Hey all. I'm way excited for this, this'll be my first real competition, and I'm a major fan of fighting games.

I'm going to be doing Zappa, who is easily one of my favorite characters from my favorite fighting game series.





I'm still trying to figure out how I want to reimagine him. I was tossing around a few ideas:

Victorian/Gypsy Steampunk
Okami style (I'd like this, but the biggest issue is getting the shaders to work right, which is something I just don't really know how to do...)
Having him posessed by Raou in a sort of Shadow of the Colossus style
"Hero"-ized, fashioning weapons and armor and tools from his summons

Right now I'm not really sure which direction I want to go in. I want to focus on being true to the original character as well as expanding and adding new elements to him; part of this is going to be focusing on making sure I can rotate his head and arms and make him bend over backwards properly. Gonna have a heck of a time getting the geometry to work right!

Here's some sketches I did for the steampunk-ish idea today:



I'm not digging that idea as much as I originally was... Seems sort of busy and sloppy.

I'm gonna do some more sketches and try to do some silhouettes. Once I can decide what kind of revisioning I'd like to do, I'll start putting together proper concepts to start working on the model. Any suggestions/comments/critiques are more than welcome!

So here's some inspiration sheets I pulled together to help me figure out some ideas.

This first one is sort of inspired by the way Zappa would like to see himself: completely in control of himself and able to coexist with the rest of society. So, I was think of him as some sort of hero, using all of his summons in some way as an expression of his 'control.' I went with a more Sentai hero style for this, because I really love Kamen Rider and think it'd be hilarious/awesome to see Zappa as an over the top hero like that. I was thinking of doing him in a Marvel/DC style character, but I'm not sure it would really make a big difference, or really help the idea completely (since Zappa's complexity of the summons are a big thing, and many Marvel/DC characters use a much more streamlined and simple style). Any thoughts on this would be appreciated, as I'm still trying to figure out which way I want to go.




This next one is "Freak Show" Zappa. That is, Zappa after being to an old fashioned, cruel mental asylum, escaping, and being hired in a freak show in exchange for hiding him. He'd have the dog's head attached to the back of his, wearing a straight jacket, and the centipedes would be attached to his stomach. I think this style would be really interesting to do, but I don't feel content with how the idea sits in my head; doesn't feel complete.



I'll do some sketches of these and any other ideas that appear in my head. Crits/comments/etc. welcome!

I've decided to go a completely different route than what I was thinking before. I'm going to do a reimagining of Zappa as a female, sort of as a mixture of S-Ko (his vengeful ghost) and him. Here's some concepts and a turntable:





This is good enough for me to start modeling. Which is what I'm going to do now!

First step of progress. Got a remarkable amount of modeling done pretty quickly. The straps are gonna be finnicky to set up but they should hopefully look good once I get them in place. Collar design is still WIP.

More progress! Beginning to block out the centipede faces. Zoop zoop!

really good base mesh. keep it up

Still more progress. Centipedes are in place. Might need to remove some tris from them later but I'll deal with that later. Gonna try to refine the pants and sleeves a bit more and then get some feet and hands in here.

Wow I really like your progression and drawings! Keep it up !

thank you for introducing me to this wonderful fabolus character <3

Now go block in the rest of it, looking forward to a full block

Yet another update! Got the pants and sleeve to a respectable state, and got some shoes in there. Now I need to do the hands, which are going to be pretty challenging... I'm going to do regular hands for the model (maybe with gloves or something?) but I'm also going to do big Raou hands that are detached from the rest of the model. The tricky bit is that I want them to look like lightning as well as 'ghostly'.... Should be interesting! Gonna start with some concept sketches of the hands as well as the collar, and probably some face/head sketches too.

Forward I go!

I thought about Zappa too, Really like how its coming out.