#like the fanart is loose and flowing but also I try to add movement and think of composition (sometimes😆)

[myokk]

some pen drawings♥️

[whitleyschn33]

Nitpick November: 08

So beyond just intensely disliking Weiss’s Atlas look in concept, I also hate its execution - aka, how it’s modelled.  Here’s the concept art for reference.

While working on the concept art to recolor it, it gave me a good amount of time to ponder what I liked and didn’t like about the design, and what made it so “bad” for me. I don’t like the poofy sleeves that taper into tight gloves and the longer dress, because they feel too different from her usual silhouette and too restrictive for her elegant dancer/skater of fighting, or the shitload of belts and thick heavy braid that look too messy and complicated for a character who’s always appeared very elegant and sophisticated. I feel like the artists didn’t realize you can make a character look elegant without looking like a fantasy princess, and rather than have a simple but graceful design, loaded Weiss down with accessories like a fucking bejeweled crown hairpiece and boots with ruffled pieces up the front. It’s too much, too heavy, too restrictive, too princess for a character that’s left her rich family to be a huntress. I would have expected Weiss to more closely align with how she dressed at Beacon and mimic Winter’s style, rather than take cues from the clothes Jacques had her in.

But I’ve talked about this at length before - so let’s talk about how the move from concept art to 3D model made this poor design look awful. 

We’ve all seen for ourselves how horrible Weiss’ hair looks in the 3D model - it’s thick and oddly clumped together, like thick rope strands braided together and plugged into her head at a giant mass, rather than locks of hair twisted together, and her bangs have gone from separated strands to a couple thick globs. While I will give credit in that it looks better in V8, with more definition in her bangs and a tighter braid so it’s not so thick and massive at the top of her head, it still doesn’t look good. It doesn’t look like hair. it looks the exact same as everything else in RWBY’s world, because it has no texture, no definition. RT’s modelers took the concept art, saw that there wasn’t any kind of texture on the hair, and didn’t bother trying to add any while modeling it in the show beyond the few lines on her scalp. There’s nothing that makes it look like hair, no individual strands, no separated locks, no texture given. It looks like putty or clay that’s been modeled into this shape and stuck on Weiss’s head. It looks better in V8 because they added lines that made it look more like locks of hair, an uneven-ness that made it seem more like hair. 

This lack of definition and texture also claimed any chance Weiss’ dress had of looking good in the engine - and this is what really kills me, what I really want to talk about, because I think it’s something that’s been largely overlooked with just how bad the hair is. In the concept art, the white dress Weiss is wearing is wavy and ruffled, giving it a little volume without flaring out too much. Her overcoat, while wide, does look like it’s laid overtop of the dress and has some waviness to it without being so thick or unbending as to completely hinder Weiss’s movements. In the show, though? Weiss’s dress on the model is flat as a tarp, and as stiff as cardboard. It doesn’t look like fabric, much less a cute dress - they ironed it down to a bland, uninteresting blank canvas. The overcoat looks so heavy and starched to be stuck in that one position. It’s made the entire ensemble stiff and unbending when a dress and overcoat like these need to be loose and flowing to have a chance of looking good. The wavy texture from the concept art gave the impression that even in a longer skirt, Weiss could still theoretically move around in this outfit with its looser curls. The flat texture of the model, though, makes the dress look tight and inflexible, unable to bend to the way Weiss would need it to to move her legs. 

Every good piece of fanart I’ve seen lets this outfits’ skirt poof and flow in the wind and with Weiss’s movements, adding flourishes to Weiss’s more dance-like combat moves - something that I could believe is possible from the concept art and the promo art. The in-show model though looks like it would be insanely difficult for Weiss to do her twirls and leaps or even run, because her dress is so stiff and inflexible; it won’t move with her legs, but instead will trap them. It doesn’t add an accent or flourish to her fighting style, it hampers it - which is probably why Weiss has become a Summoner/Mage instead of being a Fencer like she used to be. Because they can’t or won’t go to the effort it takes to animate it, or model a dress that would let her actually fight like she used to.

I’m never going to like this design for Weiss: it’s over-complicated in all the wrong ways, doesn’t make good use of her colors, looks too cold for Atlas with it’s low-cut neckline, and doesn’t follow her character’s progression. But at least, in concept, it looks like a dress Weiss could move and fight in. However, the lazy modeling of the outfit, the refusal by RT to actually texture any of the shit on their models makes her hair look ugly and fake, and her dress like a bunch of frozen tarps layered on top of each other that she’d rip before being able to actually fight in.