TF2 - Stunticons - SLR 03

Purple People Eater. It's hard to pull off being a bad guy with a purple paint job, but with glow-y red eyes, half the battle is won already. While I accept the blue in car mode, it might not work as well when he's standing up. Just a bit too garish...


I do like the solution to the transformation, while I still kept grill cues along the chest, the fenders slid through the shoulders to for the 'wings', and the parts of the hood that housed the headlights flipped out the create the forearms. I'm sure it's been done before, but it's a new one for me.


Another stacked roof to hide the glass, and another tailgate bottom.


I put all four wheels into the legs, I used up a lot of mass for the upper body, so it was a good way to fill out the legs and give them some weight.


Pretty good profile too. One of the frustrating things about doing these turnaround views, is that it's so hard to indicate any kind of character - no attitude or style. I need to stand them up as straight as possible to give the builders the best look at all the elements.


The side views are about the only opportunity to indicate any kind of personality, and sometimes it's successful, and sometimes not. While I like the technical aspects of this view, I don't think it indicates any kind character development - he kind of just 'IS.'

This is probably my least favorite of my guys from this last game, and it's not that I'm not proud of the work I put into it, but unlike all the others, I can't just SEE the character alive in my head, like I somehow can with the others.

TF2 - Stunticons - SLR 02

So this is the original submission for the SLR, to legal. I had already done the changes that made the other cars safe, but these super cars are just so unique, that a lot of revisions went into these before they got cleared. The Reventon took longer, but I thought it still maintained at the least the overall feel of the car, but this SLR lost a lot of swagger that those original racing images had. It kind of devolved into a variation of the stock model, which I don't think is that exciting.


After legal approval, I took these guys to the 'paint shop' and threw down colors and graphics. The primary color being the purple, and the Luxo guys requested a blue. I wasn't actually sure what kind of blue they meant and I just did this color as a test - here's a starting point, darker, lighter, more or less saturated - but they went for this one. I thought it was a little over the top, but in the levels in which they appear are the super dark and saturated Shanghai city maps, and that color looks pretty good against the backround.


The top purple is the game version. The one below it, is the first, along with that idea of the numbering system ( 44 for my HSBFF) the graphics were just too much to even show up in the game. So that's why they got scaled back a bit for the resubmission.

And the over-saturated green stripe over the blue in the repaint version. Something nice and sharp and pointy.


The transformation process, again, as traditional as possible, but since I moved around some vehicle cues, it's still fairly different from the other cars in the game.

TF2 - Stunticons - SLR 01

By now I had lots of vehicle variations to choose from, so these were a mix of new and old, and given the Mercedes SLR vehicle cues...and apparently I nailed it with the sketches, and they picked the one in the middle.


So that image got cleaned up and tone added to it, and got sent off to ol' Hasbro for approvals.

I wasn't really familiar with this car, I'm more of a muscle car guy than a super car guy, and even the stock model isn't that impressive to me (looks-wise only, of course) but the tricked out racing ones are pretty cool looking.

TF2 - Stunticons - Reventon 03

This guy is so skinny, two of them can fit on one page! Maybe it's that he's very tall, you can notice the scale of the wheels looking a little small, that's a tip-off to indicate height to the model builders. All the vehicle cues are scaled down to give the impression of size, and in the transformation, I wanted him to have a 'stacking' effect as he goes from car to bot.


Usually I have these guys transform with the mass being distributed fairly evenly, with the top mass being from the front of the car, and the legs coming from the rear of the car - this guy is kind of a top and bottom transformation. The arms come from the sides and tail lights, with the engine windows making up the back of the torso, and the traditional headlights on the chest area. Then the legs come from the rear end of the car heading towards the front elements, including the running board.


Here's the alt paint jobs highlighted separately.

This is one of my faves from the game, I don't know if he's on the figure list or not, but I hope so - I'll fight him against Sideswipe!

TF2 - Stunticons - Reventon 02

Here's the vehicle mode for this guy - lots of legal revisions went into this. These cars are so unique, that a simple swap of round lights to square lights doesn't cut it. A lot of little changes to the tail lights and intakes, spoilers and the basic lines of the car finally got it to a point where it was safe to put into production.


This is the primary paint, what I called a Sharkskin application, using black and purple to Evil Decepticon-ify him.


Same car, just a different paint app but using the same colors, just in a different arrangement. I originally had the color as red, but Luxo wanted to keep it purple, and honestly, if there is a difference in the paint schemes in the game, I haven't been able to tell yet.


This side view shows off the scheme better, and I try to keep in mind where those parts go in bot form, so I try to design the paints to look good on the bot, too.


Originally all the reference pix that Luxo sent for the super car idea were racecars, so I initially thought that they wanted a number scheme or something like that, but I was mistaken, and simply dropped off the numbers.

You can also see the original red, and some original vehicle cues that got lost in the legal revisions. I was sad to lose those wheels...


And of course...the transformation sequence.

TF2 - Stunticons - Reventon 01

This one came together really fast...and now that I think about it, I did the Omnibots first, so there were already a lot of car idea sketches to pull from, but in this case, the crouched over, skinny one on the left side middle captured the prize.


So I went to work and came up with this guy, kind of an Alien Warrior Meets the Transformers. These guys were to be Super Cars, so the Reventon'-esque' made the final cut, and I kept all the angles sharp and flat in bot form.

TF2 - Aerialbots 03

The Unpainted Man stands. I like this one, I thought the arms were a pretty good solution to break up the standard shoulder and elbow conventions, and with the jets I tried to play a lot with the idea of hydraulics and linkages holding everything together. More an idea of creating jointing appropriate to the vehicle - linkage for jets, as opposed to the differential and disc brake gearing approach of the ground vehicles.


This view shows off the airframe, which I almost lost - I placed it in the block-in, showing a lot more with the intent of integrating better as I took it to final, but Luxo had a big reaction, and I had to talk them down a bit. That's a tough thing, they took a lot of things too literal in the roughs, which is how I best work, get all the ideas in there fast, and refine as I go. Their approach was to lay all the groundwork even in the tone drawings - but to me those are the most basic of ideas, to set up the discovery of new ideas along the way.


The side view is my favorite of this guy, just in that it illustrates the movie-ification of a G1 concept, with the canopy/nose, meeting the tail/engine to form the back torso.

It pleases me, I wish I could have done as well for all of them!