April 2nd Update

First of the four weapon redesigns, Naga’s:

SnakeSplitter2.png

I basically combined the elements I liked from the previous designs into one, and honestly I’ve think I’ve got the best of of the three in one design

SnakeSplitter

I wish I had more this week, if I all the redesigns go as quick as this one I could potentially do more than one, but I hit a pretty major wall of creative resistance, which doesn’t happen often, but thanks to the deadline i give myself each week I was able to power through it.

Which makes me realise I haven’t talked much about my creative process in general, so I will a little now.
The first an most important thing I want to point out is that everyone has different ways of working, some people might have more efficient ways, but this is what works for me.

I go to college in Dublin, when I get home I only really have two hours to myself after I’m done with homework and such, and its very easy to sit and watch movies or play games until I have to sleep, so I make a deal with myself, I sit down and try to work for  one hour. The key word here is try, and its really important, creativity sort of comes and goes like the tide, its very easy to say that you don’t have motivation and give up on working, don’t do that, its a trap. You might not get much done, but it is very important to get something done, anything you do get done is something your won’t have to do next time, even if its a line or two of a drawing or a word or two of a script.

The second thing that’s important in my work is limitations, I have a lot of this story planned out, but I’m only focusing on the parts that are urgent, I’ve had people disagree with what those urgency are, but these ultimately need to be done eventually, but in this project its important that certain elements do get a second look, particularly designs involving main characters, so I need to limit how main times I go back and tweak things, for concepts I’m allowing myself one loop of redesigns and for storyboards I’m going to allow two.

Finally comes the balance of scope, and this is a tricky one, Fade is a big project for one person, and keeping a view of the overall vision of the project is important, but in order to not get overwhelmed it has to be broken down into smaller steps, and again into sub-steps, a small step is far easier to achieve than a large one, but you’d be amazed how many people only see the big steps when I talk about this project. But there are down sides to the small steps too, if there are two many it can feel like the project is dragging on, and complicate planning, so its important to step back and view the larger scope again.
All in all, be adaptable, and be productive and things tend to slot into place

So there we go, I don’t know how many people will read this, but I hope it helps those that do.

Anyway, here is 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: 7/7
    • Weapon Redesigns: 1/4
  • Scene Concepts
    • Interiors: 0/24
    • Exteriors: 0/20

That’s all for this week,
Until next time

Marc Out~~

January 22nd Update

Ok, getting close to the end of the weapon concepts, this week its Naga’s Weapon:

SnakeSplitter

This was a seriously fun weapon to design, First off I knew I wanted to give Naga some variant of the Seven Branched Sword:

the-seven-branched-sword

After that I started searching for other swords I could combine it with to make it a bit more original, one of the first I looked up was Green Destiny from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which inspired the leftmost Sword in my concepts:

6760

I also over the course of researching came across the Sword of Goujian, which the more I find out about the more like an actual Anime the story behind it gets.

goujian-hubei-provincial-museum-2

Combining the two I came up with the Right most Sword in my concept image, which I think will be the one I go with.

Ok, now onto the bad news, I unfortunately won’t be able to post a blog post next week, due to me taking part in the Global Game Jam as an Animator, it’ll be the first week I’ve missed since starting this blog, but if I can I’ll try to update later in the week, fingers crossed.

Anyway, here is 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: 10/12
    • Secondary Characters: 0/7
  • Scene Concepts
    • Interiors: 0/24
    • Exteriors: 0/20

That’s all for this week,
Until next time

Marc Out~~

October 22nd Update

Apologies for the lack of an update last week, I had a power outage and I didn’t get it back until mid week, so I decided to just add this week’s and last week’s progress together, first up the last on my main character redesigns, Naga:

Naga2

I’m so much happier with this design than with the old one:
Naga

The actual changes aren’t that extreme but opening up the hoodie and changing to cargo pants really highlights the misguided teen style I’m going with, and breaks up the black and green nicely, where as before I felt the black unbalanced the previous design.

Secondly we have the first redesign of the secondary Characters, Sakata:

Sakata2

This design didn’t actually change as much as I thought it would:

sakata

Basically I adapted his armour to match the style of the human military

MaleHumanMilitary1A

I also moved the tattered shirt to the outside, and while I do like the coat I feel it is a bit bland on its own, but for now I’m quite happy with it, since the problem is that I felt his design didn’t match the advance technology of the Human culture, which I feel subtlety it does now, while keeping his individuality.

Now, onto this week’s status on concepts:

  • Background extras:42/42
  • Main Characters: 13/13
  • Main character re-designs: 5/5
  • Secondary Character: 14/14
  • Secondary Character re-designs: 1/5

That’s all for this week,
Until next time

Marc Out~~

Naga and 3D updates

Another week another Character concept, this week is Naga:
Naga

Like the other characters I’ve shown he’s based off of a two Mekakucity Actor’s characters, this time its Seto and Shintaro

10274269d1b03d4a3ef801c12bae6c2934b260bc

I disliked Seto over all design but liked the colour scheme, so I worked to stick the colours onto a design that I liked, and I loved the dual coloured jacket that Shintaro has in this picture, which he never wore in the anime, for some strange reason, because I think its the best outfit I’ve seen him in.

In 3D news I’ve been taking a break from my female template to work on two new things: A male template and fixing the transparency problem with my title wall.

I’ll start with the template model, since I’ll get though that quickly. I was attempting to do what I had done with the female model and use a Rwby reference image, and I thought that using mercury would leave little up to imagination but I’ve realised that most of the guys in Rwby have some form of popped collar and waist obscuring drapery, making is difficult to gauge parts of the body, also male eyes are much smaller in Rwby for some reason. Luckily I’ve been able to find a super high res image of Neptune which has been doing the job nicely for now:
MaleTemplate1

The female template I had nearly finished when I started this blog, so I’m looking forward to showing my progress as I go with this one. Also If your curious about the reference image, check it out here:
Neptune-turnaround.png

In an earlier blog post Ebony and Material practise I talked about a problem I’ve been dealing with with some of my textures in blender cycles being unnesssarily transparent, I haven’t fully nailed down the problem, but I think it could be in how I’m exporting the images from photoshop, I decided to split my materials apart, making just a graffiti Material:

Graffiti1

And and Wall Material

Wall1

Now it looks to me that the graffiti is still a bit darker than it should be, I went out of my way to make the images bright:

I’m thinking that its possible by making the images .png files its automatically making the image transparent. If there are any experts in blender I’d love to know how you’d handle it in the comments below.

And also in case your wondering, I’ve made this graffiti for the intro of the show, Its going to be very inspired by the Noragmai opening, but more on that closer to when I’m ready to animate it.

Till Next week

Marc Out~~