Month: April 2018

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enecola:

Armor Fix for Olivia!

Her legs must hurt… Olivia is pretty fun but I never understood why they made her use a sword when she had these cool rings. Like… that’s not less believable that chrom using his dumbass swords that he keeps sticking into the ground all the fucking time.

I think that fixing a plate armor design is fairly straight-forward in what needs to fixed: put a functional breastplate on the tiddy, add protection to some vital areas that got missed, and add some fabric in-between to pad the armor. I find it harder to fix armor for characters who don’t really wear it. This redesign did that wonderfully. It’s just so darn beautiful!

In Fire Emblem Awakening, Olivia starts out as a Dancer class, and boy do her dancing animations with that original getup look like absolute crap. But I would loooove to see the redesign in motion! There’s so much more potential for interesting movements with all that flowing fabric. I also never noticed Olivia even had a jingly belt until I saw the redesign, and then looked back at the original. That’s how you know you have a Quality Character Design™.

I love the subtle touch of the seam lines going down her legs, which lets us know that even underneath the transparent fabric, she is wearing opaque tights. It really is the little things.

I definitely look forward to featuring more of this artist’s redesigns on the blog. <Sequel Hook>

-Icy

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Time to come back to Sideshow Toys and probably their best example yet of how much amazing craftsmanship (that sculpt! the intricate paint job! the fabric and synthetic leather details!) can be wasted on super garbage design.
This time, a classic garbage that is Red Sonja in her standard scalemail bikini. 

How do the mail bra and loincloth even hold up with such flimsy straps?
What is the point of protecting your neck with metal collar when your heart, guts and skull are all totally exposed?
Why worry about reasonably padding your leg and arm protection, but wear a scalemail bra (that will sand your nipples off) directly on your skin?

“Looks nothing like male equivalent” checked, of course, because of Conan.
Not crossing out “High heels” square, since that (cw: gore) is a reasonable heel size for a horse riding and wouldn’t be out of ordinary for a male character either. 

Also note how all those arrows that apparently completely missed Sonja, presumably due to her “costume” being more of a plot armor than anything else.
Reminds me of those couple “bikini armor makes you completely resistant to arrows” parodies we featured before: 

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Full comics to be viewed here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

~Ozzie

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For those not aware, film creator and media critic Dan Olson (aka Foldable Human) has been on a quest to find games that are “so bad they’re good” in the same way some classic movies such as Plan 9 From Outer Space and Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes.  

Viking: Battle for Asgard is kind of amazing in that not only does have the promise of this – but if the steam page is to be believed the developers are still, to this day, convinced this is a great adaption of Norse myth and history.

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Unsurprisingly, the studio decided this was probably not the direction they wanted to go long term and went back to making their regular games… until they got a license for an certain other totally creative property.

– wincenworks

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Tharja – Medieval Fantasy Body Stocking Technology

Jumping forward a few streams for this post, since this was back when I went way over our allotted time, and those old designs aren’t done yet… They’ll be done one day. ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ

So this was more of a fashion redesign exercise. Tharja, from Fire Emblem Awakening, is a sorceress. In terms of game mechanics, they tend to stay in the back and be pretty squishy, so I don’t expect her to wear full plate. I just wanted her to not wear… that thing. The body stocking, that somehow exists in this universe. Oh, and she comes from a hot desert region, so….

Since this is a fantasy universe that borrows very little from actual desert-dwelling peoples, I took inspiration from her counterpart, who’s from the same country. He looks like this:

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So I took the skirt-like thing and the shirt he wears and adjusted it for Tharja. I liked her belt, so I kept it, and instead changed the waistline of the skirt to try and form some nice shapes.

Because of the skirt, however, the cape became redundant. I tried 2 different versions of it before scrapping it. Looking at it now, I should have just made it connect to her sleeves at the wrist. Without the cape, the little dangly things on it looked weird, and I hated her hair from the start, so I basically just moved the shapes around. Got rid of the ponytail thing, while adding a similar shape to her circlet, though I probably should have made it smaller. As for her tights, I was too lazy to paint over them, but in theory, they’d be like Henry’s (the boy above) legging-type things.

The last thing I did was adjust the color balance. Her colors were so muted in the original, especially her golden accents, so I upped the saturation on that to complement the purple.

Overall, I was trying to go for a more professional, distancing look. Tharja is antisocial and strange, after all. I do like the redesign, though there’s always things you see after you “finish” a work that could be improved upon. Honestly, I kind of want to redo Henry’s design, cause it’s kinda bad… Purple on purple; genus.

-Icy

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Tidy Up Tuesday #76

Couple things to unpack this week: 

We’ve been informed that a Tumblr user from whom we reblogged two bingos, including the last one, expresses transphobic views on their blog. We apologize for not picking up on that earlier. 

BABD can not stand behind giving exposure to a transphobe, therefore both posts will be marked as private from now on. 

Another apology for not noticing that the awesome unofficial Laura Kinney/X-23 redesign we reblogged yesterday was drawn by Kris Anka, who’s definitely a comic industry professional. 

Tumblr unmarked our blog from “sensitive” and also apparently fixed the bug that didn’t allow to mark individual posts as sensitive on PC version of the platform. 

Now worst of the worst posts from our NSFW tag are also invisible in Safe Mode. They’re additionally tagged as “sentitive” – but before clicking that link please keep in mind they’re the ones that feature imagery of distinctly explicit and/or suggestive and/or disturbing and/or violent nature – viewer discretion highly advised. 

Things we addressed on the blog before: 

~Ozzie, – wincenworks & -Icy

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Mercedes Marten (Dragon’s Dogma)

qvlqu:

Mercedes Marten (Dragon’s Dogma)

Excuse me, but literally the first concept for this character is fully armored, in reasonable plate, with no Tiddies and with actual pants??

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E X C U S E  M E ? ? ?

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-Icy

Just in  case the “no pants” part wasn’t clear enough from the image used by the OP, here’s some concept art for the final design, pants definitely not included:

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Sad part is that clearly whoever worked on that studied real armor design… Then presumably got told by a creepy marketing guy that if no boob (and thighs), how woman?

I think it’s reasonable to say that Dragon’s Dogma, both with outright bad stuff and clearly missed opportunities, like this one, belongs firmly on our Wall of Shame.

~Ozzie