Yeah, I believe they were so crunched for time that they ended up having to shoot with Del Toro's character designs practically on set and later Jackson overlaid his designs digitally in post.
A fair number of my disappointments with the Hobbit trilogy seem to stem from the fact that the pre-production timeline was all messed up. Del Toro was on the movie for years, but the rights were tangled up between multiple studios so they couldn't start filming. Finally, Del Toro just couldn't wait any longer for a green light and he had to leave. Then suddenly the studios got their acts together and greenlit the whole thing. But they didn't have a director. Jackson didn't want to do it, but they were out of time. So he signed on with little prep and no real time to change up the script or designs to his liking. (They're both a-list filmmakers, but they have very different aesthetics. True, Jackson was exec producing, but as I understand it, he was letting Del Toro make the movie he wanted to make. Which was pretty different from the movie he would want to make.) So in the end it ended up being kind of a hodge-podge.
If I could visit the multi-verse, I'd love to see the movies Del Toro intended to make. I'd also love to see the movies Jackson would have made if given adequate prep time.
