Let's talk about the Drell for a bit, since they're the new Citadel race that has been added to the game and one of the main characters is Drell. How did the design for Thane evolve?

Derek Watts – Art Director:
Thane was a great example of collaborative concepting. Both Ben and Matt worked on this race and they definitely felt some frustration in getting him completed. The part that threw everyone was the fact that he was to be a romance option for female Shepard characters; we just had a hard time getting that out of our heads. I think we over thought what female game players wanted. We explored several different avenues for the design but we basically settled on a head that Ben had done. We based him more on reptiles and aquatic reference. I’ll tell you that at this point the female staff members had heard about this and became very worried that their love interest would end up being a dude with a fish head. They ended up really liking the final character and we also had great feedback on him when he first appeared in screen shots.


What were your goals when you sat down to create Thane?

Kolby Jukes – Character Artist:
The original designs for Thane were a lot more humanoid. He was supposed to be incredibly handsome; most beautiful man in the universe sort of thing. When we made the switch to a more amphibian/fish-like design, the challenge was to still make him look attractive and sympathetic. So when I started work on the character, my primary goal was just to make a believable, badass alien hitman, that the male/female audience would genuinely want to romance.

The Collectors are downright creepy, and come in several different varieties. They're also all insanely detailed. Could you talk about their creation?

Leroy Chen – Character Artist:
When I was making the Trooper I was going for the insect look on the overall treatment. A lot of references were gathered to help me getting the feel in the detail mesh and also in the final shader.

Kolby Jukes – Character Artist:
The first 3 subdivisions of the Collector General model were sculpted in MudBox v1.07. The model was already somewhat heavy at the 3rd subdivision (approximately 4 million polygons distributed between a number of separate meshes) and I started to run into insufficient memory errors when I tried to subdivide some of the heavier meshes like the torso & head. In order to achieve the necessary detail I imported and reconstructed the model into ZBrush 3.1, which was capable of comfortably pushing about 10 million polys on my workstation. This transition allowed me to add the necessary tertiary forms (flesh and bone detailing) and high frequency detail to the model cleanly and efficiently.

When sculpting the anatomy I drew a lot of inspiration from the works of Japanese model-makers Yasushi Nirasawa and Takayuki Takeya; two of my favourite sculptors.


Where did you find yourselves really pushing the envelope with the Collectors?

Leroy Chen – Character Artist:
As for the Collector Trooper, since it has pretty fine concentration of details on its body the distribution of the loops is pretty essential. First I targeted areas to make cuts on the body so it minimized seams and then brought them in as SubTools, thus maximizing the polycount usage. I also made sure all the pieces would contain mostly quads at this point. With the help of custom alphas and brushes like ClayTubes, the final result was achieved.