What's the general process of creating a prop?

Depending on the complexity of the prop, we follow a few different pipelines, if you like. For something like a shield generator that's got quite a lot of gameplay as part of it, it's very much there for a purpose. We wouldn't really start working on any of this stuff until we've got a full design doc and we've had a good conversation with design and really understand what it does. Not just what it should look like and where it should go, but what the functionality of it is. Because like I say, that plays a big part for us in its metrics. And if you need the internals to be accessible, then we need to be able to do that. So from that point, it would be a conversation with the concept team, and we would have a sit-down with them and a kick-off with them, especially if it was the first shield generator we were making. Then we'd probably have a meeting about it and get all the questions out there, so that we try and answer as much of it upfront before we start the work. And then from that point, we get a signed-off concept from the art director and from the concept team, and it comes over to us. I do the boring scheduling side of things and then put it on someone's plate, and then it would go over to an artist like Cory.

So once it's been briefed out and we know it's not going to change, we know how it's going to function, things to consider such as physical constraints: it's got to fit into this kind of size hole, the doors are going to have to open in this way. We flesh it out and build a template for it, and we try and unify positions of certain things. For instance, the shield generators, they have these end caps that change based on the grades. Basically, it's like a GPU, I suppose. You can swap it out of your computer. We standardize the size and parameters for these, and we make sure that that's all good to go. And then we actually get on with actually making it.

So we go through a set of phases. We start off with our white box, and that's really important to get something in engine as quickly as possible. So sometimes it is literally a box and sometimes it has a bit more functionality built into it. So if there's player interaction, we need to pass it over to the animation team to make sure it works with them, or if it has design implications, so if it was a cover item or something like that, we need to make sure that we're getting everything nailed before we invest too much art time in it. Normally creating a white box is a really quick task. We just get something in, get it named right, in the right location and in engine. And that means that all the other teams can then start using it and they're not blocked by us and how long it takes to actually make the asset. We'll then go through a gray box phase, which is the primary modeling phase of it. And then materials and finishings. And then if it requires some animation, there'll be a call whether or not we'll take it or hand it over to the animation team. Some of the more simple assets we'll deal with, and some of the more complex stuff we hand off.

As we said earlier, we make quite a broad range of assets. Some of them are super simple. We can do them autonomously and just bang it out, basically. It's like, I need to make some cans. You can just get on with it.

Yeah, I mean, our time investment ranges from some props can take a few hours or half a day, to some props can take three or four weeks. So, like I say, it depends on the complexity of the asset. And then once we've got the LOD 0, so everything's in, it looks pretty and everything like that, we then do our game-ready pass, which would be creating all the LODs, making sure that physics proxies are all correct and don't break things, and that side of it. And just our final nods and sanity checks to make sure that we're not breaking anything.