Saikokira and the birth of Saikokids

A lot of work was done for this semester's project class, and therefore a separate post entirely dedicated to this.

The brief and story premise is designed by my lecturer, in which it is about a game which takes place in and around Mount. Fuji. The characters come from diverse cultures around the world, each with their own back story and abilities. We were free to choose from the 40+ characters to work on, with 11 weeks to finish the design work (turnarounds, emotes and action poses combined) of a good character, a villain, the character's prop, a vehicle, a creature and environment. On top of that, we were required to followed the Hyung Tae-Kim (character designer of Magna Carta) art style.

I like, no, I love character design. But I was really pushed to my limits when creating these individual characters under the time limitations when coupled with all the other assignments coming from other classes. There were times when I felt like I should give in to the slacker in me. There were times when I thought I should put in a little less effort. It takes a great deal of willpower to overcome these thoughts at 3am in the morning, but I'm glad everything came out fine in the end.

The first character I worked on was Johnny Blackwater, a mute South American leader of the resistance group known as the Screaming Eagles. Whenever he activates his chakra, his left eye glows, allowing him to never miss his target when he fires his weapon. I initially wanted to use his cloak as a device for the transformation sequence, but I didn't get to work on him for that in the end. As this was the first assignment, I felt that it turned out looking pretty much like my style, instead of the Hyung Tae-Kim style.

I'm not very good with vehicles, so this was a good learning experience for me. The main critique that I usually get from the previous assignments was that all my characters look very clean and neat. This was a result of just painting with the default '19' round brush for the whole artwork. That could arguably work for a character, but it was a no-no for vehicle design. Therefore, I incorporated the use of textured brushes to achieve this weathered look.  I am currently still experimenting with the idea of using this similar technique for my character workflow. I also used a base 3D model as a template to construct my drawing on and it worked pretty well.

For the villain, I chose Akane, a character that also appears in the same level as Johnny. It was an easier task channeling Hyung Tae-Kim with female characters. I wanted to try something different for the splash page, so I drew the scene where Akane kills Johnny. Multi-figure composition has always been a weakness of mine. I have difficulty trying to portray characters existing within the same space in a drawing; they often turn out looking like separate elements.

Click for transformation animation

Next came the transformation sequence. We were allowed to work on the previous characters that we have already designed, but I chose to do a new one as I got pretty tired of Johnny and Akane after working so long on them. I picked Long Po, a spunky dragonboat racer from Hong Kong. For the transformation sequence, I tried to incorporate knowledge gained from traditional effects animation from last semester to create a Hyung Tae-Kim styled water splash.

The final assignment was a group animation. We managed to persuade our lecturer to allow us to form a massive group consisting of the entire class (7 members). I will further discuss this group project on a separate post, but the above are some of the digital artwork that was churned out as part of the deliverables. The creature is designed by my teammate Lauren Heng.  I left the creature splash page in the school's server, will update this post once I get my hands on it.

[EDIT] - Its here!