(Image credit: Arrowhead Game Studios)

With the Scope of Authority Warbond bringing new sniper rifles, ghillie armour, and mine grenades to Helldivers 2, we asked Arrowhead concept artist Christian Forsgren how that kind of hardware goes from Blender blockout to an in-game weapon. The answer is speed. “I can see how it actually handles in a player’s hands straight away, not weeks later,” he says. For weapons and machinery, that matters: a badly judged few centimetres can be the difference between convincing military hardware and something from a toy shop.

Each asset starts with a brief and a team brainstorm. Forsgren then builds a rough 3D blockout in Blender, refines the functionality, materials and finish, and pushes it into Arrowhead’s Stingray engine to see how it behaves in real time.

That loop helps give Helldivers 2 its battered, believable look.…