Bonus Content Disc/Creatures: Turians

The following are transcriptions of the artists' comments for the design gallery "The Creatures of Mass Effect: Turians" found on the bonus content disc of Mass Effect released in 2007.

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Sung Kim: Hi, my name is Sung Kim, and I'm a concept artist for BioWare. I was on another project at the time, Dragon Age, when Mass Effect had asked me to work on a few concepts, particularly the turian. This concept here was an early sketch of the turian; it was very influenced by bird-like features. Designers had mentioned that they wanted a bird race, and essentially, it was trying to capture that in the head, with sort of like a beak-like facial features and feathers, but ultimately, this was a little bit too bird-like.

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Sung Kim: This one here was very similar facially, but I just tried playing around with the body and was sort of influenced with the Batman Animated-style body. Very triangular, blocky upper body; give it sort of an imposing look.

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Sung Kim: Another concept of the turian. Ultimately this was a little too far the other way, I wanted to get away from bird features. I guess this one sort of fell in the "what is that?" category. It was too far gone. There were some interesting things that I pulled from it that actually stayed on the actual turian that was used.

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Sung Kim: I guess the more I was playing around with the musculature and physiology of the turian, the more I wanted it to be sort of elegant and long and have sort of an exoskeleton feel to it, and to make it look, I guess, fast and agile, and essentially hoping that the characteristics of the head were the most prominent features. And unfortunately, I was running out of time doing concepts on the turian, so I never got to fully actualize the lower part portion of the body... I guess more details of the rest of him.

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Sung Kim: Tighter version of the head. It was sort of my intention to have that plated feel over the face, almost as though you can imagine that over years of evolution. They were birds, and their beak had just evolved into plating over the entirety of the face and areas of the body. Hopefully, carrying some of the characterizations of the bird eyes I think plays a big part in the success of the concept. I wanted to have a certain intelligence to the race. Yeah, and that's about it.

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Derek Watts: So, after we designed the turian, the designers came forward to us at Saren. Our main bad guy was a turian, so we had to decide how much we wanted to take the actual turian design and make it different. Was he radically different from the original turians? Was he huge? Was his head different? Did he have extra limbs? So, this drawing here was actually kind of starting to figure out the head. We were starting to work on his actual clothing; very important to get cool villain clothing. So, Matt Rhodes actually was looking at a lot of robes, cloth; this was the concept for that. We ended up having to not do the cloth, it was just going to be too hard. The designers were also worried about your main villain; this game is all about armor, your different kinds of armors and shields... and your main bad guy has cloth. They were worried that it feels like you should be able to shoot him with one shot.

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Derek Watts: So, after we found out that cloth was a no-go, we went with armor. So, we played around with quite a few different armor variations, then we started to really look at pushing the design a bit more. What we kind of came up with, after talking to Casey, is he wanted to have more of kind of a geth arm on him; he started to be transferred more into the machine. He has the blue lights in there, maybe he has one large geth arm really kind of moved in with hoses. A really iconic feature of him. In this concept, you can see he's still quite thin; the turians were this very sinewy race. We ended up bulking him up quite a bit just to make him feel more massive. And then the one drawing on the right is just some detail about how the hoses start to go into his head. He's getting turned over into a machine. The blue lights in there... So, this is pretty well the final one. We just ended up adding more dirt onto him, a bit more weathering... Almost blood splattering on him, that he's been through hell and back.

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Derek Watts: This is the concept for Saren's head. We did a lot of concepts for this, probably did about 25 or so. Matt Rhodes and myself all worked on these. Talk about a lot of people being included in design. We had Sung did the original turian head; Matt did some variations on this, he actually painted all the robes around here and all the clothing on Saren; I actually worked on the head. Some of the things we did to kind of get a different look was we took some microscopic pictures of insects, and the large bone structure that comes out from the back of his eye is actually the stinger off a mosquito. We just kind of incorporated that into the design, and how those grooves work with just the actual photo being overlaid on top. The pistons... we wanted to kind of start to get him some mechanisms in his jaw like he's starting to get eaten away, and he's starting to get hollow in there with these blue lights kind of shining in through there. We eventually took his eye and made that blue also like it was mechanic. We looked at, I think... Transformers: The Movie had a poster come out, and we looked at that eye a bit as a bit of reference.

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Derek Watts: This concept here is the turian monster... "Saren monster" I should say. After Saren gets destroyed, gets eaten away, comes back to life, as they always do -- I don't know how many times you have to try and kill him -- he turns into a monster. So, this is him actually at that point. We ended up animating him to the hopper pose, so we made him all on all fours. He gets eaten away, he's missing his jaw, he has all these wiring being exposed. Matt Rhodes has him kind of burning up on here. This concept was something real, like, it was very hard to model though. We gave it to James the modeler and I mean, he did a great job on it because there was a lot of questions unanswered with this. How do these hinges work? What's it made out of? How much of these hoses do I have to build in here? And so on. But the final model turned out really good.