CLEVER ASSETS

ROCKET SCIENCE’S CHRIS NOKES REVEALS HOW THE TEAM HANDLES LONG-STANDING ASSETS

“The Expanse is a long-running show, so assets can be re-used for new purposes or also rebuilt from scratch,” says Nokes.

“The Expanse is a mostly Maya show, but we use things like Substance Painter and Mari to create assets. All assets may need to be rebuilt at some point. An asset that maybe you designed thinking of season two might have a new purpose in season four or five. The Roci is a great example: at one point we decided, we’ve used it for three seasons, we want to rebuild it. The ship has tiles all over it, and we decided to rebuild each of those tiles individually and one of the reasons was we wanted to make it look better, but also every new season, there's some new thing that Roci needs to do. And it was really hard to pick out a place to do it. So, we made sure we had tiles that could easily be removed to sub in for a hatch here, or a light there. This type of asset redesign gives us far more flexibility later.”