Sharing my Facebook rant:
Another example: This is Mamoru Nagano's failed attempt to do a design that flips the use of golden ratio over. The result is a huge lack of cohesion because of the parallel rule: that if you draw two vertical or horizontal lines next to eachother that are of the same height and you adjust the thickness of one, it looks shorter than the other. It brings the entire design collapsing down as a joke. Its a shame because Five Star Stories is about the biggest influence on my work I even know. Hell, it was a huge influence on ME growing up.
Mamoru, why would you do that I don't even
So unfortunately, he Mamoru (the gothic-made guy of the failed design earlier) tried to abandon the idea of thigh and legspace, in exchange for more torso and tried to use the arms as a floating point compensation of whitespace. The result is the Gothicmode looks fucking hideous.
To quote Luca: "Its like someone threw a knife drawer into the air and said 'let's go with this'."
Yet, abandoning or interfering with the rule is fine, if you do it properly: Some work by Makoto Kobayashi who deliberately flubs the thighlegspace rule and still makes it work because he's not a total scrub. Note the wider skirt serving as a base of weight and the arch of the back, betwe back and the arm:
And here, the near total removal of the torso, in exchange for a larger head to offset the loss of said torso:
Some designers CAN look at work and ask "what can i do without?" and really nail it: There's Yutaka Izubuchi, Kazumi Fujita, Shoji Kawamori, and to a much much lesser extent, Obari (a guy who's no understanding of proportion who has other people, typically, Fujita or Hajime Katoki. Hilariously, Katoki has now basically become the face of Gundam, totally replacing Obari. lol outsourcing.
Here's something that started off as a joke by Shigeto Koyama on a napkin mocking Mamoru's Gothicmade. Ironically, the StarDriver ended up getting its own show, something Mamoru STILL can't swing because of how hard he is to work with and his hatred of plamo.
Anyway, The major flaw of this VWX/AB golden-ratio style is that its really hard to make it good while in motion, while its moving even though it looks really big and imposing while stationary, largely because the proportions and lines are disrupted by the act of altering the posture of the figure which throws the entire thing into a mess. Its why, for example, you tend never to see a robot with these proportions run the same way a human does: It looks really really silly.
This is why you'll see the same angles and poses over and over and over again in mecha anime. It made the genre stale for a really long time, the dependence on the aesthetic and the entire styling.
A really common cheat is to have the thing not walk at all and move over the ground like an ice-skar, something we first saw in VOTOMS and in Gundam with the DOM, a design specifically made to move this way because they couldn't make it look good walking, so they improvised with what they had. Armored Core made it into a trope in the 90s and it kind of became a big thing, really.
So then we had Eva, which decided "fuck it, let's do a robot with the proportions of a human exaggerated a bit" as a nod to some of he manga work with Ultraman, which depicted him with really wide shoulders and super long arms. The result was a machine that looks good running AND is imposing, but doesn't look "stable", hence you won't see Eva's fly or in space unless there's proportional adjustment (3.33 used the add-boosters) or instead of thrust they're using harpoons or something (as they did also in 3.33).
See here how they relaxed these proportions for the later movies?
How they became more human?
Note how this eva, with its relaxed form looks VERY diferent to this Eva:
Which in turn is different from this Eva of the same overall design, thanks to weighting and proportion:
So you end up with this bizzare game of cat and mouse with stability, stoic form and imposing proportion vs instability, dynamic form and movable balanced proportion: To this, we got some really interesting answers. The first, the people behind Gundam hired
Syd Mead, a really really famous American mechanical designer who's responsible for Aliens, Bladerunner and pretty much probably your scifi childhood by extension of inspiring others. He dismantled the whole proportion-set and he refined it, deciding as a joke he'd make sething that looks bad in the vwx/default pose but looks amazing in motion. The result was the Turn-A Gundam, which is nothing like anything prior to this point in time, back in 2001. This was cleaned up by a few other designers to compromise between the two quite nicely.
So while it looks really really weird stationary (here) it looks really good in motion (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w89V1_C4uQ), running no-less which was basically near impossible to get right prior. Note the legs close up into golden ratio from like four different angles.
The Japanese went fucking apeshit and declared that for an Ameican to show up and school them and not only that but to make it intentionally ugly when stationary was an utter travesty and there was huge backlash: they were furious and called it monsterous and disgusting.
In fact, the Japanese were so smug that that Hobby Japan Modeler magazine hired Katoki to do a redesign of it. Katoki, appreciating Syd's work did almost exclusively greeble, detailing (to do a trick of weighting or emphasis, making some parts look big or smaller based on the detail density inside their silouette from any given angles) and chamfered some edges up to make it blockier.
2ch went nuts declaring "See, this is what it SHOULD look like" then like a month later Katoki gave an interview, total trolface-tier as he said "I actually didn't alter the silhouette or base proportions.: You're just acting like it was your idea the entire time".
As sad as it sounds, little plastic mens what blow eachother up are really really fun and the infighting, backstabbing, drama and lulz in the design community is fantastic. How do I know this? This revision of VWX with the elongated legs, unified shoulder/torso design and curved lower legs, wrist and emphasized back? They're all standard tropes of design now. Mead changed everything.
Anyway, there's more stuff I could go on about - the way this idea was toyed with -- for example, Kojima getting his lead designer Yoji Shinkawa (who prior mostly did characters) to take a crack at a humanoid robot: To use the tropes and shapes of VWX (big shoulders, wide hips, wasp waists, the shapes of the heads) but to apply them to more human shapes so when they were in motion they would look good and to solve the walking problem simply by having them float through the entire game.
To this end, they even end the golden ratio at the ankle, removing the foot entirely.
While I use a lot of the form tropes of ZOE, my design-style is actually more like Mamoru's work than Yoji Shinkawa's.
It also made huge use of monoforms, continuous shapes rather than lots of blocky modular shapes -- more like skin and less like an exoskeleton, because it was easier and more effective on a console to create robots that moved like characters themselves.
So then you had this big new divide nobody prior had considered outside of Eva: Were monoforms doale with those classic vwx tropes? Answer: Yes.
So the explosive reaction has been to try exploring VWX's logical extremes, to see if it can be salvaged instead of having this cat and mouse game between relaxed and tight proportions.
We got it with Gundam SEED which wanted to explore every variant of the identical same proportions, we got it with Kawamori's move to a more anorexically styled Macross and we got it with Armored Core V which fetishisically wanted to explore "real robot" as an aesthetic to its logical extreme.
The genre's been pretty stagnant for the last 5 years or so. I seriously think the next big thing is going to be seeing how small they can make them while still fitting a person inside, but still maintaining the clever proportions that make it look both imposing and dynamic and where the true compromise between the two lies -- that is, to introduce "fitting" as a third dynamic property to explore given the other two seem stagnant.
Fitting will become the new gimmick that transformation used to be, I think.
My personal style is built around fitting and next I want to see if I can manage it AND get a working GOOD transformation in there too just to see how far I can push things. That would be the creme de la creme of design, I think.
