Friday, December 4, 2009

More mecha Linearts






A bunch of lineart forms of Katoki's works in their primary forms.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Gundam Wing, Hajime variations



Here are some variations of Hajime Katoki's main mecha designs for the Gundam Wing series. He did the early design of these mechas and later on will be updated by other designers to finalize their shape. Here are respectively Heavyarms, Shenlong, Deathscythe, Sandrock and Wing custom.

Minor Mobile Suits design updates



Thanks to technology innovations, these two mobiles are updated to 3 dimensional designs.

Minor Mobile Suits designs



Lineart of the GM mobile and the colored Zaku are two recurring mechas designed by Katoki as the mass produced war machines for the armies of the Gundam Series.

Alex Gundam customs






















Here are the designs of the RX-78NT-1 "Alex" Gundam from Katoki, an actual tune-up of the original Gundam. The Alex Gundam is designed for the OVA series Gundam 0080 - War in the Pocket. A visible difference of this Gundam to the original RX-78 in terms of the weaponry is that the Alex has hand-rifles attached to its wrists that are covered within the blue plate.

Here are some sneak peeks of Katoki's main robot design MBV-04-G "Temjin" for Virtual-On.The first one is from the original game series on Sega Saturn while the second one is a port to Super Robot Wars W.

another approach, Virtual-On













Other than the popular animes and video games of the Gundam series also comes the video games of Cyber Troopers Virtual-On. All mecha designs are made by Hajime Katoki in this feature. This time, instead of having robots manned by humans, Virtual-On brings a world of self-aware robots in conflicts.

First Gundam introduced


The RX-78 Gundam is Katoki's first Gundam design, introduced for the first time in Sunrise's series of Mobile Suit Gundam 0079. Aside from being limited to a shield and a beam rifle as presented on the picture above, this mecha also has a fair inventory of weapons. The two poles on its backpack are actually beam sabers; tiny rifles are equipped on its forehead, shown as two holes on the side of its eyes; this mecha can also come to the battlefield with a giant rocket launcher.

For its 30th anniversary, Sunrise announced the construction of a real size Gundam in Japan. The construction ran from March 2009 to June 2009 and was dismantled in September 2009.

Short Biography of Hajime Katoki.











Hajime Katoki
was born in 1963 in Japan. He is a famous mecha designer for the Japanese animations and video games. One of his most remarkable designs that is still praised up to nowadays is more particularly his mechanical designs for the Gundam series. These series, created since the early 80s, are long running TV-shows featuring stories of fictional futuristic wars in which the soldiers fight with 20-feet tall humanoid war machines. The reason of his Gundam designs being so controversial for his time is because Katoki was one of the first designers to create realistic robots, later on known as real-type robots, that have no supernatural powers and unlike any mecha series of his time, the robots from the Gundam series function with limited supplies and might technically be constructed in our distant future, once our technology is advanced enough. *note that a giant model of Katoki's first Gundam design is constructed in Japan and even its original 20-feet height is also respected*

Katoki works as a member of the Sunrise studio, generally for mecha design or mecha updates, and various homage of his designs are made in the Super Robot Wars game series, where all his previous works are put together in an original storyline.