Jordu Schell, Lead Character Designer of the Na’Vi for James Cameron’s Avatar film, discusses some of the iterations he went through for the design and how he found CG modeling lacking and reverted to physical sculpted maquettes.
How many characters did you design overall?
Oh gosh. I did a design of the lead female. I did — I don’t know, I would say I did probably about 15 total maquettes of the characters, and I did a bunch of maquettes also of the creatures that are in the film. Most of those maquettes — all of those maquettes — were based on designs that come from other artists that I kind of massaged into a more realistic realm taken from the drawing.
PS: We’ve been trying to setup a similiar interview with Jordu ourselves here at VizWorld, but he hasn’t responded to the first round of questions we submitted via email. Hopefully we’ll pull something together with more in-depth details on the design.
via Avatar Concept Designer Reveals the Secrets of the Na’Vi – Avatar – io9.
