chillyche

I'd like to weigh in about the ethnicity issue, because it's something I think about a lot. For starters, I tend to agree with everybody here that the dialog shouldn't be altered to create racial stereotypes. It'd be plain offensive, and in general poor taste. In particular, I suspect that part of the purpose of Edgar's character was to buck the trend. He first appears as The Black Sidekick , and is lost when the hero's plane goes down. Expendable Black Sidekicks are a huge cliche. Yet Edgar reappears later on, throwing audiences expecting a tired plotline a curveball. This becomes a running gag, with Edgar appearing in the final episode with a line translated as, "I failed to die, yet again." Whether or not Edgar is bucking the Expendable Sidekick archetype, or in particular the Expendable Black Sidekick archetype, only the creators will know for sure. But I'm down with it either way. They also buck the Kill The Black Guy First routine, which was extremely popular in the 80s, and still reers its ugly head from time to time. That said, there is a valid criticism in regards to certain productions with multi-ethnic casts where varied ethnicities are not represented in anyway other than skin-color. In the original Japanese, you will often find american characters, british characters, japanese characters, and anything in between that all speak basically Japanese. Without a great understanding of the language, I can't tell if they're giving the characters various dialects, but to my ear, the voices are homogenized. To combat this, I see no problem with performers adding a dialect or local flavor to a character they're voicing. However, the danger of stereotypes, cliches, and other ugly and/or ignorant choices is certainly there. If we cast a black dude from Brooklyn, NY to play Edgar, and told him to speak in his own voice, rather than affecting any particular dialect or accent, we might find that he would sound "black" to us in a particular way. This without changing lines to "lemme axe you a question" or "whattup my n*gga?" A local dialect is not the same as a stereotype. We could even ask an actor to attempt the dialect, but if the actor had no real voice coaching or dialect training, they might resort to just mimicry, which would probably devolve into stereotypes, which I'd definitely be against. If one's experience with a black dialect is just based on TV or worse -- popular music -- then one has no real business attempting that dialect. Even if it's "oh, there's a lot of black people in my neighborhood," I'd be against it. We all know a crappy british accent when we hear one, the same should be true for other accents/dialects. I'm not even particularly clear on Edgar's origin. Edgar LaSalle, right? Claudia's brother? Where are they from? Are they African? African-American? Caribbean? This is an important question in determining the cultural background and local flavor of Edgar. Both he and his sister are in the military? Are they army brats? Did they grow up on bases? Did they travel around as kids? An actor playing a part usually researches these questions -- if it's not in the script, they pick the director's brain, if it's not in the director or writer's brain, then the actor basically creates this information to inform their acting choices. Ultimately, if a talented actor chose defensible changes to the character, then I wouldn't have a problem, so long as they stayed true to the intention of the character (which I would argue, in the case of Edgar, isn't terribly well defined, what with him being a minor supporting character). But these would have to be smart choices, not stereotypes. In the case of a dub, it's pretty challenging because the performance already exists, the character's movements, stance, and physical behavior has already been set. As a side note: I used to read comics fairly regularly. In the early 2000s, Brian Michael Bendis became a major force in comics, and eventually wound up writing for almost every major marvel character, as well as plenty of other characters. I was a fan of his POWERS book, and thought his style was particularly fitting for ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN. However, with ULTIMATE X-MEN, though he wrote good scenarios and was able to keep the book smart for its initial run, with plenty of subtext, the book suffered from one point. All the characters were equally snarky. Bendis was writing most of the X-Men the same. Sure, Wolverine would say Bub, but other than that, the characters all sort of spoke with the same edge. The writing was amusing, but it wasn't true to the fact that we were dealing with a diverse group of people from across the world with a variety of backgrounds, etc. I do notice that sometimes, particularly if a sub-job is very literal, that individual linguistic flair is sort of lost in the characters. So, I do understand this criticism. That's all.

Still looking!

I'm trying to split the difference at this point. The straight cel shading looks okay, but sometimes looks a bit flat, or weird with 3d characters. Particularly, the vehicles tend to look better with a little more definition. I think the perfect look would be an Appleseed: Ex Machina, but I believe XSI was used for renders, not 3ds Max (though some work was Max), and XSI has some great cel shading texture tools. At the end of the day, it will be a matter of experimenting until we get a look that works in conjunction with all the elements. As of right now, the lines tend to crash a render, somewhat arbitrarily, and will probably do so until I upgrade to a 64-bit OS and get some new RAM. Pipedreams right now. We've got a ways to go before we're producing FINAL renders anyway. Still, I'm excited about showing off Alex here, and hope this little tease reinvigorates interest in the project. Deculture! P.S. Oh, and here's what she would look like with a more 2D interpretation:

Introducing the protagonist of Macross Aria, Alex Yokohama.

I'm looking specifically, for some images of the backpack worn by pilots in Macross M3. Does anybody have anything that could help? Thanks as always!

I love this about mods. Sure, we all want to play 'em, and we'd love some kind of estimate of when we can, but the simple truth is, these are volunteer projects. They're done when they're done, and that's really the only answer there CAN be, unless people are getting paid, and thus subject to budgets and timelines. I welcome any and all updates for this project, and I support the members taking the time they need to make it awesome and to live their own lives on their own terms. Way better than the crazy-ass long days that game devs work.

Still off topic... but I wouldn't expect uncompressed video to become the norm any time in the near future. These codecs are in development for years before we see them and before they become standard, and then longer before hardware manufacturers adopt them. While multilayer blu-ray will definitely allow for the storage space necessary for far better codecs and uncompressed 2k and eventually 4k stuff, the market won't be ready for another upgrade so soon, nor will consumers who are still lukewarm about the benefits of blu-ray (or HD-DVD) over DVD be ready to toss their BR players for MLBR players that can read uncompressed formats. Although, perhaps a firmware update would be all it took. I don't know. I think at the end of the day, the LD rips would be as pretty as the original LDs, until compressed, of course. But that the original LDs decreased rez is sort of a sticking point. I think a decent BR encoding, even with mpeg artifacting, still looks better than an SD image, a lot of the time. But, then again, I haven't seen the BRs, so I don't know. Still, I gotta give boinger props for being massively enterprising, and I hope you keep releasing stuff.

Blu-Ray video is always compressed. That said, the simple fact that the resolution is bound to be either 720p or 1080p, suggests that even WITH compression, we'll be looking at a far better image. It would be fantastic if the remastered directly from the original film prints, but often they have to remaster from the broadcast tapes, meaning its an upsampled imaged, but I agree with the entire point of: let's wait and see what gets released.

Cool.

Drool. Tear of joy. Wow. Awesome work, man.

Eh, just a lot of the actresses I know prefer wigs, because they'd rather not put their hair through all that. I was shocked to find that out, because I just assumed they were dying and cutting and growing styling all the time, because I thought wigs all looked wack (like the wig in question here), but it turns out, there are some crazy good wigs out there. Weird. Whatever. Shouldn't I be in 3d studio right now? I have work to do.

I'm not against wigs. Sure, when they're off, they're creepy. But we can't really ask women to destroy their natural hair by constant bleaching, dying, styling, rebleaching, dying, styling. The hair itself becomes too damaged to style effectively. Wigs are a great solution. But obviously, a high quality wig is way better than a cheapo one. And by way better I mean way more expensive. Either way, I agree that those photos do no justice. We need a shallower depth of field, like in the first Mylene pic, and we need appropriate lighting rather than underexposed or flat. Shapes become forms when light and shadow work together. That's deep right? You know who said that? I DID.

WDC - Awesome return. She's got some meat to her, which is a nice switch. BRL - I work in film production, and nobody bats an eyelid at a tattoo, especially not on the G&E folks, who it seems more often than not have tatts. But, I also have friends who work in stuffy law firms that can't legally discriminate against somebody with dope ink, but would probably turn up their nose at it, because they DO look to the past. It's all old boy's network and stuff with those guys. So, you know, it's a valid question. That said: awesome tattoo. Definitely post pics of the Polidread version when that's up, too! Whoever the tattoo artist was, they did a faithful rendering.

This is a crazy thread, folks.

Hey, I'm excited to see how this thing turns out. Datterboy's model made me want to quit modeling completely when I first saw it. Then I realized, wait, no, it's inspirational! Anyway, there's room for all skill levels with Aria. I'm nowhere near Rodavan or Datterboy or Aztek, but I think I did a snazzy job with that RMS-1 that I modeled. And there's need for a lot of stuff like that in the project, just so you know. It's not all super-high-poly hero models. We still need our 55mm shell casings, which nobody has stepped up to model yet. And, you know I was just messing with ya a la Kanye with that Datterboy thing, right? Because I encourage everybody of every skill level to post their models and I encourage everybody to give useful constructive criticism (unlike Kanye). Right now, it's a bit early in the modeling process to tell, but you've gotten over the biggest hurdles -- getting the proportions to actually look right in 3d (of course, if you try to slice it up for transformation, that's another headache waiting to happen).

Got your PM. Have been swamped with work, but will respond soon. I like your watercolor (?) manga of Hikaru and Misa.

Yo Cannon Fodder, I'ma let you finish. But Datterboy has one of the best CG Valks of the decade! Har har. Schizo really made me say that, I couldn't help it. (See, I even dragged somebody else into it) But seriously, nice work so far. I'm not much of a mechanical modeler myself, though I can eek by in a pinch. Just wanna say, if you want a challenge, come join Macross Aria, because I will put you TO WORK! I mean... er... we'll all collaborate and have fun making something really awesome.

Cool. Nobody has done the hand yet. But, I'm also happy to say I found a few more reference pics. The last one is the TV version, but I figured I'd upload it anyway, to see if there's anything useful to fill in lack of detail on the DYRL version.

Well, if I toss an assignment at y'all, if there's any chance it might get done, that's better than it not getting done at all, regardless of the timeline.

She's moving on to other stuff.

What are you up to, then?

I just found this...Valk Girl I think it's dope.

Once again the Aria project is looking for some talented 2d character artists. We have developed the majority of the Macross Aria cast, but still need some concept art and some fine-tuning on a few characters. If you've got the chops to bring an original and exciting cast to life in vivid 2d style, then sign up! We're also looking for some storyboard artists. DECULTURE!

Cool, send me a PM when your schedule is more organized, and I'll get you started. It's pretty cut and dry, actually. Thanks man!

Heh heh, thanks! Indeed, I threw a little 2001 in there for good measure. It wasn't even really in the storyboards, but I realized it was perfect after I had already hinted at the monolith with that Technics 1200 turntable. When this thing is done, there will be references out the wazoo. Here's a little prop that makes an appearance...