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I had a brief stint working on the Ch'tauri (though they weren't called that at the time) while in the Visual Development department. I took a couple of passes of refining Justin Sweet's original designs and attempting to define the look of the armor & weapons and how they might integrate into the creature. Ultimately Ryan Meinerding developed the final look in Z-Brush.
I imagined the helmet as being a little deceiving, so that ultimately when the mask was ripped off you would find that the creature had air holes in the place of eyes, which would actually be to either side of the mouth. I also liked the idea of some kind of "light chainsaw" that would wrap around the forearm. Kind of the hedge trimmer of your nightmares.
The next thing I worked on was the Quinjet. The initial mandate was a craft that could carry the team plus pilots, travel at hypersonic speeds and take off and land vertically on a carrier deck or in the middle of Times Square. It needed to have windows in the roof (to see Thor land on it in flight) and a ramp opening in the back for loading.
My first ideas never went past the rough sketch form as Jos Whedon considered them too sci-fi:
The design was refined to more of a conventional aircraft with some F-35 characteristics and variable geometry in the cockpit section like the Concord. The nose could drop and the wing tips fold down, giving it a bird of prey attitude during VTOL, as the unfinished sketch at the bottom shows.
Ultimately Production Designer James Chinlund was looking for a more brutal, ground attack craft aesthetic and the need to cross the globe in an hour was no longer a priority, so the aerodynamic qualities were downplayed and I pursued this concept that's a little more A10 Warthog-like:
Early work in progress gives a peek in to my process, as well as showing my initial thought as to how this would work in VTOL mode, but the design was rejected as still too streamlined and futuristic before I could develop it any further.
Given the note of "more attack-chopper-like" and having been steered toward referencing the Apache and Comanche helicopters, I headed in a different direction with this one:
Fellow concept artist & modeler Mike Meyers had developed a rough
model that was very well received with some radical variable geometry
that extended the engine nacelles back for high-speed flight, visually lengthening the plane. Myself and colleague Tani Kunitake were tasked with pursuing that basic concept further, he by doing an aesthetic pass on Mike's basic layout that ultimately became the Quinjet you see in the movie. In parallel developed a concept for a forward-swept scissor-wing geometry that would motivate the lengthening of the silhouette for more aerodynamic high-speed flight and maintain that hawk-like attack attitude for VTOL. I started with the basic design above and roughed it in using Luxology Modo for modeling and simple rigging:
As James was unsatisfied with the styling, feeling it to be somewhat "heavy" looking, I sketched loosely over a screen cap of the model to find a new form vocabulary:
This lead to the following design:
Working from these sketches I went back into the Modo model to further refine the transformation:
While I would have liked to refine the design further (In particular the rear and engine area which is pretty basic and crude in its forms) I was pretty pleased with the overall concept and think it would have been a very unique and dynamic aircraft. As it turned out Tani's excellent design had already gained traction with James Chinlund and Joss Whedon with it's complex forms and canopy evoking such navy carrier planes as the Tracker and Grumman Prowler, so ultimately that design was chosen and passed on to Paul Ozzimo for further refinement in 3-D. Someday I'll jump back into Modo on my own and develop a design I like based on this geometry.
A few more Helicarrier designs, drawing more from the idea of a massive amphibious transport aircraft with a carrier deck on its back.
Before working on the Mk 7 suit with the Visual Development team, I was initially brought into the Art Department to work on the Helicarrier. While ultimately the Production Designer James Chinlund's direction was pursued by Nathan Schroeder to the version you see on screen, I was tasked with providing some alternative approaches. Below is a sampling of some initial sketches pursuing a combination of naval and stealth-inspired forms. In a more radical departure from the concept of 'Heli-' carrier I was exploring some form of vertical jet engine clusters to lift the massive hull rather than the traditional ducted fans.
Yeah. Been awhile. And Avengers is old news.
But as anyone who... ahem...'follows'... my blog, it's not something that focuses on timeliness.
Better late than never, eh?
I do have a big dump to put up, as I spent a little time on almost every aspect of the movie, including the Helicarrier, Quinjet, Aliens and Alien craft.
So, prompted by special request, I'm putting up a selection of my work on Avengers.
So lets begin with a few bits of what you've come to expect from me and the one design of mine that made it into the film untouched... the MK 7.
Below are the initial 3 sketches I did early on before we knew what the Mk 7 should be. The first was actually a revision of a design I had been thinking of initially for Iron Man 2 before ultimately choosing another project. It was a lighter, more streamlined version of what had come before, trying to integrate a flowing theme wrapping around the "RT" on the chest and mirroring that fast line through the body. This was more of the evolutionary design, and ultimately was approved pretty much immediately as a starting point for the Mk 7.
The next design was playing around with the stance of the suit toward more of a brawler attitude, somewhat beefier and less aircraft-like.
Lastly was a more extreme departure, trying to create a very different silhouette, sort of the Stark Industries answer to a more heavily militarized suit like War Machine, but drawing from Air Force form language instead of Army.
Further discussion of the function of the suit in the script lead to the idea of having a more armored suit that over the course of battle would shed its ammo packs and additional armor. Styling elements from the first and third concepts were integrated and the design was revised as below...
The final design would incorporate a thruster backpack for the pivotal final battle, which wrapped around the "lats" and "serratus" areas under the arm to form flush mounted adjustable intake vanes. Much of the approach was based on the mantra of the "wearable Ferrari" so a lot of attention was spent on creating flowing lines from chest though the torso, pelvis, arms and legs.
Final design detailing was painted over turnarounds of the Mk 4 suit, to keep proportions consistent and realistic.
Lastly elevations were painted at an extreme level of detail to make sure lines would resolve all the way around the surface, giving our modeler Josh Herman a solid foundation to build from. Even still a lot was resolved in the modeling process.
The final model below, digitally sculpted by Josh Herman, reflects a very tight collaborative process to create the final form.
