How long does it take each of you to work on a single specific thing, like designing a character concept or building a character?

For concepts, it really depends on what type of person this character is, right? So if this is just a regular miner, you just have a onesie, that can take a day, right? But if we're going on to a heavy marine, where it has all these different functions, attachment points, and also EVA capabilities, those things take a little bit more time. And just really the uniqueness of the character kind of defines how long a character would take. And plus, I do not just one character, but three variations of that character. So a little bit more time, because I can't just show the producers and the artists and also Chris just one concept and be like, 'That's what you got.' You can't do that. So I have to show different variations, and whichever meets the standards and also the creativity bar, they'll select one out of three. So it really depends. I've had characters approved in two days, and I've also had characters approved in two weeks.

I think that's the nature of the beast with being an artist. It's one of these amorphous things where you can build a checklist of everything you need to do, but you don't necessarily know, going into it, how long each thing is going to take. And sometimes I'll be working on a piece of geometry and I'll think, oh my god, this is going to take me three days, and it'll take me a day. And then other times I'll think, this is going to take an hour, and it takes six. And our producers hate us for that. But I think that's the nature of being an artist: sometimes things take a long time, because you're going through this stuff and figuring out how it looks, where it's going to go, how it's going to factor into the ship.

Ships, they take a really long time. It just depends. Usually the size of the ship definitely changes the amount of time it'll take for concept. But a single-seater, I would say roughly about a month. And then you just build from there; the bigger the ship, the longer it's going to take. And one of the things is the company that is creating that ship. For example, Aegis is one of our more defined companies within the ship companies that we have already. The Retaliator kind of sets the tone for what future Aegis ships are going to look like. So when you have something like that providing information, it will speed up the concept a lot, but if it's a company where there's a lot less pre-made ships to define it, then it's going to take even longer, just because you're still trying to figure out the look and the feel and all that for that company. So it's a hard question to answer. As well, interiors take a long time. For the Vanguard, for example, interiors for three variants was about two months, with all the art and all the modeling and all the design, which I think is pretty good. And then the exterior for that one was also about two months, just to figure out the basic shapes and stuff like that. But if another ship similar to the Vanguard by Aegis was to be done, now I have a lot of assets I could reuse. So the more we do it, the quicker it's going to get. So yeah, I hope that helps.