What do you anticipate the greatest difficulty for this weapon [the Gemini sniper rifle] to be at this point?

I know that already. I've had to tackle it a bit. And it's this area around here, all this kind of gubbins, because if I focus on the concept a sec, not only have you got these really difficult organic shapes in a hard surface asset, they're all very slightly turning in.

Yeah, that's one of the biggest... One of the problems we need to tackle while doing it is that everything needs to be animated, it needs to work, the magazine needs to rotate out, it has a mechanism and all that needs to work, and the parts shouldn't intersect, shouldn't move into each other and have that ugly intersection. That's something we need to prevent while doing it.

And of course, that's something that concept artists know to look out for, through metrics and stuff like that. But you don't always discover every single edge case and issue during the concept process.

That's why we're doing a block out. We're doing this block out in this state and already do a rig. A rig is basically a skeleton that an animator can use. The animator then tests it in engine. While doing it, we usually run into issues and see how this works out. Here we can see that the mechanism is pretty nice. We can test all that in-engine and reiterate on it, because in this state it's really easy to rebuild something or change something. But if it's final and we have already made textures and so on, the more we've done on it, the harder it gets to change. So in this state, it's still pretty easy to change around shapes and rebuild it.