DESIGN DIARY - 11.09.00

Leia Organa, Princess of Alderaan

"Good morning Joe."

Silent as a tomb is his shadowy corner, Joe is meticulously working on the Princess Leia model. It's not a wireframe construction but rather a 3D model of the figure's surfaces, semi-transparent and without any colors. Although I can recognize the character, I don't really see her: I make out a succession of gray layers, and the computer allows me to look through each of them, all the way to the core of the model.
It feels like I'm looking right at Princess Leia's soul.

"Your timing is perfect," says Joe. And he hits a button on the screen.
Leia's soul disappears - but the display doesn't stay blank for long. The computer is rendering the model, taking Leia's essence and molding it into a physical entity. Even on Joe's heavy-duty computer equipment, the process is not instantaneous, nor would I expect it to be. Incarnation is a complicated and delicate matter. Piece by piece, as if the computer were assembling a living jigsaw puzzle, the Princess takes form. I first catch a glimpse of her white diplomatic robe, then part of her arm, then her lips - deep red - then a lock of hair, an eye. Half of her face has materialized and before I get a chance to take it in, the rest of the model springs into reality, like magnets snapping back together, whole at last.

"You're the first one to see her like this."
I have just witnessed the birth of Princess Leia.

All my fears about computer-generated alter egos of the main characters of the Star Wars universe have vanished into digital oblivion. Leia is a lot more beautiful than what I expected - and I expected a lot. Yesterday evening, shortly before I left work, I was shown the first 26 finished card images that were minutes away from being sent to Lucasfilm for approval. And I was very impressed. That first batch featured, among other wonders, amazing images of TIE fighters, an unbelievable look at the Endor bunker, and an attack on a sandcrawler like no one has ever seen before. "Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise..."
Yet, despite those spectacular visuals, a part of me dreaded the moment when I would look upon the likeness of the first main character to be declared complete by the Art Department. That moment is behind me now, and the dread is gone. But I'm not better off: now I just can't wait to see the rest of the main characters. If they look half as good as Leia, it'll make for one stunning family portrait.

"She's the result of the combined efforts of four artists working over quite a long period," says Joe with a touch of reverence in his voice. Quiet, we just stare at the screen for a moment. The Jedi Knights digital models are being given a special look that lies halfway between computer-generated imagery and photo-reality. And Leia is right at that junction, with one foot firmly planted in the computer's digital world, and the other extending in our own universe. Flesh and bits.

I ask Joe if Leia was first built as a skeleton and then expanded until she reached her final form; to my surprise, he tells me that the process is reversed. "The skeleton was the last part of the puzzle. First we design the surface, the texture, and we work on it until we obtain the look we want. Then the bones go in and we tell the computer where to place the joints, and what each joint can and cannot do. This ensures that when moving the model we don't end up with an elbow bent at a wrong angle. Then we bind the skin to the bones, telling the computer how this should affect the appearance of the model. So the skeletal structure is really designed last. The whole creation process runs backwards."

And on the first day, Joe rested.

Francis K. Lalumiere
The Juggler