Alberto Petronio · Lead Vehicle Concept Artist

It really depends on the brief. If I'm doing a capital ship, our approach will be completely different. But considering how a motorbike works and how much of a human appears on a motorbike, which is a good 30%, the first things I will make sure I have in the right position are the steering wheel? What's it called on a bike? The handlebars. As my accent can tell you, I'm not British, and English is not my first language. So I make sure that I have them in the right position. I have the character fully rigged so I can move it. Generally, I also reference other animations from the game, so sometimes we can recycle things.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

That's a consideration. If you can reuse an existing animation for the enter and exit, that cuts down development time, development cost tremendously.

Alberto Petronio · Lead Vehicle Concept Artist

And it's all a matter of balance. Can we afford it? Is it something particularly important that we have to do?

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And when you say can you afford it, I continuously have to clarify that we're talking about performance metrics. It's a relative development term. We use the term cost to mean performance and not money or whatnot.

Alberto Petronio · Lead Vehicle Concept Artist

No, no, no. Eventually time.

Dan McCabe · Senior Vehicle Artist

Time. I think one thing as well is when you have this library of mo-capped entry-exit anims we've got for different styles of vehicles, if you have something that's a little bit more unique in its stance, like take for example the Fury, we had to make it so the seat would come out and lower down, because it didn't really make sense for the player to kind of scramble up and spin around in there. So it ended up adding some more interest into the entry-exit anim because of that limitation. Just kind of welcome, really.