i am serious to learn … 
Just got back from the film and read the Art of book for a couple of hours. What an inspiration. Really excellent work. The characters, the world and the story are all of such high quality that this will be a hard bar to match.
I thought the characters in this thread were all incredible in the film. Watching the trailer I wasn’t really expecting to be blown away but when you see these guys in the film and in 3D you get really drawn in and forget that you are watching CG. Sigourney Weaver’s avatar was the best for me as it truly looked like it had been grown with her DNA
Zoe Saldana deserves the best virtual/cg/mocap actor Oscar. This is the one they should have introduced to give to Andy Serkis several years back. Zoe was great as Neytiri and thats not just down to great acting but because of all the hard work you guys have put into this. Top job, I want a sequel just so I can see more of this world.
:Damazing!Avatar!
I Saw the movie again (fourth time) in Imax, and I’m still blown away after four viewings lol. Additionally, I bought the first part of your Gnomon DVD’s on character design and it is excellent, I look forward to putting the techniques you talk about into practice.
Absolutely wonderful work and having seen Avatar numerous times i can fully appreciate the designs.
Look forward to seeing more inspirational work…
Dreamworld Digital
Hello Scott,
first let me say that I envy… or better adore those people who have such nice workplaces and projects. I just watched Avatar a few times but I
did fallen in love with the whole movie and the main-characters within the first view of Jake in his avatar-being and the following scenes. It was one of the rare occusions that a movie touched me so deep and
made me a goose skin!
Since I only have expirience with sea mamals (specially dolphins!) in zbrush I’m some kind of stuck and searched via Google for some help where to start to model my own avatar. And I did end here, registering and browsing the forums. I was pretty surprised that there is a thread with somebody directly related to the movie. It’s a big honor for me to know that this message is read by somebody faaaar superior and of course far more successfull with these tools.
I’m fully pleased what your co-workers made out of your work. Cameron gave the idea but your department gave it the soul. As I said already, this movie was so emotional, magnificent.
What is slow? I work with Zbrush 3 and 3Dsmax 5 on a Acer Aspire 1511LMI (1,6GHz Athlon64, 2GB RAM, 500GB internal HDD, 2nd screen and WinXP 32bit) and it feels slow. =)
I was part of the group of artists that Designed the Na’vi characters I was responsible for working out Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) Digital sculpts with expressions as a proof of concept for the look of the Na’vi people. I also did the designs for Norm (Joel Moore) as well as the Grace ( Sigourney Weaver}.
You did a great work, the concept-pictures look great! I bought today
the “The art of Avatar”-book. It holds so many nice concept and design
images, but I miss pictures from the internal design-project like those
you did kindly show us. Maybe “The Movie Scrapbook” holds some more.
We also designed the Viper wolfs from a sketch of Camerons.
And fleshed out and detailed the head of the Banshee and figured out how it would function, that was a Neville Page design
The Banshee looked nice, to me part raptor part dragon. Only the
gill-like breathholes looked odd, the same with the “horses”. But
I designed some blowholes for a Beluga-animation and that was already
pretty tricky to animate the breathtaking-movement. I’m a noob.
Here are some of the Images that I did for the film Hope you like them, It was a long while ago, it’s amazing how far CG has come from way back when these were done.
PS.Here are some links to my new Gnomon DVDs
Yes, I haven’t done much with 3D-animation the last 2 years, mostly
picturemanipulation and editing for poster or some videoeffects,
for the letter one Photoshop comes in handy.
And about CG-evolution: yes, its pretty amazing what was standard back then and today, even with homecomputer-equipment… now somebody told me that it is now possible to use 3Dsmax to capture facial expressions and full bodymovement with just one (facial) or two cams in realtime with some addon… unfortunately I don’t know wich
software that is, that would make my workflow alot easier and faster.
And yes, I have seen the product-page of those DVDs already. I must
admit that I haven’t bought them yet, I still plan to do… especially
if I keep up with my work on my own Avatar and the work on a selfmade
Neytiri.
Thank you for your kindness to share this in public and keep up
your good work!
phiny regards from the 'lil Avatardolphin :}
Awesome!!! A work very well done!!! Perfect!!! Congratulations!!!
Patton, I honestly cannot even begin to tell you how awesome your work is. You have inspired me to learn ZBrush after using 3DS Max for 7 years! I got your training DVD, saving up for the 2nd next month. I’ve also seen Avatar about 4 times already and there will be a 5th and 6th lol… its like porn for us CG Artists!
Congrats on some fantastic work man,
Marc
Amazing stuff buddie!
Thanks for sharing!
I am a student new to 3d world and you people are just like GOD to me!
All my life I’ll keep trying to emulate you. I love ZBrush very very much.
Thanks for sharing your work.
We just saw it again a second time yesterday, and love it even more!
Any chance of you posting some character dekstop wallpaper sized images? The stuff available on the net are pretty crappy resolutions.
It took us a second viewing to notice the Navi have only 3 fingers, while the human avatars have 4… interesting divergence.
… (And my wife stil hadn’t noticed it till I pointed it out to her!)
@ Gareee
You can ge some pretty large wallpapers at the official site (http://www.avatarmovie.com/index.html) or from their Flicker Stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/officialavatarmovie/
but yes, some larger images of wires etc. would be interesting to look at. Great work on the film. Seeing it again tomorrow.
Thanks! I have a feeling I’ll be spending some time at that flicker site… 
OUTEVERMOSTBESTGREATOMGatastic!
Everything, the art, the feel of the movie as a whole, wonderful and very inspiring! Congratulations to all the people that worked on this epic project!!
Hat’s down.
Really inspiring stuff. I’ve seen the movie 3 times already and am still blown away every time I see it. Your guy’s work and the movie itself has been a huge inspiration to me as an artist. And the fact that you are self taught also is encouraging to me as I went to school and got a degree in computer science only to find out afterwards that I wouldn’t be happy until I was doing 3D for a living. Definitely encourages me to keep at it on my own because I love doing it.
Lemo: yes, you are a genius , I bow to you!!
Thanks everyone!!
Just got back from watching the movie and it was fantastic. I could not believe all the work that went into that movie. It shows and I had a great time!
I just came back from the cinema, and I still feel shaky from the whole experience. When I was walking back to my car, I felt like I wanted to go and hang out on Pandora. All I have is my boring human body, crappy car that’s going to break down in little less than a year.
I can’t believe how attractive the creatures were in the film. Every single one of them were just gorgeous. Its the one film that in a looooong time that I’ve felt like going back and watching again. Why did I enjoy it so much? probably the main reason why was because I wasn’t boasted at by the screen “LOOK AT WHAT WE CAN DO NOW WITH 3D”. Instead the movie said to me “We are damn good at our graphics and here is a REAL story”. It was such a relief to go to the cinema and not be bombarded with brightly coloured pies thrown at my eyes one after the other and then have some more from another angle thrown, this time in slow mo. Exquisite craft producing a new standard, classic story telling.
When I was a kid I used to keep the tickets to the films I went to, that eventually wore off after a while. I thought it was because I grew out of it, until today.
Are you still going to put up some more process?