Redesign of a Megaman X Boss Character
Hello everyone!
So for a course I have been tasked with Redesigning a character from Mega Man X and I have chosen to go with Storm Eagle from the Mega Man X series of games. Of course, anything you see which can/should be fixed or improve on please feel free to point out, I welcome all criticism.
I chose Storm Eagle because I liked the way his original design implemented the aspects of a bird on to his robotic body and I wish to recreate that myself with my own interpretations. Another factor to me choosing this was to expand on my knowledge of hard-surface modelling as well as my organic modelling which I ma more comfortable in doing. I hope this project allows me to learn much more about hard surface modelling and creating robotic like characters.
I have started off by grabbing some quick references of Storm Eagle to help show what the original character looked like.
Next I am hoping to get some bird references, as well as look at some other games from the SNES era have be redesigned and brought to life in the current era of graphics
So for a course I have been tasked with Redesigning a character from Mega Man X and I have chosen to go with Storm Eagle from the Mega Man X series of games. Of course, anything you see which can/should be fixed or improve on please feel free to point out, I welcome all criticism.
I chose Storm Eagle because I liked the way his original design implemented the aspects of a bird on to his robotic body and I wish to recreate that myself with my own interpretations. Another factor to me choosing this was to expand on my knowledge of hard-surface modelling as well as my organic modelling which I ma more comfortable in doing. I hope this project allows me to learn much more about hard surface modelling and creating robotic like characters.
I have started off by grabbing some quick references of Storm Eagle to help show what the original character looked like.
Next I am hoping to get some bird references, as well as look at some other games from the SNES era have be redesigned and brought to life in the current era of graphics
Replies
To help with the design process a quick comparative look at other popular and graphically improved characters was required. Mario and Snake were chosen because they are both very popular/Easily recognisable and have been updated quite a few times over the years.
Mario has generally not changed too much in appearance, his clothing and colour scheme has stayed pretty much consistent throughout all of the games he appears in, this is so that he is very easy to recognise as he appears in such a massively wide range of games making him more of an icon than a game character. For this reason his creators have decided to keep him as similar and consistent with his older designs as possible, with the only changes being different material looks. For example Super Smash Brothers Brawl has much more detail included in the denim material of his dungarees than Mario 64 does.
While taking looking at the character of Snake it was illogical to look at all of the games, firstly looking at an in game shot of Snake from Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and seeing how he is dressed as well as a shot of just his face. The general style of clothing that Snake has implies that he was based on action movie stars from the 80s and early 90s, showing him dressed in basic camouflage gear. The in game shots of Snake are missing a lot of detail but this is due to the limitations in pixels for the character and made more sense to give him a blank face. One thing that is noticeable in both his portrait and in game character is his bandana, a feature that progresses on to the later games of Metal Gear Solid 1, which is the next game to be looked at.
Looking at some concept art as well as an in game shot of Snake from Metal Gear Solid 1(from now on referred to as MGS1), one of the most notable differences between this Snake and the one from Metal Gear 2 is his suit, in MGS1 he wears a black/navy blue body suit that is shown to have an assortment of belts as a means to carry guns/ammo as well as looking more heavily armoured/protected than he did in Metal Gear 2, yet his bandana remains as both an iconic garment for Snake to make him recognisable, as well as add to his characters story.
In Metal Gear Solid 4 (from now on referred to as MGS4) the overall design for Snake, clothing wise, remains similar. He keeps his dark body suit, now with the addition of being able to switch to different camouflage styles at will, as well as his signature bandana and assortment of belts attached to the suit, the major differences in the new Snake from MGS4 is his eye patch used to help with vision, not because of a lost eye, and the fact that he has aged considerably, with grey hair and noticeably more wrinkles than he had before.
Using these two characters overall progression shows that some of the more popular game franchises have chosen to keep their characters looking quite consistent in overall design but they have also been willing to change certain aspects in order to show off how graphics and storyline has progressed. Keeping characters looking similar throughout a large period of time allows fans to become familiar with them.