Moonshot wrote:Is there a site that has all or a lot of those Sunbow character model sheets u just showed?
Yes. They can be found
here. A fan named D.M has gone to great, painstaking lengths of tracking down the correct, finalized character models used by Toei and digitally recreating their official colorings using Toei's color palettes for each model. He has also recreated early, non-final colorings for preliminary models that help to show the evolutionary development of the models and their colorings, from non-final to final.
o.supreme wrote:I may be mistaken, but most of the models seem to come from "The Ark" character design books published by IDW ( Jim Sorenson and Bill Foster). Those were all just B&W sketches however, not sure who went to all the trouble to digitally color them
Many of the models used in the Ark books were early, non-final ones with certain details that differed from the final models. In the years since those books' publishing, many more
discoveries have been made:
In the years since The Ark series books were published, multiple model sheet collections and production bibles have surfaced through auction sites, social media and fan archive blogs, revealing that the majority of the models from the original cartoon that Bob Budiansky and Jim Sorenson had in their collective possession at the time of publishing, were not final. The bulk of the season 2 character models (as well as a few others) published in the books were older models that had received several revisions before making it into the cartoon, meaning that some of the details that can be found on these models had either been removed or redesigned afterwards, hence why some of them don't match up with what can be seen on-screen.
Several of the season 3 model sheets that appear in the books—such as the ones for the Predacons, Pipes, Swerve and Sky Lynx—all received entirely new models by Toei, different from what was originally drawn up, with Sky Lynx and the Predacons drawn from angles that are much more stylistic when compared to the standard ¾ angles used in past seasons, and feature large black shadows underneath their rear-view models, which also hadn't been used until this point. Also among the drastic changes in the art style are the "boxier" hand designs used on the Predacons, which would be utilized more frequently in the subsequent Japanese cartoons like The Headmasters, instead of the rounded hands that were more common in Floro Dery's work for seasons 1 and 2.
Also discovered years after the book series was published, were models for The Transformers: The Movie that were either not known about or fully understood at the time of publishing, such as the unique head design that appears alongside Rodimus Prime's models in the books. For years, the fandom assumed the boxy Rodimus model used in the books was the model used in the film and season 3, but it was actually scrapped in favor of the sleeker design used for Hot Rod's final model. Rather than designing an entirely new model sheet for Rodimus that fit the slender aesthetic they wanted, all that was designed was a new head with the animators simply instructed to draw a larger version of Hot Rod's body with Rodimus's head slapped on top. Because of this, no official robot mode model exists for Rodimus, just a head design.
The Junkions Junkyard and Scrapheap were also given entirely new models by Toei for the movie, that had parts matching the other non-Wreck-Gar Junkions, giving them a collective "mix and match"-type design, rather than the two stand-alone designs drawn by Floro Dery. The problem with the Junkion models though, is that the only known trace of the final Toei Junkion models as of 2022, is a small section in the back of the Transformers Generations guidebooks. That being said, Dery's original designs for these two Junkions did still appear in season 3 of the cartoon, due to AKOM animating the two episodes they appeared in.
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