As an artist, what's the most challenging aspect of creating a character?

I think for me, definitely, because I'm coming from making sure we can ship the product with these characters. That's my primary objective. Hit the visual quality bar, be shippable. Those are the two challenges. So for me, the biggest challenge is creating a character that's up to the standards of how good Corey, Omar, Josh, our incredibly talented character team, can make a character. I want to be able to make sure that that is getting into the game and we're not downsizing, cutting corners to make it work. We've all played games where we've seen assets in the game and you're like, I bet you that's not what it looked like when the artist was done with it. And so the one thing that I really wanted to make sure of is that when the artist was done with it, that's what it looks like in the game. And so that to me is a challenging thing: hitting all your performance specs, but keeping that quality up.

Anything else challenging from your perspective in creating one of these characters?

I don't know if there's any one specific thing, but usually with every character there's one aspect of the pipeline where it's like, on this one the game mesh is being really annoying, because you worked on it for a while, and you need to go back, fix stuff, update the UVs, and move back on to the texturing. It really depends on the asset, because sometimes it just runs smooth, and other times there's one part where it's just like, I can't get this approved.

And there's a lot of challenges too. The character artists have to do things that in the past have generally been accepted as okay, like hard surfaces, anything that's metal. The character artists have to build topology that now supports a hard object on top of an object that's rigid. Previously, in games like The Witcher, they move their arm up and down, the metal bends and everything.

You've got to be like, how does the sternum... Yeah, that is a challenge.

Getting it approved by rigging. You've got to be like, okay, well, we have this chest plate, can you bend all the things that you need?

Yeah, there was plenty of that. I was working on a character and I had a metal chest plate and it's like, well, how's your arm going to go forward? So you start to nudge things in and things get ironed out, but it's frustrating. It's like, why didn't I think of that? I was doing this because it looks pretty.

And then our rigger tries to put hockey gear on us and he's like, could you do that in this? And then I'm like, no, and he goes, and you can't do it in the game.

Some of the coolest-looking stuff generally never really would work in reality, right?

In the end, it is a game, so there's the balance between cool and functional. You need both, and you just have to find a balance.

But at the same time, I've known a lot of people that are quite successful art-wise with the mentality that a good design will sell itself visually. So if you make it work and you make it work real, theoretically that will translate pretty well on the screen, especially if you have some art direction on top of a good design.