We kinda know what the Vanduul look like... but what about the others? What goes into concepting an alien race?asked by Superflytwo

That's a great question and a super fun question.

It is, it is. Alien races right? Forest what's different? We got Jeremiah Lee here right? One of our Concept Artists who is doing a lot characters, a lot of human characters. What's the difference what goes into making an alien race besides concepting?

Well, you have your humans and then you already know what your skin tone is going to be like you have a certain range in your height, you know your anatomy is going to be and how the character moves. There's a lot of things that go into an alien race however. How humanoid is it? Does it have four legs? Does it have two legs? How are the legs shaped? How does it move? So I think a lot of the times you get your inspiration from real life creatures and real life animals and then you start merging them together to make new species.Then you also have to think about what kind of environments do they live in? What kind of worlds do they live in? That way you start understanding how their skin tone works because their skin tone probably evolve differently based on their environments right? So in a more icy environments you're probably going to have more hair and stuff like that. In a hotter environment you're probably going to have less hair right? Then the colours of the skin tone and then how do you want the skin tone to react when light hits it? Do you want it to be more like deep underwater jelly fish where it can absorb light and then be somewhat transparent where you kind of see the inner workings of what's happening. Or is it going to be rough and tough and feel more like you can't penetrate this skin. So a lot of those questions are asked when you start introducing alien races. So it's super fun.

It is! And I would say on the production side it doesn't really change much. You and I have been developing or working hard on this, really establishing design, sit down and put their designs together before we even start concepting. Those guys, there's a lot of great things that they can come up with as conceptors. Brilliant, very creative but the Designers tend to know.and the Writers know where this, how this fits in the universe.So in the Ten For The Writers i'm sure they talked about this and the Designers. But then you get all of that content that Forest was just talking about before you even get into making the image. There will I think be some back and forth like: "Oh that doesn't really make sense". Or "I want to dig into that more." Or "I have some ideas" And that's totally cool that's where the back and forth goes.

And you're always going to find a limitation in the tech right?

Totally, yeah.

Potentially have to write new shaders to react to determine how the skin reacts, the lighting and stuff like that. So it does impact the schedule a little bit depending.It's all about a balance. You want to push it as far as the Writers and the Designers wanted to go but still keep it in the boundaries of how much time you actually have and how limited your resources are.

And even animation. I feel like, if it's just pure concepting you just come up with an idea. People do this all the time for personal work but in this environment then once you get this concept you would take it to the Animation Director and say "What are my limitations here. In the system as well as what you need" And that may even go back to be tweaked based on that.

Are we going to need to make a brand new rig? How are we going to Motion Capture this? That's the other thing that get's really interesting like we did with the Vanduul right? Is the Motion Capture. How do you have humanoids move and you know, talk? It's pretty serious. So you got to be kind of creative and you got almost build these sets, like these suits and stuff that they could potentially wear to see where like, the collar, and how do they move? It's a tricky thing. It's one of the funnest things right? It really allows you to be creative about the process.

There's just so much that goes into making a concept for an alien race. It's not just make this guy it's like "Here are all the implications". Alright next question.

And hopefully we'll have languages or something.

Hopefully we'll have languages. Maybe.