What sort of unique challenges have occurred in the process of designing and developing characters for Star Citizen?asked by Eskel Goroff

Making just characters in general? For this game? Well, coming on, learning the pipeline, the tech of where to start and where you finish, and what makes up our characters, since there's the high poly, which as a character artist is kind of a general thing that everyone really knows how to do, but how to implement your clothing that you make, and what the tech that we use can make it different. How do we switch up materials? How do we do color variance? Stuff like that. The challenges are really just learning the tools and getting, I would say, a similarity between all the character artists, and all coming out looking like the characters all belong in the same universe is probably the hardest trick to do, really.

Do all the character artists use the same process?

Yeah, the tools might differ slightly between if you use Max or use Maya, but those tools do the same thing. So it is the same process, but the tools can change out. It doesn't matter as long as you're getting the result that's necessary. That's important.

I think the biggest thing, just to go back to the question, the biggest challenge that I see is balancing making a huge open world game where you want to have massive customization, and then doing Squadron as well. Where at Naughty Dog, I would imagine the amount of character heads and stuff was a lot, but the amount of ones that were really going to be close up and in cinematic, close-up ready, was probably a handful, maybe 10, maybe 20. Whereas we have 120, 130, 150, 200, like how many heads are we going to have, right? Nobody knows. We're just going to keep adding stuff to it. But to start with, an average game has this many. We've got a plan though. Definitely. We've got a plan. It's just that's the challenge of making a game that's pushing it both on the tech and the gameplay.