Hired Steel and Making MechWarrior 5: Clans Cinematics with Constantin & Bernhard of TMC

About a decade ago, a group of friends came together to make some MechWarrior machinima, a hobby which eventually led them to create the best BattleTech animations the fandom had ever seen. Hired Steel was so great, it eventually led to them getting hired to create official cinematics for an actual MechWarrior title. I refer to none other than TMC.

Soon after completing my second playthrough of MechWarrior 5: Clans, I sat down with Constantin and Bernhard of TMC to talk about their journey from fans to having credits in an actual MechWarrior game. Along the way, we learn a little bit about how to turn old sketches into fully-animated 3D models, the German word for sitting around waiting for work to call, and why it’s always better to make something new rather than remake something old. Enjoy.

Sean (Sarna): Thank you both for agreeing to speak to Sarna about your work with MechWarrior 5: Clans, Hired Steel, and just your BattleTech work in general. To get us started, how about we do some brief introductions? So, who are you?

Constantin (TMC): You want to start, Bernhard? 

Bernhard (TMC): I can start. My name is Bernhard Engstler. I work in the electrical power industry by day and as a 3D artist, mostly in the evenings and nights. I got in touch with the BattleTech / MechWarrior universe with MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat, and since then, I’m pretty much in love with that universe and franchise and got into 3D because of that. Now, the circle is closing with my work on MechWarrior 5: Clans. It was great to be a part of that. 

Constantin: My name is Constantin Kormann, Germany. During the day I work in the university. I’m basically responsible for digital education.

We’ve been running the TMC channel now for almost 13 years I think at this point. MechWarrior 3 was one of the first video games I played—I don’t know if it was Age of Empires 2 or MechWarrior 3, that was literally the first video game I ever played, one of them certainly. I think the intro of MechWarrior 3 is burnt into my brain and MechWarrior is the reason that I chose my career and all that stuff.

So like Bernhard said, the circle is closing and it’s exciting to work on something official. 

Sean: All right, cool. How about we go over quickly what games you’ve played, starting with Bernhard.

Bernhard: I think it’s been pretty much every MechWarrior title since MechWarrior 2, like Ghost Bear’s Legacy and Mercenaries etc., also  the MechCommander series, everything except BATTLETECH, I think. 

Sean: Harebrained’s BATTLETECH? 

Bernhard: Yeah, I have to admit. I have also read quite a number of novels; I think everything up until Operation Bulldog of the Clan Invasion era. I’ve never played the tabletop though. So it’s been mostly video games and novels, but I was so drawn into the novels when I was a teenager. I was devouring these novels like crazy.

Sean: Same here. 

Constantin: So like I said, I think I started with MechWarrior 3, but the first one I really played extensively was MechWarrior 4. There as well, the intro sequence really influenced me a lot. I still love to watch it. Then came MechWarrior Online, and Online I actually played—I don’t want to say competitively, but pretty much. It was way before it was available on Steam, but it would probably be my most-played game ever. I played in a German unit with training three times a week, with TeamSpeak and sync dropping and stuff like that. All that very old-school stuff from 2012 and onwards.

That’s why I did the unit promotion videos with the team, and that’s why we started making videos. And then I played MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, and I played a few hundred hours of Harebrained Schemes’ BATTLETECH, I think. 

Sean: And have you done the tabletop at all or has it just all been video games?

Constantin: No, no, sadly not. I think it’s just that nobody was available for me. I grew up in a tiny town and the best I could get there was people that played Battlefield with me after school or whatever. So yeah, no luck so far. I would love to get into it, but also, time is the issue now. 

Sean: Time is always an issue. Let’s end off your BattleTech bonafides with the most important question. What is your favorite ‘Mech?

Bernhard: Well, that’s a really, really tough one. If I could pick an Inner Sphere and a Clan ‘Mech, Inner Sphere would probably be the Shadow Hawk. The Gray Death Trilogy was one of the first novels I read and I fell absolutely in love with the trilogy and the Shadow Hawk. I think it’s just a cool design.

For the Clan ‘Mech, I think it’s the Mad Dog because it just looks freaking cool. 

Constantin: I would say for Inner Sphere, it’s the Catapult because everything about this thing screams ‘Mech to me. From the bird legs to the fighter cockpit and the rocket launchers—I think it’s great. I also think the redesigns from both PGI and CGL have been awesome. 

On the Clan side, I would also agree with the Mad Dog. Many people would probably say it’s a Mad Cat (or Timber Wolf to be exact), but the Mad Dog, especially the hero Mad Dog in the intro of MechWarrior—I think they called it Mk.II or whatever in the lore. But yeah, it’s pretty cool. 

Sean: We’re going to start the questions with Hired Steel and your YouTube channel TMC. So what does TMC stand for, anyway?

Constantin: That’s a great question. I’m going to answer that because I was there before. So the reason behind the abbreviation is that we were called Tamar Media Corporation because we were part of the Tamar Jaegers, the unit that we played in MechWarrior Online. The problem is that the channel, team, and whole project kept going after the MechWarrior Online part of our lives had already ended. So we were stuck with the name. We could try to rebrand, but we just stick with TMC and treat it like ABC or CNN since nobody really knows what it means.

Sean: Well, people know now! You’ve let the secret out! Names aside, you’ve been doing MechWarrior/BattleTech machinima for quite a number of years. I see a Ghost Bear’s Legacy video from nine years ago, for example. What made you jump from these shorter fan videos to something more involved like Hired Steel?

Constantin: Sorry, Bernhard, I’m gonna answer since it was before your time again. If you look at our channel and you sort by oldest you see that the first ones were recorded in MechWarrior Online. Back then there wasn’t even a camera to it, so we always sat down in our JagerMechs, because they had the largest windows so you could record without the struts. 

The first one was a fellow German unit, the Phoenix Legion. The unit approached us and asked, “Can you do this promotion for us as well?” And we said, sure, why not? Then one of our members, Andreas started trying some stuff in Blender. I think the forum name was Hayden or Markamp, he created these exporting tools for CryEngine that let you take the models out of the game. We asked PGI and they said, “Yeah, sure. If you don’t do anything super commercial with it, it’s fine with us.” 

PGI has always been super supportive of the fans. So he started doing first some tests in Blender that enabled us to do whatever we wanted. We weren’t constrained to the ‘Mechs or maps in the game anymore, and that’s how it all started.

Sean: Fan videos are one thing, but Hired Steel is something entirely different. What made you embark on something as ambitions as Hired Steel?

Constantin: The reason why this whole project started is because I chose a career in professional 3D animation. I worked in advertising for TV commercials and did a lot of car stuff for German car brands, and then COVID came and we had a quite strict lockdown in my area of Germany.

So I was sitting at home, not doing any work, but still had to be on-call for whenever work called. We call it ‘Kurzarbeit’ in Germany. You’re basically waiting around until your work calls you in again. So I was sitting around on the PC all day anyway, and then I just started playing around with these models.

And since that was what I was doing during the day as well, I had all the tools on my PC and I just started modeling and did some texturing and sent it into our discord and the rest of the team was like, “Oh, that looks nice.” And then the lockdown kept dragging on, so we started working on the very first pilot, which we then called Episode Zero.

Sean: For the models in Hired Steel, they look like they’re from MechWarrior Online or MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, but they’re also heavily customized. For example, the Hunchback has what appears to be reactive armor, and the Shadow Hawk has an AMS and two SRM-6s, which I think is technically possible but not something you’d see very often. For the pirate ‘Mechs, those all are stock builds, but the professional team—the mercenaries of Hired Steel—they’re all custom builds. Why are the pirates only in stock builds for their ‘Mechs?

Constantin: I mentioned this in our pre-talk briefly—we have a backstory for our mercenaries. In our head canon, they have these semi-experimental loadouts because some of these weapons hadn’t been released yet, or were a few years away from being released. Just look at the very first episode to check the date that Hired Steel is set in.

There’s also a reason why the pirates look like they’re stock ‘Mechs that are kind of just bolted together. For a pirate regiment, they are quite well equipped and well organized, which doesn’t usually happen with pirates.

We have a new “Lore” section on hiredsteel.com where you can see the backstory behind the characters, builds, and factions.

Sean: Hired Steel features a lot of BattleTech creators, including Tex leading the lance from his Shadow Hawk, Mr. Paladin in the Catapult, Baradul in the Rifleman, and Aggie Law Girl in her Hunchback, as well as several others in a pretty long list of credits. How did you get so many people involved with Hired Steel?

Constantin: So again, I’m just gonna answer because Bernhard joined us for Episode Two when all of that stuff had happened. Tex just wrote a comment. It’s actually still under Episode Zero; it’s the most-rated comment. He’s like, “This looks cool. Let me know if you need a voice,” and people were writing like, “This comment has changed history,” or whatever. So that’s how he came on.

And then the others we either knew already or somebody in our team stumbled upon them or they reached out to us. It’s very cool to work with creators that actually like the universe itself, of course. It’s also good if you have a professional voice actor, which we also have. 

But yeah, just by accident. I guess the community is so small and there are not a lot of YouTube creators out there who make the stuff that we do, which is a shame. We would love to have more because there are only a few minutes for each episode, and there are a lot of minutes in a year that you could spend watching other stuff. 

So yeah, we stumbled upon each other and have been working together ever since then. But for Tex, we have done a lot of stuff already and I think it’s a great collaboration with him. 

Sean: I noticed that you did a collaboration for the Twycross video. 

Constantin: And the UrbanMech one.

Sean: Oh yeah, there’s a scene for the UrbanMech there. How was it working with Tex and the Black Pants Legion to make those scenes?

Constantin: Did we work together on the UrbanMech one a little bit, or did I just ask you questions?

Bernhard: No no, UrbanMech was all yours. For the Hunchback, I did one shot and you did another one. 

Constantin: Yeah. No, it was great. He approached me and was like, “We are doing this thing. We have a slot that we would like to fill with your guys’s stuff.” And then I just said, yeah, sure, why not? And then the UrbanMech factory one completely escalated. I spent weeks on that just because I found the idea so cool to show how these might be built. 

For the Twycross one as well, he reached out to us very early and said we are planning to do this video, we need a little bit of art. We need to show this crazy battle in the swamp and also this crazy battle in the desert. And I was like, oh God, especially because that was during the same time that the game work was going on. I needed to be very efficient with my planning so that not one of these two projects would suffer.

Sean: When you’re doing the work for Tex or for Hired Steel, are the models essentially taken out of MechWarrior Online slash MechWarrior 5? Or do you touch them up a little bit? Or do you build them from the ground up? 

Constantin: I’m going to hand this question over to Bernhard in a second.

For the models, we start off with the base model from the game, and then we do our custom texturing. We basically only use the normal maps and upscale them a little bit, but we do a complete texturing pass with our own smart materials. We also do a little bit of a kitbash pass on the ‘Mechs that we add our own geometry to them.

Not just the weapon systems, but also random blades or hinges or whatever, so that they look a little bit more what we would imagine them to look like. And then we hand them off to Bernhard to give them basically a skeleton. Maybe you want to say how you do that? 

Bernhard: Well, the game version comes with a skeleton, but we make our own rig so it fits  our needs for animation. For the latest episode, as we were moving to Unreal Engine, we had to create our custom weapon systems. Unreal has blueprints, which is basically a visual scripting language with nodes, and I was using blueprints for setting up systems which spawn weapon fire and associated effects by just setting a keyframe—like pressing a button—and then the ‘Mech will spawn a laser,  an AC projectile or LRMs and so on.

There is still a lot of custom work that we are doing with these ‘Mechs and models, and of course, also the environment is custom-made—the landscape, the SLDF depot, etc. Considering the whole work package, the ‘Mechs are just a small part of the big picture. 

Constantin: Especially because the vehicles are all always custom modeled by members of the community who offer their help to us and then join our team. Now for Episode Four, we are moving to custom models for the first time.

We have two new ‘Mechs that we are going to introduce that are not from the game—they are modeled from the ground up. I’m not going to reveal what they are. You could maybe figure it out with some clues that we left. Also, the Hunchback cockpit is still very much orienting itself after the game. We are moving to more custom stuff. I posted something a while ago that features a fully 100-percent custom cockpit that we built from the ground up.

Sean: I’ve noticed that the effects in Hired Steel are kind of different from the games. The autocannons, for example, seem to be more like what you would expect from a real-life Gatling type cannon, like a GAU-8 or an M61, and the Rifleman‘s Gauss Rifle doesn’t look like what you would expect in MechWarrior 5. It looks more like what you would expect from a penetrator round from a tank cannon, like an APFSDS round; it’s not very dramatic, it just leaves a smoking hole and the tank stops moving.

What made you opt for this sort of ultra-realism in Hired Steel? And is this something you’d like to see more of in the MechWarrior games?

Bernhard: I guess it’s just an artistic choice. 

Constantin: For us, we have limited resources. Hired Steel is basically a no-budget production, and with these limited resources to have something look believable in such a fantasy setting, you need something that connects them with stuff you’ve already seen, like movies.

We decided, first of all, to introduce vehicles and humans to give the whole thing perspective because these things are like 13-meter-tall giant machines. If you could imagine seeing them in real life, that would be horrifying. I also thought it would be a nice touch to connect them to reality a little bit more, so give them smoke launchers, give them an anti-missile system, give them spotlights, and give them explosive reactive armor. Connect it a little bit more to real life because there might be a time when these things are still around in a few hundred years or not, I don’t know. But it was basically the thought to make it more believable, integrated a little bit more into what people might instinctively expect this to look like.

Sean: Let’s move away from Hired Steel and get to your work on MechWarrior 5: Clans. First off, have you played MechWarrior 5: Clans and what did you think about it? 

Constantin: Yes, we’ve played it. We’ve all played it. 

Sean: So what did you think? 

Bernhard: I had a blast. Not only because it was cool to see our work in the game, which was kind of a new experience besides seeing some of the sequences we worked on over and over again, but experiencing that in the game and in the story. Yeah, it was just awesome.

I also really enjoyed the narrative, the story-driven MechWarrior experience. That was quite refreshing. Also seeing the Clan perspective again, after such a long time—I think it was 1995 when MechWarrior 2 came out, and the rest pretty much focused on the Inner Sphere.

So that was nice for a change. Overall, I really enjoyed the game very much. 

Sean: Yeah, same. I’ve played through it twice already.

Constantin: I played through it once. Most of it actually during the beta, but I have to second that it was really, really, cool seeing a narrative experience. You always have conversations and some basic cutscenes in the other games, but having like a real part—I mean, the game has over a hundred minutes of cinematics. It’s absolutely insane what they pulled off over there, huge props. It’s basically a movie and a game—like, both in one. 

People have been asking about things like an animated series, and I think the game is the closest that we have. If it’s performing well, and I think it’s performing well, then there will be lots more in the future, so I’m really looking forward to that. 

Sean: You guys actually did quite a few of the videos for MechWarrior 5: Clans. Tell me how PGI contracted you to contribute footage and assets for MechWarrior 5 Clans. I know about the initial teaser video, but what else did you do in MechWarrior 5: Clans?

Constantin: So we got contacted in early 2023 by someone from PGI. We had a few calls with them. They told us that they had seen Hired Steel, they liked what we did, and they were getting this cool new thing and that they would like to work with us. And we wanted to show what we can do. 

So we did the teaser, and I think that worked out quite nicely. I think they were happy with what we did and gave us a bunch more to do. This was always a developing relationship; you never know from the start how much you will actually do, and how this thing will develop. Game development, especially in modern game engines, is an insanely complicated task, and there are so many moving things.

After everything was said and done, what we did was the teaser and three cinematics. We did the bombardment of Edo cinematic, we did the Tyra Miraborg and space battle cinematic, and we did the Crusader and Warden cinematic. In these cinematics, we did everything except the humans—the humans were handled by PGI in-house except the humans in Edo because we started that so early that the motion-capturing pipeline wasn’t fully established yet. PGI of course provided all the models, motion captured humans, art direction, and they did the final cut, as well as the music and sound effects.

The two Kuritan soldiers on the roof shortly before they were blown up were actually rendered by us. Then we modeled a bunch of background starships. Basically all the starships except the Shilone, the Jagatai, the two warships, the Essex class and the—what is the Wolf warship? Sovetskii Soyuz.

The foreground ships, like the Dire Wolf, were done by PGI because they were like the hero assets. Then we provided the JumpShips—everything except the biggest one. So we did the Scout, the Merchant, the Star Lords, and the Invaders. Then we did the WarShips, the Lola III, the Black Lion, the Liberator, the Texas class, and the Vincent Mark 42. And then we did the Vengeance DropShip, the Fury DropShip, the Shologar, the Sparrowhawk, and the Corsair fighters for the cinematics. So a bunch of them. 

I started uploading breakdowns of the ships to my Artstation account, but this is a work in progress as there are a lot of ships I need to cover.

Then we did the loading screens. Not all of them—the ones with the starships were done in-house for them, but we did the ‘Mechs firing weapons both in the static and the moving versions. And we also did the invasion star map animation. The one where the ships are moving towards the Inner Sphere. And also the main logo intro thing with the light, and I think that is all.

Bernhard: Yeah. And to be precise the Warden/Crusader cinematic was basically the intro to the Battle of Luthien. There are slightly different versions for both the Crusader and Warden paths, and these are the two versions of the cinematic that we did. 

Sean: A lot of people are very excited to see these WarShips remade in the modern era because we’ve only got these super old sketches that I mean, they give you the impression of what they should look like, but they’re nothing in comparison to what you would get from the ‘Mechs in MechWarrior 5.

How about you walk me through the process of recreating the Black Lion for these cinematics? 

Constantin: So, how this worked was they realized that there was a need for these, and that was something that was outsourced to us at that point because they were obviously busy with making the game. So I brought Austin Geiger from my team on—he is a professional 3D modeler.

He took these old sketches and he made one or two passes over a low-poly rough silhouette model—like, not super rough, but also not very detailed. You will see exactly how that looked in our little behind-the-scenes video. And then I basically went in and did the fine modeling, always exchanging the models with the art direction and lore people at PGI.

There’s a lot of kitbashing going on. Kitbashing is a term that you might know from Star Wars. What they did to make those super high-detail models back then (for the AT-ST or AT-AT) is they took model kits and they bashed them together using a soldering iron or whatever.

Now, we are doing that basically in the digital world. I’m taking apart all these models from these kits that you can purchase or that I built myself or that I take from the other models in the game—you noticed that we have some antennas that are the same or cockpits or whatever—and then you put that all together.

Then you do a material pass over it to make sure that it all looks good. Do the color scheme, make sure it looks like a hull, has some damage, and some lights, then add some windows. You set that up in Unreal Engine, and then I basically handed them off to the people at PGI, who then put them in their cinematics and the loading screens with the starships. 

Sean: And of all the ships you guys have made, which ship is your favorite?

Constantin: Bernhard, what’s your favorite?

Bernhard: I have not worked on any of these. This was all Constantin’s and Austin’s work. And I’m afraid I have to say, I don’t remember the classes. Oh yeah, there’s the Texas class, that one. 

Constantin: I mean, the Texas class is a giant ship. It’s like double the size of the others.

For me, it was probably the Lola III because it has this cool Venator Star Destroyer-like shape. But I also really enjoy the Liberator because it basically looks like an angry fish and it has all these forward-facing weapons. I actually went into Sarna articles and your site was a great help. I spent hundreds of hours on Sarna with it open on my second monitor. 

I also modeled every single weapon according to the articles. If you go through and look, I try to build up, okay, this is a naval AC/10, and this is a naval AC/20, and it was a little bit bigger and a little bit smaller than you actually have in the other kits, so sometimes you have like four guns in one turret and sometimes they are in a single turret. So that was a huge help. 

Sean: One of the things I hated about those original sketches is they’re just kind of these geometric shapes that don’t really show where any of these weapons are. So I certainly appreciate being able to see the turrets and the missile launchers and all that fun stuff.

Constantin: Yeah, that was actually very cool. When the game launched, I sent a few of the screenshots to Duane Loose, the guy who drew these original images all the way back. If you listen to his interviews and his stories like how that happened, the world was a lot simpler back then. It was a lot lower-budget and less stressful. It was basically like, you have a hundred bucks and draw us a spaceship.

Then generations afterwards trying to make sense of everything, but he really liked the way that it looked and that made me very happy. Bringing the generations together, it’s really cool.

Bernhard: I think that turned out really well because these original line drawings, I think they’re burnt into so many minds, and if you deviate too much or if you lose the essence of these line drawings then a lot of people would feel disconnected. You did a great job of combining the original aesthetics and with a more modern look.

Constantin: No, that is really important to me to respect the old art and to make sure that all of the stuff that my dad read in his crudely translated German BattleTech books still applies and that we still respect that, but put a spin from 2024 without altering the thing too much.

I think if you look at some other universes and IPs out there, if they try to change things up too much, then they might lose their initial appeal. Then you might as well just do a new thing, you know?

Sean: Let’s talk about one of MechWarrior 5: Clan‘s more impressive cinematics, which is the space fight where Tyra Miraborg rams her Shilone into the bridge of the Dire Wolf. How did you go about animating this scene? Did you re-read Lethal Heritage and try and play out each move as it’s written? Or did you ignore the book to just make something that looked cool?

Constantin: So I’m gonna let Bernhard relive his trauma. Because at the end, that scene had I think close to 2,000 animated objects in it that had been all touched by hand at some point. That was an insane amount of work, and we are really happy that we don’t have to do that again.

Bernhard: I’ve read these novels, the Blood of Kerensky Trilogy way back when, and I read it again a couple of years ago. So when we knew that we had to do that cinematic, of course, I opened those novels again and read through them. There were also animated stills from PGI, like a rough guideline of what they wanted to have, but it was quite rough. We saw that the Shilone fighters were in there, the Dire Wolf WarShip, of course, and that they wanted to have ‘Mechs shown on the Dire Wolf as well so they would get into the action. And of course, how Tyra’s Shilone would shoot into the bridge of the Dire Wolf.

My first animatic pass was crafted following these guidelines, but we figured that there was still a lot  missing. The cinematic director at PGI then did a rough pass in Unreal Engine himself and showed it to us and it was already pretty good. So I then went into Blender, recreated and refined that draft, and about halfway through the whole process of laying things out there were concerns that it wasn’t close enough to what was established in the novel. 

There were quite a few iterations on the whole sequence, back and forth, which was quite a long process to get that to feel right. And of course, something written in a novel doesn’t necessarily translate well into a cinematic. So it was quite a process to get it to look and feel right. 

In the end, everyone was happy and I think it turned out quite well. Of course, not every shot and not every scene is precisely as it was described in the novel, but I think the essence of the story is in there and the emotions as well. Some artistic license was taken but I think we stayed quite true to the story. 

Sean: I thought so. 

Constantin: That was also the point where it was realized that these background ships were needed because these battles just had them. At that point, the Vengeance, the Fury, and the Sparrowhawk didn’t exist.

PGI decided at the beginning that they wanted to try to stick to the lore, and I really respect that because that makes everything a lot more complicated. They decided we needed these ships, but they were busy with their stuff, so I said, “Yeah, okay, then we do it just for this cinematic.” And I have to say, putting everything in three-dimensional space makes it a lot more complicated.

If you tell a story on land, you have two dimensions that the camera can move in. Obviously you still have three dimensions, but this whole up, down, left, right thing is quite defined because you always have a horizon. But in space, everything is very different and that is very hard to do. Without getting too much into the technical reasons, for many many reasons, this was also the hardest one to do just because there was—like I mentioned—an insane amount of objects. Unreal Engine is still a game engine and sometimes has quite hard limits that people who come from traditional 3D animation like me or Bernhard with Blender still have to get used to.

In the end, we made it work, but there was a lot of back and forth with PGI, and like Bernhard mentioned, the whole cinematic team and the art direction team. Pretty much everybody at PGI was super helpful at that process and really guided us through quite well.

Bernhard: Yeah. And as a fun fact, there is one shot where you see the Shilone flying over the Dire Wolf from a top-down perspective. We had to cheat there and extend the length of the Dire Wolf model to give these Shilones more flight time, or not make them look like they were flying in slow motion. Not everything that you see on a 2D storyboard works out in 3D and feels right in terms of timing. There’s always this difficulty to strike the right balance.

Constantin: There the issue was animating the fighters at actual speed and the actual length of the ship just looked either they were way too fast or way too slow. It just didn’t look right. To make it look like how it would feel knowing how a TIE Fighter might fly or how something in Star Trek might fly, we just had to cheat. There’s a lot of that stuff going on. 

Also, with ‘Mech movements, in real life everything is stabilized because you don’t want to be shaking around in your cockpit, but that just looks stupid if you have a ‘Mech gliding across the terrain. So yeah, there’s a lot of these things going on.

Sean: Let’s maybe talk about another scene that you may have had to cheat slightly on. The razing of Edo was obviously very destructive, and I would imagine it extremely difficult to convey that sort of destruction because we don’t have low-orbit naval weapons to base anything on. A nuclear explosion seems slightly overkill, but standard naval artillery seems not quite enough. How did you model the destructive capabilities of the Sabre Cat while you were blowing up Edo?

Constantin: This was the first one that we did very early in the process and there are still a lot of things that had to develop. Time-wise, this was the one that took the longest, just because everything was done so early in the project. 

The issue you have with stuff that’s being destroyed or stuff that’s exploding is that it’s not just 3D animation. It’s always a very expensive thing to do both in terms of time, money, and mostly effort. If you build an explosion, it’s not like you would do in 3D animation—just move a few keyframes and make something move. You actually have to tweak physical parameters for as long as it takes to make it look good.

You have a lot of tools to art direct stuff, but it’s a very different way of working. It’s very iterative and it takes a long time and you have to start over a lot and it has a very high barrier to entry, so there’s not a lot of people you can ask. 

You have to realize this is not a production like Marvel or Call of Duty, so you always have to be very clever with your resources. These big studios can put a team of 400 VFX artists on something for two years, and then in the end you end up with like Endgame, or some other movie, but in this case, it was basically us two, and Bernard was busy with animation, and I was doing the rest. So yeah, you have to be clever about your resources, otherwise you will not get anything done.

And like we said, there was a lot of cheating. There was maybe also not the actual scale that this battle has because, in the lore, it’s a city inhabited by millions. But we try to show that a little bit with the building that you see in the reflections, the PPC is coming down and the Barracuda missiles coming down, and then obviously the explosions.

Bernhard: Basically making smart choices of what you show to convey a battle that is taking place on a much grander scale, but just showing parts that you can manage to produce with such a small team in such a short time. 

Constantin: This was also the reason why we concentrated on this engagement between the single Panther and the Mad Dog and Stormcrow. You don’t show the whole invasion of the city, because then you have to do a 15-minute movie. But we wanted to show a scene that shows there’s a defending force. They are trying to defend the Clans, but the Clanners are actively not engaging and for some reason pulling out of the city, which is a very creepy thing to think about if you are an inhabitant of a city and your invader is suddenly turning around and leaving for some reason. 

I think they showed that quite well also with this little cockpit interaction where he’s like “No, this cannot go unpunished,” but then he’s called back by Perez and that’s a lot of foreshadowing about what is about to happen.

Sean: I thought it was a very effective scene. That’s all I had for MechWarrior 5. Let’s get into some of the fun questions we have here before I let you go. 

I would say that you guys are at least somewhat familiar now with the aerospace fighters and sort of the space-based combat in BattleTech. What if PGI decided to make an aerospace fighters game? What fighters do you want to see?

Bernhard: Oh man. Will probably have to pull up Sarna now.

Constantin: So I played a little bit of Living Legends, and there you have this combined arms aspect of playing with fighters on a ‘Mech base. It’s actually quite interesting because you have these weapons like LRMs or PPCs that are different from what you know from other games. 

But there are these famous examples like Star Wars Battlefront II, like the original one with the space battle over Coruscant which was awesome. If they do that, I would love a capital ship battle where you are just a little fighter pilot and you’re flying in between ships and you have like a naval AC/20 ripping a hole into an Inner Sphere ship or whatever. But for me, it would be the Corsair because just, I mean, I, I like the way it looks, I guess.

Bernhard: That’s a very good choice. 

Constantin: I see a white flash on Bernhard’s screen, so I assume you’re on Sarna.

Bernhard: Yeah. I cannot decide. 

Constantin: Shilone. 

Bernhard: Yeah, we’ve seen that in the game already. I mean, aesthetically, I think it’s a cool design. I don’t remember many more by name right now. If I’d see a list some memories would flash back. 

Constantin: It’s a very rarely shown aspect of BattleTech, the space stuff. I was very happy that we could get to showcase a little bit more of that in the game itself.

I think if you have this combined aspect, it adds just more depth. I mean, in the end, it’s still about the ‘Mechs, but there’s also humans, there’s tanks, there’s infantry, there’s helicopters and all that stuff, all the way up to these big 1500-meter long battleships like the Texas. It would be great if in the future we get more stuff that concentrates on everything and paints a more complete picture.

Sean: Agreed. Next fun question: what if Microsoft slash Activision said they were going to remake MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat and you’re asked to remake the opening cinematic. Do you change anything about it? Or do you just do a shot-for-shot remake of the original? 

Constantin: I think you remade it already once, Bernhard, right? That’s how I found your work. 

Bernhard: Not that one, but MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries, yeah. And I remade that with the limitation that I couldn’t remake the music and sound design, so I stuck pretty much with the original version but with some artistic freedom.

I think if I were to remake that for an official product, I would change some things. I would certainly make the PPCs look different and probably not have a Timber Wolf fire his machine guns against the Summoner. Of course, I would try to convey the original feel because I also think that one is very much burned into the brains of a lot of people, so changing that completely would probably backfire pretty hard. 

Constantin: Like I said, I don’t like the notion of changing established stuff. You can always do new stuff. And especially in a universe that offers you hundreds of planets and 99 percent of them have not been developed. Why change something that already exists?

So if you decide to remake it, I would just add stuff to it. I would add maybe the human aspect; use the great tech that they built over at PGI to actually show how the humans are interacting, show emotions, show close-ups of the faces, the horror of fighting a ‘Mech and not knowing where it is. And then maybe add a bit more atmosphere, like dust in the desert environment or something hiding in the shadows, stuff you can do with modern technology that wasn’t really possible back then. 

I think if you remake something, you have to stick to the original or otherwise just do something new, like we did with Hired Steel. Then we can do our own thing and we are not trying to tinker with people’s memories of stuff that they experienced in their childhoods. That never works out in my mind.

Bernhard: Yeah, absolutely agree. I would rather do something new than just make something old look modern. 

Sean: Alright, last question; MechWarrior 6 is announced. Where and/or when would you want it to be set?

Constantin: I don’t know if people have already thought about this, but personally, I think MechWarrior and BattleTech are basically Game of Thrones. You have these giant houses with tiny, smaller sub-factions, and people that are living on the fringes of society, and people that are In some weird sect praying to some machine god or whatever. Then you have like this big outside threat that just comes and unites everybody. I think BattleTech did it first.

 And for me, this is the big pivotal thing. You know, this feeling of the border regions where this unknown force is suddenly appearing, the whole Outbound Light incident, I think that’s awesome.

And there’s so much stuff that you can—I mean, Game of Thrones managed to fill seven seasons (even though in my head, the last two don’t exist). I’m still waiting for the final books. If he could hurry up with that, it’d be nice. 

You could tell the whole story of just before the invasion, during the invasion, after the invasion, how life changed, and then you can do prequels, you can do sequels. There’s enough stuff for 20 movies and five TV series. 

Bernhard: Yeah. I think the pre-Clan Invasion era—like around 3025—is the favorite of a lot of people. But, for a change, I would like to see something which happened before. I mean, there are centuries of BattleTech lore happening before that. That’s it. I never got into the Dark Age era and also not the ilClan, but something before that would be quite nice for a change. 

Constantin: Yeah, there would be cool stories that you can tell like the Terran Hegemony introducing the Mackie and then the horror of the soldiers on the ground seeing this thing come out of the smoke and being like, “What’s this?”

There are many stories that you can tell. I would look forward to that happening more in the future with MechWarrior 5: Clans now showing that people actually enjoy a narrative experience and that there’s still a lot of demand for that.

Sean: Alright, that’s everything I had. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about? Or was there anything else you’d like people to know about?

Bernhard: Episode Four was on the back burner for quite a while because of our work and involvement in Clans. But I think it’s important to note that we’re fully back into production now and things are moving forward quite a lot. You initially asked about a release date. I think it’s too early to say anything about that, but things are moving in the right direction and the pace has picked up quite a lot.

Constantin: There were some members of the team that kept working on that while we were doing other stuff. The team has grown—a few actual professionals have joined us who do work on Hollywood movies and triple-A games. So we are very blessed to have them on board.

It’s all developing in an exciting direction. Almost nine minutes long. It’s a complete change in software—I think we did like three steps at once with this. So without hyping it up too much—I don’t usually don’t like to do that—always under-promise and over-deliver. We are putting a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into it even more than we did before.

It’s definitely still there. We didn’t abandon it.  Quite the contrary, there’s a lot of learnings and stuff that we can carry over from our experience with the game that benefits us massively. Skills and tools have developed. 

And lastly, I would, of course, thank you. Sarna has always been very integral to everything we do. It’s a very thorough and very well-researched source. If you look into the wikis of other fandoms that might be five times as big, they are not nearly as well-developed. So very great to have. It helped me a lot with the work on the game.

I think that wouldn’t have been possible without all your resources. And also with Hired Steel, of course. Everything’s accurate, everything’s double-checked and triple-proved. A great thing to have. 

Sean: Well, thank you so much. And thank you for your contributions to BattleTech and MechWarrior and everything you do in the future.

Thanks again to Constantin and Bernhard of TMC for sitting down to talk with me about their work for both MechWarrior 5: Clans and Hired Steel. You can subscribe to TMC on their YouTube channel, check out their official website, and support them via Patreon.

And as always, MechWarriors: Stay Syrupy.