April 24th Update

Last redesign this week, Ash’s weapon:

There wasn’t a lot to really change with this design, the handle placement was a bit awkward, I also wanted to change the handle colour,

I’m still not sure if I should give it a grip texture, but I’ll have to wait and see when I model it.

And that’s it for character concepts, I’m officially past the halfway point of the concept process, next up is the environment concepts, I’m a little apprehensive to start these, since I’ve so little experience drawing places, but if this project has taught me anything, its that the best way to learn is to jump in headfirst!

So starting next week, we’ll be starting the different sections of the city, I’ve broken it down into four building per section, one landmark building and three generic buildings to break up the background. for sections of the city that won’t be central to the story I’ll still have to provide a landmark to identify the section when wide shots of the full city are shown, but I’m going to place hold them with buildings I’ve already made.
For the progress list I’m going to I’m going to add a separate section for the landmarks, since they’ll require more detail and approach the generic buildings in sets of three, similar to what I did for the background characters.

So, for this week the 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: 0/39

That’s all for this week,
Until next time

Marc Out~~

 

March 5th Update

Over half way through the secondary characters now, this week its Sakata’s weapon:

Since Sakata was based on the myth of Kintarō I knew I wanted axes to be his weapons, plus I wanted to mix them with rifles to pay tribute to Rwby’s weapons, I was actually expecting this weapon to be difficult to design, but it turns out there are a whole host of axe-gun hybrids:

I’m honestly surprised that its such a rare weapon in popular media, but it made it very fun to design, and found a few really gorgeous designs.

Anyway I’ll keep it short this week, 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: 4/7
  • Weapon Redesigns: 0/4
• Scene Concepts
  • Interiors: 0/24
  • Exteriors: 0/20

That’s all for this week,
Until next time

Marc Out~~

Febuary 26th Update

Onto another Weapon concept this week, Commander Izanagi‘s weapon:

Aside from a few cyberpunk ideas I found on google, the two main insperations I drew from for these swords were Nero’s sword from Devil May cry 4, the Red Queen:

And Fiora’s Project Fiora Sword From League of Legends:

Honestly I love a lot of these designs, so its going to be tough to choose, luckily the Commander doesn’t have any fights in the first season so I have plenty of time to choose, but I still thought I’d design some for the sake of completeness.

In other news my college course has given me a project that’s a perfect opportunity to start story boarding the teaser for Fade, its a scene from very late in the series, I honestly don’t have much planned other than the Scene itself, but its a great point to show people where the story will go without giving the whole plot away, so expect news of that over the next few weeks.

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: 3/7
  • Weapon Redesigns: 0/4
• Scene Concepts
  • Interiors: 0/24
  • Exteriors: 0/20

That’s all for this week,
Until next time

Marc Out~~

December 11th Update

Last of our heroes weapons this week, with Ash’s:

Ok, so there were a lot of influences that I’ll try get in order here. I knew righ away that I wanted Ash’s weapons to follow the Rwby logic of having a melee weapon with a long rang attack, but I knew I also didn’t want it to transform,  so I looked to other works that would inspire me.

The first two designs are mixes of weapons from the video game Warframe, which I have a pretty big addiction to, plus I feel it does its world building in really cool subtle ways so a lot of plot elements for Fade will be taking hints from it.
The weapons themselves I tried to mash together as a sort of Warframe Rwby mix:

I really Love the fine line between organic and technological these designs walk.

The third design was based on real life weapons, but I felt it looked a bit too bland and impractical:

The two weapons just didn’t look like they belonged together. One was purely functional and the other was finely crafted and decorated, and as a result the functional one took away some of the beauty of the crafted one, and the crafted one made the design seem impractical. So its my least favored design.

The final bottom design I’ll say is my favorite, its partially inspired by Squall’s gunblade from Final fantasy VIII:

I always felt this weapon got a lot of bad press from fans, I do agree that its impractical, but in terms of design its only a few tweaks from being a really cool concept. Basically I took the idea of the gunblade turned it into a tonfa, and made it so the bullet fires along a small groove in the blade, although that detail is a little hard to see in my design due to WordPress shrinking my images.

Even though I’m planning on using design four, I do like some of the others, and may use them for other characters or as ceremonial upgrades, either way you’ll probably see them again.

That’s all on Ash’s concepts, next week we get to the Blindfold Code’s weapons!

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: 4/12
  • Secondary Characters: 0/7
• Scene Concepts
  • Interiors: 0/24
  • Exteriors: 0/20

That’s all for this week,
Until next time

Marc Out~~

December 4th Update

The start of the holiday season and I have another weapon concept, this time Damson’s:

The Idea I wanted to get across in the two lower reference images is that a ice blade can be formed to turn the guns into a melee weapon, and this concept formed the basis for how I wanted to design the guns, I wanted to have a duelling pistol grip that would look well in either gun or sword form:

So what I did was look for a few more futuristic looking guns and mix and matched the parts:

Overall I’m pretty happy with how they turned out, I’m leaning toward the lower design, which I feel looks a lot sleeker.

I would have liked to get another weapon concept done this week, but with college I just ran out of time, perhaps next week.

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: 3/12
  • Secondary Characters: 0/7
• Scene Concepts
  • Interiors: 0/24
  • Exteriors: 0/20

That’s all for this week,
Until next time

Marc Out~~

November 27th Update

First of the weapons concepts and I’m off to a pretty good start, I had enough time to get two done this week, first up is Blue’s:

I started out drawing from my mind, which is how I came up with the leftmost Dagger, but I wasn’t sure if it fit the character so I googled a few images of knifes and did a little adapting, honestly I think the rightmost dagger will be the one I use. I also traced over a reference picture of a person to give an indication of what size the daggers will be, overall I’m pretty happy with them.

Secondly we have Ebony’s:

This was actually a really interesting one to design, I started off wanting to give Ebony a pair of swords that would clip together and look similar to Kadaj’s weapon from Final fantasy Advent children:

But I couldn’t think of any way of clipping the hilts together in a way that looked good, then I found Sasuke Uchiha’s Sword from Naruto:

It perfectly summered what I wanted from Ebony, sleek, efficient and minimalist, so I altered the colours to match Ebony’s and added the little wing symbols to give it its own flair. I’m really pleased with the look overall.

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: 2/12
  • Secondary Characters: 0/7
• Scene Concepts
  • Interiors: 0/24
  • Exteriors: 0/20

That’s all for this week,
Until next time

Marc Out~~

October 2nd Update

A short update this week, here is this week’s character, Amber Miel

Honestly this is my Favourite design so far, she had a number of different influences, I made up a mood board for her, but its a bit of a mess so I’m not going to show it here, but her inspirations range from black rock shooter to Evangelion to full metal alchemist. She going to be an important character in season two, but she’s introduced in season one, so I wanted to have her design ready now. There are more areas I want to go into more detail with, like with the back of her battle suit, but I’m really working to get the ideas of each character solid first. After this I have one more character before I start working on background extras, which will take a while, but once their done, I can work on environments, and after that its time for story boarding the pilot episode!

In 3D news, I’m going to re make my template models, even after 3 weeks I’m already sure I can redo them better, the models I have look great, but they are not made correctly for animation, especially around the faces, and the models I have are too polygon heavy for background characters, so I’ll have to start again, but don’t worry, what ever I make this time I’ll totally be using, but I can already see the current models causing me problems.

Other then that not much news this week, so I’m keeping it short but sweet, I’ve been getting into the swing with college, but I will hopefully have more for you guys next week

Till then,
Marc Out~~

Damson and the city

I present the fourth and final member of Team Fade, Damson:

I feel like his design is the least solid out of the four, and that’s mainly because his colour scheme is a lot more varied, I was going for a fire and ice theme with him, actually suggestions on how to improve him would be really welcomed. He’s largely the comic relief of the group, so a more high energy dress sense might be in order? Although I might be mistaken and he will possibly  look great when I model him in 3D. Who Knows?

Speaking of 3D, I have another in progress piece, I’ve taken a break from last week’s template model to start building the city will be set in:

It’s a bit bare I know, but I realised that doing concept art for the city itself is going to be very, very time consuming, so I’m taking a shortcut, I’m going to partially model the city, with basic blocks for the buildings and draw over renders of it in photoshop, it’ll save me having to fool around with perspective and angles.
So far each walled section there is named and has a function within the city, but the city itself has no name yet, back when Fade was a Rwby story, it was going to be Vacuo, but as I’ve developed the story I’ve decided that I want it to have it’s own name and identity. Maybe as I get closer to producing the finished episodes, and if enough of you guys follow this Blog, I’ll hold a naming competition, but that’s a future topic. 😀

Anyway, I’m excited for next week, because I’ll be moving onto the concept art for the villains of our story: The Blindfold Code!

See you all then

Marc Out ~~

Ash and model template

Next up is our first Male main character Ash Snow:

He’s based partially off the Original Greed from full metal alchemist and a white haired character from a piece of art I with I could find again,  but overall I like the simplicity of his costume, I was tempted to use Inuyasha as a another reference, since they both have wolf like features, but it decided against it, mainly because a few characters draw from historical japanese designs and I want Team Fade to have a more urban, modern day look.

On the 3D side I’ve nearly finished the template I’m going to work off of for the female characters:

Looks kinda like an Alien, doesn’t she? It still has a bit of work to do, her hips are a bit pointed, her fingers need to be a bit thinner, I’m not sure how to approach modelling her eyes and teeth and I think she could impale someone on her chest, but for a first attempt I’m very pleased with how its going, I can’t wait to try out some of the Photo realistic textures I’ve found for her.

I’m working off of Some Rwby references I found online Here, in particular Pyrrha Nikos and Mercury Black, although the images I’m using are just that little too low resolution to make out some of the finer details like the fingers. but that’s something I can figure out with trial and error.
One of the things I’ve learned doing this is how much planning you have to do as your modelling I started at the head and worked my way down drawing outlines around the profile of my reference image but often the vertexes wouldn’t match up and I’d have weird angles when I attempted to smooth the surface.

Finally I’ve been working with a friend to look over the script of the first season, its going well, but there are one or two changes he’s suggesting that could be a lot of work to fit in. I’ve never really had to rewrite any of my stories before, so its both slow going and intimidating, but I am determined to give each change the time and attention it needs to do it right!

That’s all for now, see you next week for some more concept art!
Marc Out ~~