How long a process would this normally take?

It depends on how many problems come up while doing it. In the optimal case, you can do it in about two weeks, I would say. In a non-optimal case, where we need to change a lot, where problems come up and we realize them pretty late in the process, and that sometimes happens, sadly, it can take up to a month or so. So sometimes when problems come up super late in the process, that eats up a lot of time. But usually we try to plan it pretty well and get it done as fast as possible.

That's the main reason for the block out phase. What we normally do is we get the concept mesh running through some optimization processes and get that in game. And then we can see the character holding it. We can say, does this work on the male rig? Does this work on the female rig? Does it tick the boxes for the hand grips and stuff? Jake will probably show you another weapon later where we had to make some adjustments to the weapon from the concept because the grip wasn't quite working. While the concept artists are very aware of the application of a weapon, like a human holding it, they can't necessarily test all the use cases. Sometimes we do come back and we get it in and we're like, okay, this isn't working, tweak the proportions here, make some changes, just purely because it needs to be used by a character.

I can show that now. One of the problems that came up, for example, with the shotgun here is that the magazine actually stuck a little bit too much into the armor of the character. And we had to address that. And that's something, while doing the weapon itself, sometimes you can't even think about: the possibility that the magazine, because of the shape it has, clips too much into the body of the character. And therefore we had to change the orientation of it so that the flat side is on the body and not the round side that you can see here. If that makes sense.

So some of those changes that you guys are mentioning, if I change over to the shotgun concept, this was the concept that we were given. I can't really show them side by side, so I'm just going to quickly flash between the two of them. But if I point it out in the concept here, we've got this trigger and then this nice angle here that leads into the magazine, and then it leads out into this really nice long barrel. And this area is where most of the change happened. We were having issues with what you said, David, like the character's arm clipping with this barrel. We're limited, right, by how big this barrel needs to be, because we want it to specifically contain, I think it was 12 shotgun shells. So I had to make this thicker. This has to be sitting right up against the trigger now. And this whole nose area had to be brought way back. And because there's a pump action as well, if you look here, the handle's quite slim. And if you were to grab that and drag that back and forth, you'd probably break your fingers on this or something.