The name Kerogi (ケロギ - Japanese katakana), comes from a combination of two Japanese words:
-Kero, more precisely "kerokero" (can also be gerogero) which is an onomatopoeia that describes the sounds frogs do (ribbit).
-Usagi, which means rabbit.
In my mind this guy looked like some sort of hybrid between a frog and a rabbit. Like a frog with rabbit antennae haha. Σ(￣。￣ﾉ)
I sculpted this guy and kind of looked like this:
When sculpting these kind of fellows I usually start with the overall shape and then I start cutting, engraving and slicing my way through the final form.
To illustrate what I mean I sculpted a thingy for your eyes only (￣ε￣＠) ちゅう:
With more time and work it could be a cool kitty nekomimi motorbike helmet... perhaps.
I wanted this guy to show some kind of action, like a mechanical thing that came out of his face, so I posed it and sculpted this mechanical proboscis:
I exported the two sculptures, the normal and the one with the action proboscis, and imported them to Blender.
There I added materials and found some angles and start rendering. These guys came out:
Then I dragged them and dropped them into the fotochopz thing and started doing various things like:
-Adding background -Adding text -Changing the color of the renders -Painting little thingies on top like the energy fx -Adding the cast shadows Etc...
Like so:
Final pieces:
Above japanese text reads "charging" (electrically)... I think. If I'm in an error please point it out ;)
When I started making these bots, I imagined they were made by a company, at that time I didn't want to spend time making a logo and backstory, but that was the idea. And every one of them features a number and this kanji 型 which means model or type. The number is just the date I finished the bot.
By the way, I already shared a bot this one. But I think I didn't mentioned its in-my-head story.
This bot was designed for military, bellicose and violent purposes :( May this series of mass produced killbots be hacked in favor of human and nature well being.
That was what I thought for that one.
For this one I thought it would be kind of an automaton. Harmless and ecological. This guy runs on a cutting edge battery that let it consume (through the proboscis) certain harmful particles and substances that threaten the ecosystem homeostasis... hahaha ie pollution materials. So when the battery is running out it immediately start the ecosystem cleansing cycle. Pretty nice machine. It is very animal and environment friendly.
Autonomous bot. Absorbs toxic particles from environment in order to gain energy. Clean cycle!
Something like that.
If you see them in full res you'll notice some chromatic aberration. I also treated this like some sort of toys. I wanted them to look a little like those 90's photos that came behind of the package of an action figure or a toy box, in which there were various photos of other toys that were featured in that collection. Good ol' times. Dino Riders. TMNT. Thundercats. Ghostbusters. SwampThing. Aliens. Robocop. Street Sharks. Saint Seya. Jurassic Park.
I also have in mind to further this series, or start another and produce them as toys or collectibles. But that will be in the future... if it is greater than present.
