A lot to get through this week, first up this week’s concept and the second last weapon concept for the moment, Commander Izanami‘s weapon:
I was searching for ceremonial Chinese swords and came across a number of Dao swords from the Tang Dynasty that I loved the look of
The simplicity of the designs fits the character really well, since she’s a bit of a pragmatist despite the formal clothes. It also contrasts nicely with her counterpart Commander Izanagi’s Weapon which is a bit more technology based. Overall I wanted to keep this weapon simple since it only appears once in the first season.
Secondly, comes the cool thing I was talking about at the end of last week’s blog post, the first animation for Fade’s teaser:
Its a section that comes later in the story, but its a excellent scene for generating interest, it still required some music and some redrawing in parts, but this is a really important milestone for me since its the first thing I’ve been able to show that conveys the tone of the cartoon and shows the key relationship dynamics for three of our four main characters.
That being said there is some extra work to be done, while Ebony’s design is fine for this scene, Ash, and more so Blue have some pretty drastic changes to their looks that I had to leave out. The environment will also need to be planned out, and while I have a good idea of the layout, a few parts I’ll need to find out how to texture and model.
Overall though this minute and a half video I have gotten a much better idea of how to plan out the storyboards of the show itself and over the summer I want to break my work week into finishing environment concepts and storyboards for the Official trailer which will contain scenes solely from season 1. This might seem like jumping ahead when the teaser has only really been started, but in my current situation I’m pretty limited in what I can do technology wise, so jumping into modelling and animating isn’t a good idea, plus with animatics I can actually plan out what I need far better, which will save me building assets I might not actually need, so overall the more storyboards and animatics I do now, the less I have to do later.
When it comes to adding the trailer to the progress list, I’m going to wait until I have a scene list of moments I’m going to include in the Trailer, the idea is the Teaser should raise questions, and the Trailer should answer just enough to make people care, so I want to take my time with it more so than with the Teaser, so it might be a while before I talk about it again, but know that its very much still at work in the background.
Anyway, onto this week’s progress:
- Character Concepts
- Background extras:42/42
- Main Characters: 13/13
- Main character re-designs: 5/5
- Secondary Character: 14/14
- Secondary Character re-designs: 5/5
- Weapon Concepts
- Main Characters: 12/12
- Secondary Characters: 6/7
- Weapon Redesigns: 0/4
- Scene Concepts
- Interiors: 0/24
- Exteriors: 0/20
That’s all for this week,
Until next time
Marc Out~~
Fade Cartoon 