The killer whale and raven motifs featured on the 2010 Olympic medals are rooted in ancient aboriginal art, but the design concept - laser-etching the images onto big, undulating discs - is so demanding of modern technology it pushed an engineering team to the limit.

As the gold, silver and bronze medals were unveiled in the Olympic Village on Thursday, Renato Romozzi, design co-ordinator for corporate engineering at the Royal Canadian Mint, stood in the applauding crowd and felt like crying. For him, it was the triumphant end of a journey that from the outset had seemed impossible.

"It's amazing. It's amazing. It actually brought a tear to my eye," he said moments after the medals were shown publicly for the first time.

"I mean the Royal Canadian Mint has put so much effort and so much time into this.... the whole team has spent evenings, weekends trying to put this through. It is quite an achievement."

For a long time, it seemed as if it might not be achievable, as a team of 34 engineers, machinists, engravers, die technicians and production experts struggled with how to etch on to 1,014 big, heavy, metal discs selected fragments of the Coast Salish-inspired work of Corrine Hunt and Omer Arbel.

"There had never been anything like this. It sort of caught us by surprise," said Mr. Romozzi, whose team has spent more than a year on the project.

"We're used to striking flat coins, flat medals. The dies aren't this size. The dies ... were so massive... I mean all aspects of it, from producing the dies, to striking the medals, to applying the designs to the medals, has been a challenge."

The artwork might seem simple. There is a killer whale design in four panels, as it might appear on a traditional bentwood box, and a raven in three segments, in the style found on a totem pole.

But the request from the artistic designers was to shatter those images into fragments and etch individual pieces on to medals with undulating forms to reflect the sea, mountains and snow of the Vancouver-Whistler region.

For the Royal Canadian Mint, this was a long way from printing a polar bear on a flat $2 coin.

Go behind the scenes at the Canadian Mint and watch the making of the medals.

"I guess the undulations gave us the greatest challenge," Mr. Romozzi said. "We had to keep the medals pretty consistent and that's what was really difficult ... because the relief of the undulations was so high."

Using lasers on the uneven medals was a daunting task. "It's not a flat surface, so that is really complicated, to try and understand the intensity of the laser; to try and burn evenly on both faces," he said.

The medals were held in jigs, devices that guide the tools, and if the jig was not perfect the medals came out flawed. A lot of early attempts were melted down, Mr. Romozzi said.

"There was a learning curve at the beginning and that was very slow and frustrating," he said. "Like the athletes' dream, this was like a journey, a mini-journey for us because we had ups and downs."

Mr. Romozzi said the mint has made all 615 gold, silver and bronze medals for the Olympic Games and is now working on 399 medals for the Paralympics.

"Every one is unique," he said of the medals. "It's not only the motif that makes them different, but every medal itself, the thickness, the undulation - they are not identical."

Each medal is etched with a different portion, or mosaic fragment, of the larger artwork. The killer whale is on Olympic medals, the raven on Paralympic medals.

"What they have done is taken the overall design, which is a huge artwork, and they've actually removed a piece of artwork - 1,014 pieces of art work. And this is what is being ‘lasered' on the medals.

"So if you gathered all the medals, with all the motifs, and you put them together, you would basically almost create the artwork again. So it's really, really unique. It's never been done before," Mr. Romozzi said.

Ian Bennett, president and CEO of the Royal Canadian Mint, said the project pushed the team to the extreme, but in the end they produced a stunning work. "The proud employees of the Royal Canadian Mint feel that they have won their own Olympic gold today," he said.

Don Lindsay, president and CEO of Teck Resources Ltd., whose company provided all the precious metal, said he was "just overwhelmed" when he saw - and got to hold - a finished medal.

"I think they are just beautiful pieces of art and the athletes will really appreciate them," he said.