Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

How long have we got? If I start waffling too much, tell me to shut up. It's really a mixed bag. I think if you've got a black ship and you want to make it red, it's relatively straightforward for me. We have some material settings, we can change that, it's fine. Everything we do still needs to have technical entities set up, it needs to be plugged into the existing ship setup, it needs to be tested, it needs to be named, it needs to go through marketing. There's a whole host of other departments; it isn't just color swatch red, done. But making something just change colors is fairly straightforward. The difficulty comes, really, when it comes down to if you've got a ship with a particular kind of paint breakup. So if you've got a ship that, by default, is silver and it's got a little bit of blue or whatever, and it looks great, that's cool. And you can put a bunch of different combinations on there. It looks great. The problem comes, a lot of the time we're trying to theme packs around particular colors or ideas. And as soon as you start trying to get themes to work across multiple ships that have been set up in different ways, it becomes quite... You can make some really ugly ships really, really easily. So you've got to be a little bit more careful with that sort of stuff. One of the things that limits us a little bit is our breakup is baked into our ship models. So we don't have the ability to just go, OK, actually, I want to make all of these panels one kind, this panel another kind. It has to work with everything, so that can add some complications for unique paints. They're a larger investment of time. All the graffiti stuff we did early last year, this year, or end of last year, I can't quite remember, that stuff is a bigger investment of time. The issue that comes with that is there's a lot of additional geometry that we need to add onto the ships to be able to support the designs. With that additional geometry, you then have to go back in and re-set up damage, re-set up UVs, re-set up vertex colors and wear, pump it all through the LODs. It gets quite complicated quite quickly, and on top of that you then have to go through and re-update all the existing paints and tints that have already been done for those ships and anything that shares any variants. So if you take a Cutlass, for example, all of a sudden you're working across multiple different variants, all with loads. It just gets more and more of a rabbit hole you go down. So they do take a bit more investment of time, to try and not waffle for an hour on just this subject. We have recently been doing some R&D into how we improve the system and how we want to make it easier for us. There's lots of really clever ideas and things that we've talked to our graphics team about, who luckily sit next door to me, so that's quite handy. And we're getting buy-in from these other departments, and they want to see us push it as well. It now comes down to breaking down the work, getting the estimates in, getting it into a schedule, working out the priorities on it. So I do hope that we can make better paints quicker in the future. At the moment, I wish it was just the easiest color swatch, pick, go, but it's not. And I know there's a lot of games out there that do do that. There's a lot of racing games that do that, and they allow you to do full liveries across it. But the scale of our game, the texture resolution that we work to, you try putting a unique texture on a ship that's 250 meters long, you very, very quickly see the limitations of unique unwraps and unique texturing, which is something that just doesn't work for a game of our scale. And it's not a compromise that anyone's really, especially me, willing to make when it comes to putting them out. I'm not having low-res, low-quality artwork all over the side of our ships. Sorry.