Season 1 Background Extras

As Promised, My first big milestone, the Background Characters on the City, here so I can reflect on the amount I’ve gotten done, The are 126 images in this Gallery.

Looking forward to complete more milestones like this in the future.

Until Next time,

Marc Out ~~

May 15th Update

Last female business woman today, only one Male one left and that’s it for people in suits:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Not much to talk about this one, Clothes wise, I did the same as last week, I took a previous suit and removed the suit jacket, the Hair was a modified version of android 18 from Dragonball Z:
5137618-0968584112-andro

In anticipation of actually finishing the majority of my extras, I’ve started setting up a deviant art account as a sort of gallery to view all of the artwork I’ve done so far, it will be far easier than scrubbing through the blog posts I’ve done up until now, I’ll post a link to it once I have all the art uploaded to it in a few weeks.

That’s all for this week, till next time,

Marc Out~~

May 1st Update

Another business woman this week:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I realised as I was thinking about this design that all the women I have as business times all half skirts, so I decided to give at least one pants and this is the result.

Only 12 background character concepts left to do, honestly I’m getting really excited to start working on the main character revisions and get the designs of the characters I haven’t drawn yet done. After that I’m hoping to get a few environment concepts, which honestly I’m not totally sure how to attempt, I have a few ideas, but landscape drawing is very time consuming, not to mention that I have some key buildings that I want to set aside time to design, but that’s something I’ll work out when I get to it, right now I’m happy to be close to reaching this objective. When their all done I’ll place them into a separate slideshow so the can all be viewed in the one place.

Anyway, that’s all for this week, until then

Marc Out~~

April 18th Update

Argh! I’m a bit behind this week with the background character this week, Back to the business types for a while:

 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I looked over some of the earlier Business men and women I roughed out before, and decided I wanted Human business people to look a little more casual, so there are going to be more open jackets and rolled up sleeves in these designed than the Otherkin ones I started with. I’m not sure I’m Ok with the hair I designed for this particular one, particularly the division along the side, but I’m going to give myself a bit of time to process it.

Other than that not much else to report, things have been a lot more hectic than I’ve expected over the Easter, but I am hoping to have myself a bit more organised this week.

Till then,

Marc Out~~

November 21st Update

Another week, another business extra, but luckily this is the last businessy extra for a while:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

This one was basic off the idea of cats, there is also a hint of a character from one of the final fantasy mmos, I’m not sure what her name was but her race was Mithra, but these look more like Miqo’te from the newer game.

I’ve been largely busy this week with college work, however, I have started streaming my work on Picarto.tv, I may add a link to it in the side menu to my channel, it was a fun experience, there wasn’t a lot of people watching, and I had a lot of technical difficulties, but I enjoyed it enough to decide to make it a regular thing. I also see it as a useful way of interacting with you guys and find out what sort of things you want to see in these updates. For the moment I’m going to try live streaming on Fridays. You’ll be able to find my channel here: The Marcamatic Channel
Hope to see some people there 😀

Marc Out~~

October 30th Update

Another week and more concept art, this time a business woman:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I had a bit of fun with the colors with this one, the suit colours are the same as the last extra but I wanted to make the hair a bit more out there, especially since this set were based on exotic birds. I’ve been doing research on extras in animation, and it would seem my estimate of six per sector is pretty on the money, check out this analysis of star wars rebels I found:
sw-rebels-extras

This has actually given me a lot of hope for the future, since I’ve found the take of designing extras a lot more intimidating that the main characters, just through the sheer volume that I’ll need to do. That being said, I’ve been trying to focus on taking this one template at a time, but its still going to take a long time, I’m giving each district 6 template characters, and I have 21 districts including a black market sector, so in total I have 126 templates to draw, so my main concern is which districts I can reuse extras on, the areas I have are as follows, with the human areas called sectors and the Otherkin areas called Districts:

  • The Government Sector
  • The Business Sector
  • The Commercial Sector
  • The Military Sector
  • The Residential Sector
  • the Industrial Sector
  • The Entertainment Sector
  • The Processing Sector
  • The Research Sector
  • The Agriculture sector
  • The garden of Remembrance (a human owned area)
  •  The Upper District
  • The Mining District
  • The Factory District
  • The Business district
  • The Residential District
  • The Industrial District
  • The Warehouse district
  • The Market District
  • the Focus Training Dojos (Otherkin Owned)
  • The Lower district (or the slums, Neutral for both Humans and Otherkin)
  • The Black Market (Also Neutral)

There are some smaller areas as well, but I’m planning on reusing templates there, over the next week or so, I’m going to see which of those areas I can get away with re-using templates in so I can reduce those 126 drawings, For example, the Mining, Indrustial, and Warehouse districts will all be using Otherkin Labourers, so I may use the same six template extras for those three areas. I’ll have a list in the Next update for all the extras designs I’ll be needing.

Speaking of templates, I’ve started work on the new female template:
femaletemplate5

You’ll have to forgive the gap in the middle, I’m only building half the model and copying and flipping it to give you guys a better idea of my progress, it looks very similar to the original templates, but under the surface is much cleaner for animation, the eyes and mouth have a lot more detail in them and the mesh structure around the mouth and eyes will look more natural when I’m animating it. I’ve been working off youtube videos, but its actually amazing how few people using blender take into account the muscle structure of the face when modelling and focus on only the appearance of the model, as a result the models look great up until the point were you move the features. That being said even my own model could use work, but its definitely been a lesson in “choose your teachers well”.

Speaking of learning I’ve been looking for ways of story boarding, so far the only thing that seems reliable is drawing the boards myself in photoshop, but that’s adding to my drawing workload, which from above is pretty extensive as is. there seems to be plenty of software out there for story boarding, but its all insanely expensive, and honestly seems more limiting then just drawing them myself, so for now I’m just sticking with that, Drawing in photoshop, and creating animatics in flash

That’s all for this week, till next time.

Marc Out~~