Hackberry Hollow

Knuckle Dusters from Hell. Really! Okay. Not really.

Here’s this week’s prototype from the Fully-Automated Cute Factory.

Usually when I create a piece of concept art I take something from our notes and visualize it on my own. But this piece of concept art is different. This grayscale painting was created while Adam was watching the whole time to help plan the most complex location in the comic. It may not look complex but this is just the shot of the front door.

This is just the initial stage of the design process based on some preliminary 3D sculpts (after the jump).

Well, a raven or a crow. She’s one of those two. I guess both species look so alike that it doesn’t matter too much. But one thing for sure is that she is all crazy.

This is more of a costume design exercise than anything else, but it has a character in it so why not call it a character design post.

Hackberry Hollow has been interesting to design because we have animal people, animal animals, and undead versions of each. So not only do I need to design an interesting look for the fluffy characters, but the not-so-fluffy as well.

When people ask us what the log line for Hackberry Hollow is we respond with “it is a story about a taxidermist in a world where all of the people are animals” and of course creating undead which is where the necromancy comes in (evil grin). So here we have it: the first ever character design to be put up on the blog if you don’t count the robots.

This week’s post and future posts will be released on Fridays instead of Tuesdays. There are a few reasons for this. First and foremost is that we are going to start showing the works-in-progress for our character designs.

I started doing a rotation of the new robot design so I can figure out what it looks like from all angles. Getting a design for one angle of a character is just a small part of the battle. You have to design it from all sides.

Here’s part 2 of what was posted last week regarding using Alchemy to aid in character design. I wonder what will happen when we take the new shapes and apply it to our original concept and rendering style?

After the jump we’ve got some information on the process of how we take the random shapes and use that to create an actual design.