Jake Taylor

I can take this one. I mean, I was modeling it, but it's the concept artists who come up with the designs of it. So they're the ones who are creating all the lovely creative designs and then they hand them over to us and it's our job to put them into Maya and create them and get them engine ready so they work for the animators, do a bit of rigging as well here and there. We've also been doing a lot of wear and dirt as well, so any new weapons have that, so they're all ready to go with that as well.

I think one of the visual challenges from making the multi-tools is it's the jack of all trades, isn't it? It does a bit of everything. Whereas the standalone medical, we call it the standalone medical weapon, but it's only called a weapon because it's handled by the weapons team and you hold it like a weapon, if you know what I mean. So I think obviously, visually, the manufacturer that's making it, it's got a much sleeker aesthetic to it. And I guess it makes it look a little bit more welcoming. I do remember having some discussions, and some of the ideas that were thrown around were like, I wouldn't want to be healed by some of this stuff, especially when, like Jake was saying, the wear and dirt. I think that came up recently, like, we turned all the sliders up and it's like, no, I'll wait. 'I'm here to help.' Rusty old device, it's fine. So I think getting it across that it's there to help is one of the things. And I think, like Jake says, the concept turned out great. The assets turned out really nice in game. So it should be a good one.

I think it's also, like you say, very sleek and clean, right? So that's a huge part that informs the design. It's that clinical nature of it.

I mean, I'll start on the weapon side. I think one of the things that has, not necessarily improved over the years, changed over the years, is that we try and invest a little bit more time in the concept phase, like Jake's already mentioned, to try and make sure that we're solving all the visual questions as early as possible and trying to get that concept nailed down from the start. It works out a lot better for the development team, the guys that are actually delivering the asset, if there's not changes in the direction during the process, if possible. There's always going to be challenges and things that you need to resolve when the concepts come in. You don't see the concepts in the player's hand. You're not running around with it. And until you get to that point, you don't know exactly. It can be the prettiest weapon in the world, and then you get it in the character's hands and you're like, it doesn't quite look how I expected it. And concept take care of that, and they do a lot of things with the character models and things. But I think until it's got into the animators', the designers', the weapons artists' hands to play with, it's kind of difficult to judge. And I think that's probably the other change that we've tried to make, at least more recently, is that we now try and front-load as much of the setup work as we can in the pipeline so that we're not taking an asset to a final asset and then it gets handed over to the other department. The makeup of the team has changed slightly, so we're working much closer with design and animation to make sure that as soon as the concept comes in, the artists, like David and Jake, try and get that in game as quickly as possible. It might look a bit rough, but it gets the idea in game and lets people play with it.

Yeah, we talk with the animators quite a lot now. I think that's probably the team we're the closest with in terms of how often we're talking with them. We'll get that blockout in, and then they'll be like, oh, this doesn't quite work, let's review this. I think with the shotgun in particular, the shoulder would have to stretch way forward. That wouldn't quite work. So we had to make that shotgun much stubbier. And overall, that changes the design, quite surprisingly. So yeah, that's really beneficial of the new pipeline that we've got and any changes that we've made.

I think metrics are probably one of the biggest changes for every content team, not just weapons and props. As the game progresses, metrics get refined, better defined.

Also the female rig that we added, that also caused a couple of issues that we had to rethink or go back to older assets and change them a little bit. So you have the grip a little bit more towards the character, so the arm doesn't stretch too far to the front. And I think just things like that, that we didn't think about earlier.

I mean, I think the key is as well, the process keeps changing as we go. Like Dave said, you have the female rig, that adds some more steps in the process. You add attachments, you've then got to make sure you do all the attachment checks as you go as part of the pipeline. And then for the future stuff like magazine stripping, we've now got to think about the process and how that changes going forward. So it's constantly evolving and updating based off how the game changes.

It's very much the same on the prop side of it, really. If you take, for example, usables, a lot of assets that were previously considered just dressing, you could consider, it's going to be carryable, it might have power, it might have certain features associated with it. There are instances where we've created these assets purely as an art content team, we've created them as dressing, and then we're having to retroactively, as new features come online, consider how those impact our existing assets. We're a lot more conscious of getting ahead of the curve now than we were five years ago when it comes to, okay, I'm creating a new asset, there aren't any existing ones, let's make a template for it, make sure it gets signed off by the relevant departments. We're creating a usable and there's an existing asset, let's corral our library of assets and review them, and if there are inconsistencies, make sure we're correcting those. Basically, also just considering how to make...

And also there's one of those elements, especially with the props, that you dress an environment and then you get a designer or someone running around that environment and they're like, it'd actually be really cool if this asset would do X, Y or Z, or I could do a mission here and we could have whatever functionality we might then need. And it's like, yeah, cool, I just thought it was a bin, but okay, if we need to add support for additional things. There are things that we could do if we had the time to do them. Everything can function, but it's about seeing what's the most important for missions and that sort of stuff. But a lot of it, like I say, you get from just getting in the environment, running around, being like, oh, this would be really cool, and then that gets added to the 'can we have this feature, please?'

I can speak to this from a design side first if you want. Basically, it's something that we really, really want to do. And obviously, we plan on doing it at some point. But I think I may have said this before. Essentially, we're trying to build out our more standard set of weapons first. So everything you'd basically expect to see in an FPS game, all of the tools available. You want your anti-vehicle weapons, LMGs, rifles, all that stuff. And we've got these existing human manufacturers that we want to build out while we've got our heads in the right space to do them, so we're not jumping all over the place. But yeah, it's the most exciting part of making weapons in my eyes. When we start to visit this new tech, we get to speak to the writing team and talk with them about what would this alien race have technology-wise that differs them from these human manufacturers. Then that ties into the art and it's like, how can we get this tech level across and this special functionality across in how the weapon looks? Which then ties into animation, and you talk to them as well, and everyone's just getting really excited about this new thing that you're doing, and everyone gets to input and shape this weapon together. And an example of that is what we've done before with the Atzkav. That was a new manufacturer when it was coming out. It was new tech because it was an electron weapon. And you're going through all of these really exciting steps of collaborating with all of the other teams and going, how does it work? What happens when you shoot someone? Speak to the VFX team, speak to the art team. What's it going to look like? How's it going to feel? It's just very exciting stuff. So yeah, certainly something that we on the design team want to get to doing at some point. And we're starting to move very slowly in that direction.

Art team, are they moving fast enough? Do you want to get your hands on some alien weapons?

Definitely not fast enough. We want to do more weapons, right, Jake?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I really do. With the alien weapons, they're quite complex, and they're much more organic in their form. So I think they'll be more challenging, but that's part of the fun of it, really. So yeah, I'd like to do some more alien weapons.

Yeah, and I think pretty much everyone's really excited about getting onto alien stuff at some point. I think the scope there to do some really fun weaponry is massive. Like JJ says, at the moment we've got our focus, and as we tick off all of that stuff we get to explore the new stuff, especially when we start exploring other systems. Not committing that the next system is going to be an alien system, but what I'm saying is that as we do a game with as many star systems in it as we're looking to deliver, if it was all human, personally... I can see Jared looking at me being like, what's he going to say? I survived last week, so I'm bulletproof. From my point of view, there's scope for so much variation, not just alien, but advanced tech.

Stylistically, with ultra-modern stuff, there's a lot of room to explore, I think.

Yeah, but ultimately this is story driven. So the further we go with the story, the more we can explore things like aliens and alien technology.

Maybe the concept artists don't have as much excitement for leather as we do as a group.

So to keep it back on track, again, I think that comes down to the manufacturers and the brands that we've currently established so far. A lot of our stuff is military and a lot of it is dictated by its functionality over necessarily its form. But I think as you branch into the less military-specific weapon manufacturers and more into the civilian or the collectibles or the rarer stuff, that's where you start to experiment a little bit more with the materials that are used. I think there's lots of opportunities for other materials to be used.

We've shown some homestead stuff as well, right? That includes a lot more organic furnishings, including pelts and felts and all that jazz.

We do have a lot of leather sofas.

Yeah, it's that office synthetic leather, I guess, right? So there's a lot of that kind of furnishing.

It's very much related. I mean, it's kind of the same answer for that question, but there's a lot of reasons why. Company-wide, the whole idea of wear and dirt is not unified. And it depends how it's being done, if it's a ship, a weapon or a character. But on the artist side of things, at least from my point of view, we're trying to get ahead of that as best as we can, in the sense that now part of the pipeline is making sure that we have those WDA maps and those blends there and ready. So when the system is in place, a lot of those guns we can just tick on and they're ready to go.

I think it's largely just down to the stuff we've seen so far is, I think it's safe to say, fairly experimental. I can't really write checks on behalf of the graphics team. There's work to be done in terms of biome-specific wear; that's a larger system, really. I think that's a global system that expands beyond just weapons. It's a huge thing.

Yeah, I think, although all of these things are just a 3D object in the world, the way they're actually brought into the engine and the way the engine handles them is very different depending on if it is a character or if it is a weapon or a static prop. It's all just 3D geometry, but each one of those things has its own individual pipeline and technical limitations. And the character team got their stuff working and that was the initial push to get that tech in there. But it's not rolled across to the other teams yet, as far as I'm aware.

Yeah, and there's plenty of hurdles to come across really, isn't there? One example: you could drive the wear up on a weapon, the entity, and it will work, you'll see that being driven up, but any attachments, they'll stay pristine. And that's just one of the many things that need to be worked on and we are working on.

I think we have a couple of glowy bits on the Gemini weapons, the blue spinner, and the glowy bits on that SMG that Jake did. Of course, we need to be a little bit careful because it needs to have a certain purpose when it glows. We can't just put glowy stuff on it because it looks cool. It needs to make sense that it's on there. I mean, weapons usually, from a tactical perspective, don't glow that much. Of course, futuristic weapons like the Atzkav, they have glowy bits, and when you reload or if the flaps at the front open, you can see glowy bits inside. We have a lot of stuff like this, not all over the place, but where it makes sense, I would say.

When we move on to alien weapons too, we should have some nice glowy stuff.

I've heard aliens like glowy bits.

I guess we could say, I don't know, the turtle. That came about because one of the concept artists just drew a tiny thumbnail of a table or something, and there was a little turtle on it. And we were just like, well, it's in the concept, so we're going to have to make it now. So we made the turtle.

I think the weirdest is a tough one. I mean, I find myself always referencing the automotive industry for a lot of stuff, I guess. And I couldn't put my finger on something that stood out as being exceptionally weird. I reference a lot of just general gadgets and electronics and keyboards and...

Usually when you want reference, you're referencing something pretty close to what you want, or at least very accurate, be that geometry or materials.

Yeah, there's two sorts of references. There's the visual reference that you're going for, and then there's the functionality reference that you're going for. So if you're trying to find reference for something that's functional, the best thing you can do is look at how that problem has already been solved. And then what you need to do is take that core element of, okay, these are the core mechanics that I need to use to resolve what I'm trying to do. And then how do I aesthetically make that pleasing and fit the manufacturer or the art style or just our universe? And those two things go hand in hand. So it might be that you're referencing a great big digger for some of its mechanical functions, but then you're translating that into a small little detail that you're using on a weapon or a prop or a ship or whatever it might be. When it comes to references, there's loads of variation. But as Jake says, if you're looking at switches and dials, because you're adding some switches and dials to the back of an asset, then generally you're looking down into those details.

Definitely the crossbow for me. I know that has been wanted for a really long time. And when that concept was coming through, I was like, I want to do that. Look at it. I really thought it looked good. And so far, it's been a real challenge, but also really, really fun.

The rig's pretty crazy, right? Because you've got the cam with the strings, it's like a compound, right? So it's quite an intricate mechanism.

Yeah, I guess the reference I was looking at for that was people shooting bows and arrows in super slow motion. How does this work?

Yeah, how the hell does this work? Cables are always tricky to do, and that's the biggest challenge of the rig.

It's quite complex in its geo as well. There's a dense amount of detail to that. There's four arms to it. Just getting that under the poly count, which for us is quite high naturally because of our custom normal workflow, getting that under that highest poly count was pretty tough, while keeping it looking really dense in detail. But I did it. So it's there.

What about anybody else?

Well, I'm working on two things that I think we haven't talked about yet. So I better not talk anymore.

You mentioned the Volt stuff, we're all right.

The Volt stuff? Yeah, that's all right. I'm working on that Volt Parallax rifle right now, which is also pretty cool and has lots of detail and has the same issues as the crossbow of too many polygons that need to get optimized. And yeah, that's a really cool one, and I really like that.

JJ, you got something?

Jared, I'm excited about everything we're doing. And I'm in the very fortunate position where I get to see a lot of it in my day to day. So there's nothing in particular. And there's probably a lot of things that I'm not allowed to talk about. So let's leave it at that.

Corey?

Obviously I spend a lot of my time doing management stuff, making sure the teams are all happy and all that. I do sneak in a few assets here and there just because, obviously, I'm an artist and I enjoy making artwork. So I do little bits here and there, things like hip flasks, flair items and stuff, stuff that's not really a release task. So something that's on the back burner, I jump on some of that stuff. So yeah, hip flask. I did the handcuffs for the Star Runner trailer. They were really fun. Stuff like that.

I think props follow environment quite a bit when it comes to the style, right?

Yes, we split props into, I guess, location-specific props and then props that are separate from locations. If we're making a bench for microTech, it would adhere to that art style. But if we're making a generic flashlight that is used everywhere, that would have its own concept, whether it's high-tech or low-tech. We'd still have a tech level associated with it. And obviously, it would borrow style elements from that.

Yeah, I guess it's like a yes with the high tech, low tech, and universal. But due to the nature of props and the variety that we make, it's more of a spectrum than specific categories.

Yeah, I guess as well, an apple is an apple.

But since props are not only in environments, but also sometimes in ships, there's a lot more variety for that. Because the ships are not necessarily bound to the style of the environment.

I know that already. I've had to tackle it a bit. And it's this area around here, all this kind of gubbins, because if I focus on the concept a sec, not only have you got these really difficult organic shapes in a hard surface asset, they're all very slightly turning in.

Yeah, that's one of the biggest... One of the problems we need to tackle while doing it is that everything needs to be animated, it needs to work, the magazine needs to rotate out, it has a mechanism and all that needs to work, and the parts shouldn't intersect, shouldn't move into each other and have that ugly intersection. That's something we need to prevent while doing it.

And of course, that's something that concept artists know to look out for, through metrics and stuff like that. But you don't always discover every single edge case and issue during the concept process.

That's why we're doing a block out. We're doing this block out in this state and already do a rig. A rig is basically a skeleton that an animator can use. The animator then tests it in engine. While doing it, we usually run into issues and see how this works out. Here we can see that the mechanism is pretty nice. We can test all that in-engine and reiterate on it, because in this state it's really easy to rebuild something or change something. But if it's final and we have already made textures and so on, the more we've done on it, the harder it gets to change. So in this state, it's still pretty easy to change around shapes and rebuild it.

It depends on how many problems come up while doing it. In the optimal case, you can do it in about two weeks, I would say. In a non-optimal case, where we need to change a lot, where problems come up and we realize them pretty late in the process, and that sometimes happens, sadly, it can take up to a month or so. So sometimes when problems come up super late in the process, that eats up a lot of time. But usually we try to plan it pretty well and get it done as fast as possible.

That's the main reason for the block out phase. What we normally do is we get the concept mesh running through some optimization processes and get that in game. And then we can see the character holding it. We can say, does this work on the male rig? Does this work on the female rig? Does it tick the boxes for the hand grips and stuff? Jake will probably show you another weapon later where we had to make some adjustments to the weapon from the concept because the grip wasn't quite working. While the concept artists are very aware of the application of a weapon, like a human holding it, they can't necessarily test all the use cases. Sometimes we do come back and we get it in and we're like, okay, this isn't working, tweak the proportions here, make some changes, just purely because it needs to be used by a character.

I can show that now. One of the problems that came up, for example, with the shotgun here is that the magazine actually stuck a little bit too much into the armor of the character. And we had to address that. And that's something, while doing the weapon itself, sometimes you can't even think about: the possibility that the magazine, because of the shape it has, clips too much into the body of the character. And therefore we had to change the orientation of it so that the flat side is on the body and not the round side that you can see here. If that makes sense.

So some of those changes that you guys are mentioning, if I change over to the shotgun concept, this was the concept that we were given. I can't really show them side by side, so I'm just going to quickly flash between the two of them. But if I point it out in the concept here, we've got this trigger and then this nice angle here that leads into the magazine, and then it leads out into this really nice long barrel. And this area is where most of the change happened. We were having issues with what you said, David, like the character's arm clipping with this barrel. We're limited, right, by how big this barrel needs to be, because we want it to specifically contain, I think it was 12 shotgun shells. So I had to make this thicker. This has to be sitting right up against the trigger now. And this whole nose area had to be brought way back. And because there's a pump action as well, if you look here, the handle's quite slim. And if you were to grab that and drag that back and forth, you'd probably break your fingers on this or something.