Talk to us about how important shape language is. Why do we start here [with thumbnails and silhouettes] instead of with something more detailed?

So a lot of what the thumbnails give you, firstly, is weight and also style language. So just from looking at this you know pretty much straight away that it's Anvil. So we do these little series of thumbnails to just get our initial shapes down and to just make sure that it has a correct weight and flows well with the rest of the series of ships. And we can explore as well new avenues of shapes without really diving into anything serious and have a little bit of fun really, which is also what it's about.

You also want an individualized silhouette. You want ships to be able to be read from a long distance away. We talk a lot about, if you follow Star Citizen's development over the years, LODs or Level of Detail, where we create a ship that's super high poly and detailed and then we bake it down to LOD 4 and then 3 and then 2 and then 1. You want a ship that can still be read, its silhouette, from far away. I'm reminded of those old World War II spotter cards where they used to just have the silhouettes of ships on playing cards. That's how they would teach soldiers on the ground how to identify which ships in the air were friendlies and foes just based on the shape. Everything we know about the visual language of a ship starts with its shape.

Yeah, exactly. And colour as well is really important as we get a little bit further down, because obviously you want to recognise who they are, even from a distance. So as I say, what we do here is we just block out these series of things and see what we come up with.