What was the most challenging aspect of building the Reliant?asked by Kudos
TL;DRElwin Bachiller Jr. says the hardest parts were cockpit height forcing design changes and the unique rotating seats and cockpit, which needed early work with a flight physics engineer.
For modeling specifically, the biggest thing that we had to work around is the height space inside of the ship. So we ran into an issue where with the original concept, if we built it exactly as it came in, the player wouldn't have enough space to actually walk into the cockpit without having to crouch. And so that was kind of a problem that meant we had to make some design changes on the fly while building the ship to accommodate for it. And the final version of it is a little bit thicker, but we did it in such a way that hopefully people don't notice that it's that much different. But that was the biggest challenge, I think. It's a constant work in progress. I would say that also one of the other challenges as a whole for the entire team, not just modeling, is the rotating of the seats and the rotating of the cockpit. Just that whole mechanism was a really big challenge for the team as a whole, because it's unique specifically to the ship, and we try to build things as modularly as possible so we can apply it to as many assets as possible. Anything on a ship that's very unique to that ship is always going to present a bit of a challenge.
And it's one of our multi-state ships coming on up. The Xi'an Scout was technically the first. But that is a unique challenge. We've got John Pritchett in-house right now. And as a flight physics engineer, he's working a lot on actively looking at how to make that legit within the game, so that we can start putting as many multi-state ships as we can in, and they work perfectly. They work as we intended, they work as we modeled them, they work as we animated them, without much back-end magic, or as much back-end magic as you need. Because what people don't realize with ships that move like that, versus just the steady state where they don't do anything, is there's quite a bit of engineering work that goes into that. And we need to engage John early on and the engineering team: hey, it's going to move like this. We obviously talk about it in concept, but it's interesting when it goes, okay, now we've got to really put that in. How does that really work? How does that work with the whole system?
How do you make it happen? And also, any transforming ship also affects the physics entirely. So that's why John's super important to the process.