented on the Public Roadmap. Posts violating these guidelines may be deleted, as may in-line replies. Keep in mind that this is an art focused AMA, and our group isn't able to share things relating to upcoming gameplay loops & features. Have fun!