I don’t really want to do much on the football project until I get the new computer and do more render testing.
So I’m going to start pre-production on the next project, which is a return to the samurai project I started a while back. It’s a great excuse to just sit around and watch movies I love 
I’ll definitely be spending more time sketching the character out this time. This is what I did about 18 months ago:
Problem being the clothes aren’t samurai based, a choice I made to make things easier for me all round, but something I noticed Japanese people picked up on right away. Might go back and have a look at using nCloth, but really don’t want to head down that road. Samurai clothes are generally pretty baggy which isn’t something you’d really want on a simple 3D animation. I’ll be keeping the story and bad guys the same. Will have to tweak + fix up the environment a bit.
My main reference point will be the Loan Wolf and Cub film series and am trying to get hold of the original manga (the first pic). I’ve already watched a few of Kurosawa’s samurai films so am keen to check out other director’s work for reference material. I included Samurai Jack in there and not a huge fan of it, although I thought some episodes were very nicely done. The Samurai Champloo anime (orange pic) really showed that having a plot doesn’t in any way subtract from some great action.
But for now there’ll just be a lot of watching, cutting up some reference clips and a bit of drawing.
