This is the first ship we've released in the Crusader Industries line since the Genesis Starliner back in 2015. Coming back to Crusader, what were those first considerations you had? Did you have to go back and look at old notes? Did you just start fresh and throw everything away? How did this process begin?
TL;DRWith no notes on the earlier Crusader ship, the team picked key shapes for a senior concept artist to build on, producing varied sketches and a few different options to show Chris before moving to 3D.
That's a good question. Were there any notes? I'm not quite sure if there were. Obviously, there were a lot of pretty good visuals already for the Starliner. And it's kind of always interesting when you've only got one ship. We didn't really have any sort of reference for basically where that original artist was coming from, where they were pulling their ideas and inspiration from. So it kind of makes it a little tougher. But in terms of for the concept artist and myself, it's always pretty fresh and interesting. This is a second ship in the line. It's been a long time since the Starliner was done. And it's really just sort of going through, looking at those original images and sort of pulling the key components. I mean, Mike Oberschneider, he's one of our sort of new senior concept artists. He's super talented, super strong. So when you're working with a senior, generally there's a lot more give and take. In fact, there's a lot more give. You pick on your key points, profiles that you want to work with, a hump here, an air vent there, a VTOL here. You pick on those sort of core things that you want to start running with. And then initially it's sort of down to Mike. You're giving him sort of a small set of Lego pieces and then you're like, right, okay, bring all your own Lego pieces to the party and let's see what you come up with. So it's very much, you rely on your artists and their artistic strengths just to see what they come up with initially. And so we did loads originally, in terms of sketches and really different sort of styles, different configurations, because also it's not just for me. I'm trying to provide something for Chris and it's what was in Chris's head. Sometimes we manage to pull it out of his head. Sometimes we just have to go it alone and give it our best shot. Like we mentioned before, it's always about providing a couple of options, two or three options, really quite different ones, and then that will give us a read when we show Chris of like, okay, he's like, oh, I like this double hull or I like this one neck or I like this VTOL, and that's basically how we just sort of launch then. Take those initial sketches and then just go into 3D and off we go.