griffith76 wrote:Bovis and Fortis
They share the basic body and these two are pretty much ready. What I changed are mostly engineering stuff that non of you will be interested to hear like standard screw sizes, pin size etc.
The major flaws with this design were the lack of locking of beast limbs in robot and alternate mode and the front legs of the beast were left hanging downwards in leg mode. I made some modifications to ensure that there is no loose kibble and any mode.
Talon
We literally got trashed for the design of the wings in Actoys based on the sihoulette and we decided that we need better ones. The new set of wings are pretty much the same length but based very closely to IDW's art and of course the feathers are made articulated for a more dramatic effect.
The body proportions were changed slightly coz we feel that him and Tigris were too wide in arm mode. With the change in body proportions his indian headdress had to go and I opted for a dancougar look with a young handsome face as the older look did not suit the leaner body at all.
We decided that the simple flip down foot was too simple and the lower leg was too hollow so we filled that up and gave him new feet. And talons that are more complex and articulated.
Tigris
He had the same base body proportions as Talon but made much worse with the beast hind legs sticking out sideways in arm mode. He was made leaner as well and I redesigned him arms to have shoulders to resemble G1 more.
I modified the beast legs to make them look closer to how a real tiger should but they had to be a bit skinner to keep the arm mode compact.
Gave him a longer tail that points down instead of up and a neck for beast mode that he's missing. I also added a hunch to the tiger's look coz crouching tigers
He's actually my personal favorite and I think he looks really dynamic in botmode and fun to play fiddle around with.
Leo
The orignal finalized Leo from Cassy was good in robot mode and a nice beast mode (apart from the arm joints looking a little unorthodox). We would have kept it if not for three very fatal flaws. Lets just call him V2 I don't know if Cassy considers the earlier larger mock up to be V1 or are there more versions inbetween.
1. V2 Leo is 9" tall. Its somewhat still acceptable but we really don't want a leader size figure if possible at all.
2. We understand that Cassy had originally wanted him to be even bigger and because we asked him to shrink it down to a reasonable size to scale with his team members, the combined mode suffered and we got what you guys would call the FOC Bruticus Syndrome. It didn't help with the bot's arms/beast front legs merely hang around loosely as back kibble.
3. Lastly, the leg transformation is basically too G1. The beast legs were still acceptable and they look pretty good in bot mode with the fake knee joint in his thigh... until the knee is bent. Anyone who knows how the G1 toy works will get the idea.
So basically with all these taken into consideration the only way to fix things was to redesign Leo from scratch. I loved the body so I kept it but chopped part of the sides off to and design new arms that fold into a block that can add actual mass to the combined torso. Boss hated the heads so we got new ones. The design of the legs was one of the biggest challenge for me since G1 obviously doesnt work here and giving him beast legs like what we had for Tigris made the thighs look terrible. I came up with a new design where we still got some decent rear legs albeit a bit skinny, becomes almost unnoticeable from the front when kept in for torso mode. I'm proud of those legs
Lastly was the biggest challenge of all. Rex has no ass. I spent 2 days designing a collapsible one for him but the kibble was too huge even when folded so back to the drawing board. Finally managed to come up with a design thats simple enough and actually looks somewhat decent to be a friggin shield coz like I explained before, the shield option is a must. So the rest is history and it became the hip that a lot of folks wished it was 10% smaller.
Oh and theres the hugeass-sword and the arm cannon. The sword was a reconfiguration of what Cassy has already done but I felt that his original design looked more like a club so I played around with the blades and managed to form something that pays some homage to his G1 sword. It was initially smaller but bossman says its too puny so it became the monster we're gonna have now. Downside to it is that it takes 2 blades for each member to form it. Theres still some hidden secrets to that thing that we won't be revealing.
Cassy gave us G1 guns scaled up. They are huge and don't go anywhere in almost any modes apart from being held in the hands of the robots. Cassy originally intended to use the sword handle as the arm cannon but we thought that's a little too cheap and it means we can't have both the sword and gun at the same time. I thought since we made that sword we might as well do it for the cannon as well. So I borrowed some gun models from what I did for the other toy company I worked for and made sure no one can tell where they came from after I'm done with them.
Thats about the gist of what happened between the receiving of the finalized models from Cassy and my contribution to the overall design.
WOW by far the best transformers out this year 
Is that other Predaking still around or did it get canned?
. I can't say this scale bugs me one little bit for one i'm getting a chunk of a figure for my money, two predaking should tower other combiners and thirdly classic galvatron's size wont be an issue anymore with this beast around 
)
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