Creature Designer Neville Page worked with J.J.Abrams on the new Star Trek film and sat down with Bell Desowitz to talk about some of his creations.
BD: What toolset do you use these days?
NP: I prefer to start everything out with pencil and paper. I feel like I’ve got greater controls. But I’ll move fairly quickly into digital when the idea needs to be sold. And I find that ZBrush as a sculpting piece of software makes sense to use earlier and earlier. It’s all contingent on what the subject matter is… but in terms of the alien design for this film, since they were all human, it made sense to just go into ZBrush, grab a basic head and start tweaking it around. And I was able to generate a lot of ideas very quickly. So ZBrush is definitely a big part of my process; Photoshop, of course, for illustration and developing graphics… all the tattoos were done traditionally by hand — maybe hundreds. And then I took them into Photoshop and cleaned them up a bit and did the symmetry and the manipulation so they’d fit specific actors. And then modo, which is a new software for me. I love it. In fact, I have a demo opened in front of me, which is more architectural. Just trying to get my ability for doing environments a little higher. But it’s the software that makes sense for me. Maya is incredible, of course, but I don’t aspire to be that kind of artist as a digital designer.
