Transformers War For Cybertron Kingdom: Christiansen Megatron Concept Art

Robo-Barney looks pretty neat!

I'd like to add that while he is posting the art publicly, and every artist loves praise from fans, he is most likely not even posting it to get hype from you for toys he helped design, he's not Hasbro PR. Usually stuff like this gets posted so more potential employers can become aware of his portfolio.
It's pretty cool concept art, as it presents a good consistent view from every angle and of every form of the characters. Every one being all in the same style also prevents toys coming out mismatched stylistically, where in previous lines you might get Universe Hound and Universe Ironhide, who don't really go together. Speaking on my own experiences, it is actually quite hard to get good detailed reference from every angle of the Beast Wars cast, so it's not something easily solved by googling "BW Megatron animation model".
Concept art is for illustrating concepts, and sometimes those concepts are really straightforward. These are work materials, not promotion.

sad Megatron
 

octobotimus

Articulation isn’t present here either. Articulation points, rough drawings of what a toy might be, or rough 3D models of the toy are what people want to see out of concept art. This is still just a drawing of the character. Cool that this is concept art, I never said it wasn’t. I simply said it’s not what the public wants to see when seeing concept art, especially of a toy.

they don’t make concept art for you to drool over. They make it for hasbro and the folks who do the engineering to work with and they release just for fun. Ken is just asked to do some art and that’s all. He’s not commissioned to make the toy, just to make some drawings for them. He’s not a toy designer. He’s not told the gimmicks or anything that toy will have. He’s given a list of characters and what they imagine they will want. With Kingdom he’s told “faithful to the original look but realistic alt modes” that’s it. He’s not designing the toy he’s just giving a concept and they will take his work and then add what they like from it. That’s all that concept is

octobotimus

Cool that this is concept art, I never said it wasn’t.

octobotimus

It’s about as much concept as looking a picture of the original show.

You said it is as much concept art as something that is not concept art. To me that's you saying it is not concept art.

octobotimus

Articulation points, rough drawings of what a toy might be, or rough 3D models of the toy are what people want to see out of concept art.

Says who?

octobotimus

I simply said it’s not what the public wants to see when seeing concept art, especially of a toy.

And you're still wrong. I quite like seeing control art. I like seeing how things have evolved from a beginning point to the end product. I especially like the insights into how concept art gets used, like how Cheetor's art ended up heavily influencing his RED figure, despite being conceptualized for Kingdom.

The problem is you're saying people don't want something without actually saying what they do want. Aside from the obvious fact that you do not decide what people want to see, you're notably not articulating exactly what you seem to think they do. Because there's no baseline for what concept art is or what it represents. It's a very broad, heh, concept.

Maboroshi

before making a new toy, someone needs to define specifically what their visual goal is. then they hand it off to engineers who reference it and make their own tweaks in order to make it into an achievable reality. this is an important and necessary step in the process, no matter how many times you may have seen a character before. if it's not reusing the same mold, it needs to be designed like any other toy.
you have this art to thank for the new dino head style, some new textures, new arms, new proportions and various other little details and quirks of this specific mold.
it's not gallery art. it's not here to be what you "want to see." it wasn't created for the sole purpose of pleasing some neckbeard on the internet. it's an artist sharing part of the design process.
and to people interested in that sort of thing, it's exactly what we want to see. it's awesome to see the process and the art that goes into it.
people talking crap about this have no idea what they're talking about and have zero understanding of the process
they're just letting brown dribble out of their mouths for all to watch in horror
do yourselves a favor, wipe and close your mouths

Harsh but not incorrect.

Lot of armchair critics sitting in what they presume to be some authority on what this art is "supposed" to be, seemingly ignorant of its actual purpose. This art is usually created without ever being intended to be seen by the public, it just so happens the artist wanted to share.

before making a new toy, someone needs to define specifically what their visual goal is. then they hand it off to engineers who reference it and make their own tweaks in order to make it into an achievable reality. this is an important and necessary step in the process, no matter how many times you may have seen a character before. if it's not reusing the same mold, it needs to be designed like any other toy.
you have this art to thank for the new dino head style, some new textures, new arms, new proportions and various other little details and quirks of this specific mold.
it's not gallery art. it's not here to be what you "want to see." it wasn't created for the sole purpose of pleasing some geek on the internet. it's an artist sharing part of the design process.
and to people interested in that sort of thing, it's exactly what we want to see. it's awesome to see the process and the art that goes into it. and this is great art by a talented artist.
people talking crap about this have no idea what they're talking about and have zero understanding of the process
they're just letting brown dribble out of their mouths for all to watch in horror
do yourselves a favor, wipe and close your mouths

SPLIT LIP

If this art preceded the toy you would've then just complained that it falsely represented the final product.

Concept art is not to generate "hype," it is to show a glimpse into the conceptualization of the product.

Tbh this art isn’t the concept art people want to see. It’s just art of BW Megatron. It’s about as much concept as looking a picture of the original show.

Dusty

Because this specific toy isn't the only thing that artist is doing, for starters. This artist most likely focuses on Transformers, but also does other toylines not being reported on a Transformers website.
Also, you are ignoring the subtle differences that are absolutely different. For example, the chest piece is completely different on Kingdom Primal vs. the original 1996 toy. Everything needs an update at some point in time. Decision makers need to decide if it will be a toy that looks a LOT like the tv series or a lot like the original toy or something in between. An example here would be something like the Energon Megatron. It was obviously inspired by G1 Galvatron, but was not completely like that character. So in that case, someone made a choice to be only make it around 20-30% like G1 Galvatron.

In this case, they decided to make it very close to the original character's representation on screen. They need to present something to the modelers and engineers what envision the decision makers wanted.
This concept art will be reviewed by an internal team and they will say things like "more of a scowl on the gorilla face" or "nice, we like that you left the faceplate off", etc. The decision makers are not always 100% up to speed on past iterations on something and leave it up the concept designer to be the filter between the producers and modelers and engineers.

The workflow typically goes something like this:

*Someone says "We need a toy of Optimus Primal".
*A reference folder is created by the artist to be inspired by – this will include screen caps of the show, past toys, etc
*A designer starts thinking about play features (flip out guns, lights and sounds, does it need to mesh well with other gimmicks of the line such as Weaponizers etc)
*The concept designer starts making a design that figures out solutions to various problems the engineers don't want to think about. What does the face look like? Again, things like "does it have a faceplate or not?"
*Once they get approvals on the concepts, which translates to "Yes, this looks like the kind of Optimus Primal WE want to make", then it gets passed off to modelers and engineers to solve other things about the toy, like transformation, etc.

A toy can look like LITERALLY ANYTHING. They can make Optimus Primal with ONLY having his mutant head. They can make Optimus Primal not an ape at all, but some other animal altogether. They can do anything they want. The concept artist serves as a middle point between the decision makers (producers/designers/etc) and the modelers/engineers. Some of these concepts seem strange to you and seem like no concept art is needed, but that's because you don't know the process and its not a part of your life. Someone, for example (probably this artist?) made Paleotrex and gave him Primal's old mace as a head. That is something he didn't have to do as it doesn't serve the play feature at all and only fans will see the resemblance. The designer only says "he needs a mace weapon here", but its the concept artist who says "Oo! Wouldn't it be cool if I made Paleotrex's head Primal's old mace".

There are many moving pieces that happen when creating anything.
You'd be surprised how much industrial design and concept art needs to happen for a frickin screwdriver. Just make a screwdriver, right? Look at that one over on the shelf and make a new one, right? EVERY product on the shelf needs thorough artwork behind it. It is part of the process.

The process doesn't require the end user to understand the process, but the process exists for a reason.

*Note: I do not work in toy design. But I work in video games as an artist myself and I work in a similar pipeline. I also have many friends who have worked for Mattel and Hasbro and have personally asked questions myself over the years about what differences, if any, exist in their pipelines vs my own. I don't have to deal with engineering, for example, so I know next to nothing about that side of things. but I do know concept art quite well.

Terrific breakdown of the process. Thank you.

The final product did a pretty good job of sticking to the design. My only real nitpicks are that his hand isn't painted black and the tail can't be removed from his forearm. Both would have been incredibly easy to do.

Would have been cool to see a year ago to generate hype. A bit late at this point and don\'t care.