↪︎The novel doesn’t have that many characters, which gave Peter Watts ample opportunity to describe each one in depth. We began our work on this part by finding suitable references for each of them. Apart from their appearance, we also needed to figure out their uniforms, find the right mix of recognizable, functional and futuristic.

↪︎After a few iterations from our concept-artist, we had several character sketches that fit all the qualifications.

↪︎We began modeling Sarasti off the concept-art, but then found an AMA of Peter Watts’ on Reddit, in which he mentioned Mads Mikkelsen as the perfect actor for Sarasti’s part. This made our job a lot easier - we took Mads’ appearance as our starting-off point and then tweaked it to fit the vampiric traits described in the book.

Next we needed to figure out skin and hair shading and create his outfit.

↪︎In the case of Siri’s character we were lucky enough to find a suitable actor in a photogrammetry database. So this provided us with a starter model and textures.

↪︎After some manual clean up of the textures and a bit of retopology the model was ready for animation. The sculptor ended up having to make a few more versions of the model in order to give us all the necessary face and neck positions demanded by the script.

↪︎All that remained was placing the character in the shot’s environment and we were done.