Je vous met un petit making of pour un des designs de mecha sur Aquarion Evol. Je passe en mode anglais pour etre accessible a nos anime fans all over the world qui pourraient atterrir ici.
Basically, Stan is more experienced in mecha creation and for this production he made Kagura's mecha, the badass antagonist of the show. But I like mecha design too, and sometimes Kawamori san gives me the opportunity to draw some stuff.
This first design have been made really early in the development. At this time the show wasn't called Evol. Reffering to it, we simply were using the name "Aquarion 2". It wasn't even about abductors. I made several design proposal to show what could be enemies this time. I imagined big, animal shaped mecha, and along them I created these "spider drones". In my mind, they were quite small, maybe 2 meters tall.
Then it took several months to the bunch of producers, investors, directors, script writers took to really launch the production. And almost one year later I've been told that this design had been chosen to be used in the show, as giant abductor.
But when I looked at it again, I found it quite weak. I mean, I liked the general "silhouette", but the detail of each part was basic and not very interesting. Besides, Stan who was in charge of Kagura's mech was doing a great work. I liked the shapes he was drawing, spiky, with a lot of curves. So I decided to redraw entirerly the abductor to fit his designs.
Here is the result. 2 types of mechs, one with arms, the other with a cage for abducted people.
Kawamori san liked it. But I found that the head was too simple. And he was right considering we wil probably have several close up shot of it. The second remark was that he wanted to combine the two types (arm and cage), to blend them in just one. To the next time I came up with a more detailed head and modified body.
It was almost good. Kawamori san wanted me to unhance the desgn of the head a little bit more by adding an antenna. Without it you cannot understand in which direction the robot is facing (which was the point, in fact, but I didn't liked it) because he has groups of eyes in all the 4 cardinal directions.
Here it is.
This time it was ok. (It went smoothly considering Stan had to make changes on his design more than 10 times. Kagura's mech is the first main adversary so it had to be perfect). Next step, CG modeling. Morino san was in charge of it, here is the result after a couple of checking sessions. As he is working in the same room, it is very convienient to come and ask me precision about the design if needed.
I you compare the body part, you can see that the arm is slightly different. He had to change the shape to fit with the story board. My folding arm system was probably a little bit too complex to use.
After the model was OK, I made some color design proposals. More or less SF, more or less military.
These 4 were NG. Kawamori wanted a color between the green one and the brown one. So I came up this time with this.
And it was good this time. If you look carefully and compare to the original drawing, you will see that the design is more detailed. I added a lot of small line details, dots and stuff to make us think this mecha is huge. Scale is very important. Ok my work was over. Another guy of Satelight, Ishiwawa san picked up my 2D color design and created CG texture out of it. Here is the result, which basically look exactly the same as the previous photoshop step.
Thank you for reading!
Là, ça claque un peu plus quand même 
En revanche, les vidéo sont japan-only (question de droits à l'internationale sans doute) mais c'est une bonne initiative.
big thanx thomas 
c'est ça 
