What have been some of the challenges that you've come across while working on the alien races?
TL;DRThe hardest challenge with the alien races was facial animation and speech, making non-human anatomy express emotion convincingly from human actor performances, which took months of work for the Vanduul.
I could speak on the hardest thing. Was it all challenges? I'll just say the hardest one, at least for the concept team and also the character team and animation department and tech anim, was the facial anims. The body animations are pretty straightforward. We just communicate what the anatomy is of the creature or the alien, and the tech anim guys are amazing. The problem is speech and expression, and having the aliens speak specifically, because in most games, it's just lip flaps and words come out. But the thing is, for us, we want to make sure that... we even put lips on our aliens so that they can actually purse their lips, so that physically you can see that they're actually phonetically pronouncing certain words. And so coordinating that with tech anim, character art, and concept is, man, it's a lot of work. Making sure that the alien can express themselves in a way that we can visually understand and feel emotions for is very difficult. For the Vanduul, oh my goodness, we spent months, months just coming up with different expressions of surprise, sad, angry, puffed up. That's probably the hardest part, especially when these aliens have speaking lines. And trying to have a human actor's expression be applied to a completely different anatomy and have that express the same type of emotion. It's crazy. Crazy, crazy sauce. That's probably the hardest part.