How do you differentiate between what's created by the environment team and what's created by the props team?
TL;DRProps are mostly small dressing items like tables, lamps and cups requested from the props team after a prop request pass, while larger structural pieces are built by environment artists from kits.
It's a very popular question, one that me and Cory Bamford, if you guys know him, often discuss. So he likes to say that anything that's not bolted down is a prop. And I like to retort with, so is a space station a prop? Because it is not bolted down. I guess parts of the space station are. So when we're making a location, say if this is in the white box stage, and we've just placed down some of the basic geometry that might make out these areas over here, these pods, we'll come in and we'll do something that's called a prop request pass. And what that is, is we'll look at the concept art, and we'll look at what kind of small items might be in the concept art that we'll need that we don't naturally make as environment artists. And we'll put the request list through to props. So in this case it would be something like this box over here or this table over here, the lamp, some of these magazines, the cup. There is a slight blurred line, but it's mostly the sort of items that are dressing rather than large structural... yeah, I guess structural is the best way to describe it. In this case, something like rocks and these parts here, these kinds of beams and structures here are all part of, say, an environment art kit that we'll just bash together.