What is the process for doing that? How do we update those materials?
TL;DRAn artist updated the Scythe, whose trailer-quality model needed more detail, functionality and animation to hold up close in the hangar, while considering alien cockpit design and eventual human flyability.
Well, once we get to a certain point with the look and the feel, we took one of our best artists, Nathan Dearsley. He was amazing. He's in England. I wish he was here. So he took on the job of updating the Scythe, and it was for a variety of reasons. A lot of it was because the original model was made for the trailer. As good as it was, it needed updating on detail because we knew that fans are going to buy this and look at it in their hangar and walk around it, so it needed to hold up from a very, very close range.
That's a good point, because when you're looking at something from distance in space, you're shooting at a very tiny object, it can look great there, but when you're in the hangar and you're physically climbing into the cockpit or you're walking around, it's got to hold up.
It's got to hold up. You can't look at anything and say, oh, that's not really looking realistic. The closer I get, the worse it looks. So you want to be able to walk around it and get in it and touch it and enjoy your alien ship. So part of it is just detailing out, extra detail, extra geometry. With CryEngine, we have the luxury of high poly counts, so we can really push that. Nathan really spent a lot of time balancing detail in certain areas, not getting too overly busy though, going on the style guide that we developed with John Dickinson. And so it developed with feedback from myself and Chris Roberts, pushing it more into the look and feel of the way the alien race evolved. And part of that also is updating functionality, making sure everything works, making sure everything animates correctly in a realistic way.
They get in much differently than humans do, right? It's a different way of getting into the cockpit, flying the ship, all that kind of stuff.
Right, and these are eight-foot-tall aliens, so we need to figure out how they fly the thing. Their technology is going to dictate how they're flying it. We also have to consider human flyability eventually.
There are folks out there that have one of these, or not in their hangar yet. Fairly soon, I think.
Yeah, so there's a lot to think about as far as the interior of the cockpit that was really never developed. And so Nathan is really thinking about this stuff hard as far as getting the proper alien technology in there, but also being able to make sure that it can be retrofitted for human flight.