June 11th update and 3rd year Anniversary recap

Another Landmark concept this week, this week for the entertainment District:

I really liked the idea of a Ferris wheel against the city’s skyline, but I wanted to make it a bit more interesting, its faint but inside there are orbs, I vision these as chambers that contain a floor that stays level no matter what way the wheel turns, so people can stand and look onto n the city.

 

In other news the 3rd anniversary of this Blog was on the 6th of June, I ended up missing it, which disappointing me greatly. I feel those kinda of dates are important. But none the less it doesn’t take away from what I’ve accomplished this year.

The biggest thing was completing the base building concepts which was frankly something I had been dreading, and I can honestly say it really did try my patience but thankfully that has lifted somewhat with the landmarks as I’ve been making them.

Overall I have two years to reach my milestone of the first episode, but unlike last year I’m not so confident I’ll reach that deadline in the time I have with the workflow I currently am using, but my schedule with college and other responsibilities prevent me from working faster.  Its something I’m very frustrated by, I’ve been wondering how I should go about making things easier for myself, I have a few options:

• Firstly I could do the storyboards before concepting the interior sets, so I can plan them out more efficiently but this could delay my completion of the interior concepts and prevent me giving proper care.
• Secondly I can start story-boarding the first episode while I’m working on the Interiors but this will tighten my already tight schedule.
• Third only concept the interior scenes for the first episode before moving onto the storyboards, this would speed up the development of the first episode and reduce my initial workload, but drags out the development of later episodes significantly since those concepts will have to be drawn and built at some point.

I still haven’t decided which of these approaches I’ll take, I have seven landmarks to complete, so I have seven weeks to decide, but I’m leaning toward the third option, since it will help me keep to my original deadline better and break up the work into something that feels more achievable.

I’m still working to follow my initial plan:

But I think in the next year I’ll be tweaking it, moving Marketing to a later in the chain, but I’m still not sure as to where, its a big part of the process and something I’ll probably spend money on, but my initial attempts to gauge my audience from animatics hasn’t gone well with some of my personal animatics. Where I’m going to market it will take some thought too, I don’t want ride on Rwby’s coattails and frankly I think the story can stand up on its own, so I want to find alternative avenues to find the audience.

I still maintain that once I’m done with the concepts I’ll be able to progress very rapidly, I’m faster at 3d modeling and rigging than producing well rendered art, so I don’t thing those parts of the plan will change much.

Overall I feel I’m going into next year with a more realistic outlook in the project, recently the show took some bumps, but I felt I learned from that, and I’m still optimistic for the future.

Anyway that’s it for this week, the progress list is as follows:

• 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: 7/7
  • Weapon Redesigns: 4/4
• Scene Concepts
  • Interiors: 0/24
  • Landmarks:8/15
  • Exteriors:39/39

Thank you all for continuing to follow the show’s development, until Next time,

Marc Out ~~

Season 1 Background Buildings

My second biggest milestone after the background characters

I feel this puts me overall past the half way point with the concept art. These milestones are really important to keeping motivation throughout the boring parts.

Anyway until Next time,

Marc Out ~~

March 5th Update

Woo! I did it, all of the background city buildings for season 1 are done!

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This fits into more of an office/admin styled building, I’m also going to use one as the station for the city monorail, I wanted to give it a very simple prefabricated look, similar to the modular pre-fab offices I found online.

And with that the two biggest concept jobs for the current season is done, this with the background character designs where the two jobs I was the most daunted by, Next will be landmarks and the interior rooms, which I suspect will take longer than a week per room because of the level of detail each room needs, but I will post progress images when I get to them.

For now the next big done is the Landmarks which should still fit the one per week formula I’ve been following.

That being said next week I’ll be posting a full catalogue of the buildings I’ve done like what I did with the background extras since I’ll be attending Dublin comic con and won’t have time to work.

Anyway that’s it for this week, Thanks so much to the folks who have stuck with the blog through this section, the progress list is as follows:

• 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: 7/7
  • Weapon Redesigns: 4/4
• Scene Concepts
  • Interiors: 0/24
  • Landmarks:0/15
  • Exteriors:39/39

2nd Year Anniversary and Review

Well its June 6th, which means that I’ve been posting on this blog for 2 years now and working on the project for 3 years, and like Last year I’m planning on doing a little review of what I’ve done over the year.

So the biggest milestone I completed was the background extra’s concepts, which I’m glad to have out of the way, out of all the concepts I had to do that group was the most numerous, even more so than the buildings I’m working on now, it was the most intimidating thing in the project so far, and if nothing else I’m proud of the sheer amount I was able to get down on paper.

The Second big milestone was finishing the main characters and their re-designs, which was satisfying to see all the realised characters on paper, I still want to draw a group shot showing differences in body type and height but for now I’m happy to just have usable reference for modeling each character.

Tying in with that was the completion and re-design of the weapons, this was a big detail character wise to complete since I feel in a fighting cartoon, weapons help show personality, and having reference for each weapon is going to be so useful in the future.

Not everything was good news this year though, I had to part ways with my volunteer composer Maxim, after realising that he wasn’t the best fit for the project, we didn’t fall out, and I’d love to work with him again on a project better suited to his style of music, but it does feel like a frustrating failure on my part for being unable to direct him in the way both he and the project needed. I’ve realised that honestly the only real option is to keep searching and save money to hire someone who can fit the j-punk/anime tone of the show.

Overall 3 years into my 5 year goal I’m actually still confident I can meet the deadline of producing the first episode, I’m actually well over half way through the conception stage, which is by far the most difficult to get through for me, since its working from practically nothing. once they are done I have a jumping off point for everything.

The overall plan still remains the same as last year, if any of you guy remember the spaghetti sprawl:

since last year I have realised a few things are going to be more difficult than I first pictured, like the marketing, but I’ve learned a lot about 3d Modeling and rigging since last year. but if all goes according to plan, I may be able to move onto a few of the next stages in this upcoming year.

Its been a productive year and hopefully I’ll continue building momentum.
Here’s to the progress to come!

Till Next week

Marc Out~~

November 21st Update

Last Character concept for now, a redesign of Mayor Grey:

Its a very minor change to this design, but I prefer it, it looks a little more interesting than the old design, which I feel looked a little too bland:

And with that, I’m done with the character concepts, I would like to re-draw a few, there are one or two minor supporting characters, and there a handful of scene specific background characters, but these can wait until after my next two milestones.

Speaking of which, what comes next? Well now that I have the characters, I need a world with objects for them to interact with, which is a bigger hurdle than it sounds. There are two important milestones I need to complete, First I want to design weapons for the main characters, second I want to design buildings for the city, The buildings are the bigger job, and I don’t want to jump straight into another year long milestone right after finishing one, so I’m going to focus on designing weapons for the next few weeks, so I’m adding some new categories to the end of Update list:

• 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: 0/12
  • Secondary Characters: 0/7
• Scene Concepts
  • Interiors: 0/24
  • Exteriors: 0/20

With any luck the progress for these new milestones won’t be as slow going as the characters.

That’s all for this week,
Until next time

Marc Out~~

June 19th Update

Last of the blindfold code followers, after this one I only have six more background extras to do!

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Its pretty exciting seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on a big milestone like this.

I also love the the logos I designed for these followers, I’m going to for a punk anarchist look with them, so that’s kind of inspired the logos as well. I’m going to really focus on using these for inspiration when I’m re-designing some of the blindfold code members.

I’ve also bee brainstorming how I’m going to handle concepting the environments and scenes of the show, and I think I have an idea, I’m going to handle it in a similar way to how I’ve been handling these background extras. I’m going to start with just buildings and draw only three or four buildings for each section of the city. However I’m still going to hold off on those until I have all the character concepts for season one done.

So here is my current status on concepts:

• Background extras:36/42
• Main Characters: 13/13
• Main character re-designs: 1/5
• Secondary Character: 7/12
• Secondary Character re-designs: 0/4

These numbers may rise and fall as the series develops, but I’m going to start including the milestones on whatever I’m doing with each post from here on out.

That’s all for this Update
Until next week

Marc Out~~

October 30th Update

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

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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:

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:

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~~

October 9th Update

One of the most inhuman looking characters Kusanagi Tsurugi (yeah the name is a total mouthful!)

I wanted to have a character that shows the ranges of humanity Otherkin have, so I wanted one that was barely recognisable as human, he has heavy influences from the Saurians from outlaw star:

I toyed around with the idea of giving him hair, but I could tell even without colouring it it looked kinda ridiculous, so I left it at that. I’ll have to nearly make a custom model for his head, but I’m learning that its far easier to animate snouts than faces, so it shouldn’t be too much extra effort. I also decided to curl his wings out backward, but I’m not sure I like the look of that, I may change it once I’m doing the model.

As to the updates on the new template models, I am working on them, but the only one I have I’ve done in Maya, and i still don’t know how to render and export in it yet, so you’ll have to wait for that, its a little stylised for what I want (I was following a tutorial, in class) I’m working to get some notes from my lecturer so I can remake it in blender.

I have one more character that’s relevant to the story I’ll be concepting, then I plan on moving to background extras, up until now I’ve been using these concepts to practise my posing and proportions, but luckily I’ll be working on that regularly in college. So I’m going to cut a few corners to get the ideas on paper faster. I really want to bump up the speed on this pre-production so I can get to the cool looking parts, but I have to be careful not to let the quality of the production slip as a result.

Lot’s of planning this week, but with next week’s character I’ll be hitting my first Character milestone, I’m looking forward to it

Till then

Marc Out~~

Kigyo and milestones

Still experimenting with post layout on wordpress, I don’t want to repeat and image too much in my updates, but I’m going to try another approach, the featured Image will be a preview of the full image, and I’ll place a more detailed view below it, and here it is, the blindfold code’s Tank Kigyo:

He was the first blindfold code member that I ever drew, and i think it shows a bit, he doesn’t fully fit the punky hoodie look of the others, so I will probably redo him, there are aspects of his design that I do like and will be keeping, like the hex pattern on his sleeves, his hair colour, the hood made up of strips, as well as the mask made of multiple blindfolds. His original inspiration was based off of Konoha from Mekakucity Actors, in both his black and normal forms:

I think the main problem is that these two don’t match the designs of the other characters, because they were designed to be a villain rather then part of the group in the anime, so I’ll take a little time to redesign a hoodie for him, which I’m thinking I’ll base off of the segmented hoodie I came up with.

 

I don’t have much to show this week in other area’s, this week was kind of hectic for me, but there is another important subject I wanted to detail this week, my goals and milestones.

I don’t have much experience making a cartoon, even in a team, so I’ve been scouring the internet for any information, and I came across Olan Rogers, who has released a pilot episode of his show, Final space, which I highly suggest you go look up. but in one of his vlogs he mentions that it took him six years to get it made, so I’ve adopted that time frame for myself. Now over the last year I’ve been writing the script which is still in revisions at the moment, and may take some time, but is largely finished in my opinion which took about a year. After that I have started working on concept art, which I’m now about three months into, and I expect to take me another six, but may take longer, due to redesigns and college constraints. After that I move into story boarding, voice acting and animatic building which at my currents speed I expect to take between two and three years unless I can find help. After that I move to animating, which I expect one more year to get the pilot done.

So to summerise I’m ordering my time to hopefully look a little like this

Year 1 – scripting (Completed)

Year 2 – Concept art/begin Story boarding (in progress)

Year 3  – finish Story boarding/ record voice work/ combine story boards and audio into animatic

Year 4 – begin animation

Year 5 – finish pilot

Now, each of these big milestones are being broken down into smaller more manageable milestones, which in turn I’m breaking down into tasks that should take me about week to do, I’m not going to go into each one now, but I will give you an example with my current milestone, Concept art and story boarding.

I’ve broken up my workload into two main sections characters and environments. In characters I have: Main cast, Support cast, and background characters.

In Environments I’ve broken it up into another two categories: interiors and exteriors. Exteriors I’ve divided up into halves of the city: the human half, and the other half belonging to a race called otherkin, which a few scatter neutral areas. The Interior are going to be collected rooms from the script that will be themed around the different sectors from the two halves of the city.

From there I treat treat each drawing as a week’s work to design and detail, for characters this is a single person, for a exterior environment, this is a single sector, for interiors, this is a room. This probably seems like a lot of work, but this breaking down process helps keep me from getting overwhelmed by the bigger picture and focus on smaller achievable milestones, right now I’m focusing on my current milestone: Completing the art for the support cast of which I only half three characters left.

Wow this turned into a far longer post then I expected, don’t worry, next week I’ll be back with more art and 3D work

Till then

Marc Out~~