Since the Ship Pipeline has changed (more than once) how are ships handled in the art phase? Do you draw them from the inside out, or from the outside in?asked by Steve Hunter

That's a good question. So far we have done it simultaneously. So a lot of the ships, the Merlin's a great example, I did the modelling for the exterior, where Paul Forgi, which is another artist, is working on the cockpit, and he's continuing to work on it now. So basically what we do is we define our boundaries, and we say hey, don't cross this boundary or you're starting to clip into the exterior, or on my end, don't cross this or I'm clipping into the interior, so we basically just define the line. We draw the line in the sand and say, don't go over that side. And then we can basically work in isolation in our different scenes, and we'll go back and forth daily just to make sure things are working properly, but that's basically how we've handled it so far.

How do you bridge the gap? Once you meet in the middle, how do you say pull the influence from this one into this one?

That's more of an organic process. It comes down to, we're working from the same base of references to begin with, so we should already be starting in a good place to begin with. then what happens is it depends on what's going ot be leading the charge in terms of the shape language. SO if the exterior's going to be leading the charge, which in a lot of ways it usually is, that will then influence how the interior must change its shape languages, so it looks like it fits. It's an organic process. I'll do something and I'll say Paul, what do you think of this, and if he likes it, cool, lets make this change to the interior so it fits with the exterior, and we'll go back and forth.

What phases do you go through, to get them done?

So, ideally, the process is we get a concept done, generally we have a couple of concept artists in house, but a lot of our concepts are getting done out of house with outsourcing, david hobbins, doing some great stuff. He basically defines what the ship looks like and if it meets all the gameplay requirements, then it becomes a process of getting that concept to work in game. IN situations where that isn't such a smooth transition, cause for gameplay reasons things don't actually work or we have to make changes, at that point we have to pivot and say, okay, we'll start doing some concept ourselves. And at that point, it's us, re-concepting certain sections, making sure it works, sometimes it leads to an almost complete redo of certain ships, and then we'll go to the full modelling process where we basically do all of our geometry, after we do that we'll do something called custom normals, which basically makes our geo look better without using as much geo, so it's a cheaper way of making our ships look betterLP: Circling back to our first questionEB: Right, Then we'll go through our material pass, where we basically define what the surfaces are made of and how they look and how light reflects off of them, then we'll go through the process of making them totally destructible so that you can blow holes in all our beautiful hard work! Oh wait, there's one more, we also at some point in there have to make sure that animation gets a hand on it, so that all the panels open, the landing gear deploys, a character actually sits in the cockpit and plays with the joystick, theres a huge amount of steps.