[conceptisms]

This is after Scar takes over, right?

[conceptisms]

Here’s a video perfectly encapsulating the capitalistic, soulless, robotic nature of modern concept art. The comments are surprisingly not on board with it, perhaps because the click-bait title attracted people like me who are sick of the shallowness of the concept art industry and want to see it dead.

It’s an hour long so I suggest you skip to these parts:

2:31 Learning how to be a copycat is not talent and is certainly not a path to artistic godhood. Art is not a competition with one single clear goal that everyone needs to emulate. If the only reason why you’re doing art is to be in some kind of a race for technical skill, go be a technical artist and stop pretending like you have any kind of artistic merit. Creativity is an asset.

7:39 Basically, rip-off other people’s work so you don’t have to spend any time on actual artistic growth.

11:01 He is repeatedly using “photo reference” wrong when he means photo-bashing. These paintings clearly used photo references, but the artist wasn’t skilled enough to make them look good. It also looks like he used the “paint in grayscale and add colour through the colour option for layers“ technique, which always produces these ugly washed out paintings so I have no idea why people ever suggest it. But instead of getting better at painting, the solution was to just take photos and go over them with Photoshop tools.

14:01 Yes, concept art should be about the idea. Which is why it’s so stupid to expect fully rendered artworks from artists before they’ve even settled on the design, just because concept art needs to double as promo art and their client thinks that pretty colours and shading equal good design. People used to draw their designs on paper without a bunch of unnecessary polishing and guess what? They were great.

To be clear, photo-bashing isn’t bad in every single case, but it is a very specific and limited tool that can’t replace actual artistic skill and hand-painted work. Just because you can make quick artwork that will look “cool” to laypeople does not mean it’s on the same level as actual hand-painted artwork where the artist controls every stroke. This kind of shallow production of art, where the only thing that matters is gluing together photos asap and making them shinier with Photoshop, is unfortunately the norm in concept art now. It’s art as imagined by tech people.

14:45 Hah! I often feel sorry for the modellers because I have no idea how they manage to make sense of these kinds of photobashed “designs”.

15:35 A visualisation of everything wrong with concept art

25:50,  27:03 What if I told you that there’s a middle ground between scribbling random shapes with no thought behind them (the typical result of this “start with the silhouette/values” crap) and taking photos of “cool stuff in nature”, putting a bunch of effects over them and calling it a day?

26:57 If you’re suggesting that concept artists should be fired because they have no artistry to contribute to projects, I agree.

37:42 It’s a bad thing that all concept art done by these “art gods” looks like it’s done by the exact same person, both in artistic technique and the ideas themselves because the industry is so derivative due to concept art schools only teaching people how to follow trends to be relevant in “the industry”. Gotta meet those deadlines, gotta churn out all those samey designs, it’s what the clients want. How can you even call that art? These same copycats drool over Alien and LOTR, movies that have unique visuals precisely because they had artists with their own styles working on them, they didn’t rely solely on a bunch of clones to do the same exact factory-produced art that every single Hollywood movie has now. And with all these remakes and reboots now, these creatively-bankrupt concept artists redoing the things that people remember because they were great ideas and now they’re selling them with their crappy technological "improvements” that suck the soul out of the originals, because these are tech people who couldn’t come up with anything creative if you put a gun to their head, so they need to leech off of older properties to hide that fact and automatically gain favour with the “fans”, because they know no-one would care about their derivative superficial designs on their own. And then people say that Hollywood is out of ideas, there are plenty of ideas to go around but the people who have ideas are not hired because their art isn’t shiny and produced as fast as possible, the only ones who get jobs are these tech types who leech off of other people’s work and say they’re “honored to update it for the modern audience”.

*INHALES DEEPLY*

Okay, I’m done.

[conceptisms]

Finally the teaser for the Lion King came out. I was waiting for it because I wanted to see what route they intend to take. Would the animals be realistic with creepy humanoid facial expressions, or would they be completely realistic and look like all those talking dogs in crappy kids’ movies? Either choice is pretty damn bad, much like this whole movie. Oh and they put in these trailer sounds as if we’re going to watch a thriller. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.

The shot at 0:48 when Rafiki rips apart a root stands out to me as devoid of any kind of strength and resistance. The technology simply isn’t there to do hyper-realistic characters. The fur looks awful. The animal extras are pretty well done, but sheesh, when Simba turns around with that bad cgi fur on him, he looks like a plushy. And Rafiki looks like he’s done in stop motion.

Oh, and the shots:

Original: Huge imposing sun centred in the middle of the screen to strongly emphasise the beginning of dawn.

Remake: Small sun off-center and way in the distance, made tinier by the big trees in the foreground. Looks like your average random shot in a documentary. Having a big sun rising in the middle of the screen would make a strong impression on the audience.

Original: Morning fog at the bottom and half of Kilimanjaro being in the shadow because it’s dawn. The fog also provides some blue colour for variety.

Remake: Look, it’s cgi elephants! Wow, they look so real! Are you impressed? I guess they couldn’t have put fog there, then people couldn’t see how realistic those cgi elephants are.

Original: Clouds with sun rays breaking through them, a third of the image is the ground to show the presence of the animals.

Remake: Lower the horizon so it doesn’t emphasize all the animals gathered down there. Add some big hills in the background so it feels more cramped. Push the whole Pride Rock more towards the middle of the screen because the sky is so boring now. Just have everything happen in the bottom third of the screen because...it was really important to show the whole Pride Rock in this shot? Even though it looks worse now. I don’t get why they changed the shape like that.

The original makes sure to differentiate the colour palette in every shot. It starts with the strong orange as the sun comes up and progresses through various colours as it gets to the final epic shot. The new one is just yellow-brown (cough cough). It doesn’t have a colour palette because that wouldn’t be realistic and we wouldn’t want to be unrealistic in our movie about talking animals and lion monarchies. The part when Rafiki is showing off Simba looks especially bad, it’s like someone used too much dodge tool in Photoshop on the background. It’s so ugly. And the animals bowing. They’re very well done from a cgi point of view which I guess makes it worse because it’s like someone threw food on the ground and then filmed them, trying to pass that off as bowing. Again, like those bad kids’ movies with talking animals where you see the animals have no clue what’s going on. But I guess that’s what’s realistic. I’ll remind myself of that when these animals break into song. Unless all the singing was cut too. That’d also be realistic.

People are mocking this teaser for being a shot-by-shot remake of the original, yeah, okay. Would it be better if they forced in changes just so they’d be different? Like in Beauty and the Beast? This whole trend of rebooting great movies is stupid as a concept, you can’t make these movies work. You’re not going to make them better and they don’t need your bad lifeless cgi to make the audiences like them. You’re just going to make them more boring and self-aware because our audience is supposedly so cynical now. The only reason why they’re going to see your new movie in the first place is because they love the original, not because the new movie has any worth by itself. These filmmakers are just leeching off of the success of the originals and people are eating it all up because they love the originals. At least the sequels weren’t pretending to be the original movies.

[conceptisms]

The upcoming Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle looks the same as the Disney version, except with creepy animals that try to make human facial expressions. I don’t really care since the Soviet adaptation is the only one I need in my life (and you should watch it), but there are two funny things about this one:

The movie was originally supposed to be called Jungle Book: Origins. I wonder if it would’ve been followed by Jungle Book: Reloaded and Jungle Book Resurrection?

This quote from Andy Serkis: “We wanted to engage much more closely to the tone of the book. This is very much drawn from Kipling and has a much darker approach to the storytelling. There’s no singing and dancing from the animals, that’s for sure.”

Now Rann the Kite brings home the night

That Mang the Bat sets free—

The herds are shut in byre and hut

For loosed till dawn are we.

This is the hour of pride and power,

Talon and tush and claw.

Oh, hear the call!—Good hunting all

That keep the Jungle Law!

Night-Song in the Jungle

The beginning of the Jungle Book novel. And not the only one, since every chapter starts with a song.

[conceptisms]

For whatever reason, if Western developers do even the most basic level of research, they’ll market their game as if they made a documentary. The main culprit I have in mind is Ghost of Tsushima. It's set on an island during the Mongol invasion of Japan in the 13th century, but everyone in it is dressed like they’re some 500 years in the future. The daisho (katana+wakizashi pair of swords worn by the samurai) also wasn’t a thing back then.

We’re not talking about some obscure historical knowledge here. If you showed this game to any Japanese, they'd tell you that's not what people wore in the 13th century. It’s like making a game set in the middle ages and having everyone dressed in Victorian era fashion and then bragging about historical accuracy. Here’s some ridiculous statements from the devs:

“Honestly, the 13th century armor is pretty jarring looking, it's not what you'd expect. It's really boxy. It doesn't look aspirational. And we wanna make sure that what we give you is your fantasy of what being a wandering samurai is.”

Really? This:

..looks jarring? This of all things isn’t samurai enough for you?

The hitatare doesn’t look Japanese enough either? Careful, people might assume this is Native American clothing or something, you wouldn’t want to confuse them.

“Getting all the historical detail as right as we can is important to us”

What, so now it’s important?

"We want to be historically accurate, but we also want to play into the expectations we have from samurai films and samurai games"

Which is it? You can't say you're aiming to be stereotypical and at the same time sell your game as "historically accurate". Pick one. Either you care about historical accuracy, or you don't. If you don’t, either don’t market your game as if it’s accurate and just set in in the period you really want to see.

“A lot of samurai films are set in the Edo period, but this period isn’t very common in fiction. If you look at the armor references and the styles and what they’re wearing, it’s awesome, there’s some great stuff for us to pull from. I’m excited we went in that direction.”

You didn’t take anything that was actually present in the fashion of that era! The armor and the clothing are straight from the Edo period because “that’s what the audience expects”/”it’s what the wandering samurai fantasy entails”. It’s so slimy to act like they’re doing something daring for the sake of marketing when they didn’t have the guts to actually make the game look like the period it’s set in.

The people who know anything about Japanese history know that it wasn't all one identical monolithic culture for 500 years, and the people who don't know anything about Japan except the word kimono really aren't going to give a damn whether there’s a koshi-ita in the back of that kimono or not. And neither are they going to care whether the samurai have a katana or a tachi, so it’s really stupid to claim you put these anachronistic things in there for the sake of the audience that won’t notice them. The problem isn’t with the lack of historical accuracy per se, it’s about: 1) lying 2) making changes for a reason as stupid as “it’s not generic enough”.

This attitude is typical of concept artists and these entertainment industry types. Not only do they not think it's bad, they think it's commendable that they're skilfully managing the audiences' expectations and giving it what it wants, because any bit of creativity is going to confuse and alienate them. If the idea, or “fantasy”, doesn’t look like the most predictable thing possible, then it’s not going to resonate with the audience. It’s basically “use clichés because that’s what the audience knows”.

[conceptisms]

For anyone interested, I’ve made a second blog for all the things that Spyro the Reignited Trilogy gets wrong, to keep this one from turning into Why-Reignited-Sucks Weekly: Spyro Ashes

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Spyro Reignited and missing the point

I am absolutely amazed how often the company heading this “remaster” completely ruins and misunderstands the original designs. And I’m not even going to talk about the plain ugly redesigns here, just the ones that completely miss what the originals were going for.

These critters?

Oh, their faces aren’t black because they’re covered in cloth and peeking from the darkness inside.

They’re actually some kind of a black oily monster creature underneath because I guess leaving anything to the imagination is unacceptable with modern graphics.

This big guy’s helmet resembles a mohawk and a gear at the same time. What a neat idea!

Oh. Well, I guess it’s just a plain old helmet then. Yaawn. And he’s gotta have those bandages on that wrench for that “improvised patched up” look that this trilogy likes so much. Those are the details that matter.

https://youtu.be/sdXNAtdY9FM?t=206 These dinosaurs’ arms are so tiny that they can’t reach their holsters, so they need to shake their hips to make the guns jump out and land in their hands. That’s funny!

Oh. They just...gave them long hands. So now they randomly throw their guns high in the air for no reason and stand like they’re surrendering. The blue dinosaurs still throw dynamites at you with their mouth only, which is again stupid since they have proper arms now. The reason they were throwing them with their mouth in the first place was because their arms were too tiny. Oh and their hats have crocodile teeth on them, which is supposed to be an Australian thing, not a cowboy thing. Come on.

Look at this level: https://youtu.be/M6SDpPgowmg?t=42 It’s clearly inspired by Rome. Has a nice, cool atmosphere. Marble, stone...Lions in togas as inhabitants.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N89TUKqyDv8 But in the new version the walls for some ludicrous reason got turned into medieval wattle and daub walls. The floor looks like wood. Is it wood? I can’t tell because everything in this game looks like it’s made out of playdough or plastic. The squarish Roman patterns got replaced with some childish scribbles, it seriously looks like someone was told to make some kind of pattern and this was the first thing they came up with on the spot. And what in the world is that spiral on the wooden beam supposed to be?! The stone floors/walls were also changed from blue to orange at parts, to exterminate any feeling of coolness from the marble/stone materials which were supposed to be present. But if I went into how every level’s color palette was ruined, we’d be here all day.

https://youtu.be/oEghUW7YG-I Then there's this icy level. It's built in a cold cave and it looks like the inside of a castle.

https://youtu.be/yJUiA5nkvSs In the new one, they put friggin' sofas on the walls! Then they added horrible ice columns that look like gnawed bones. Of course there's the ever present rock lumps everywhere, can't have something detailed like marble with our PS4 graphics. And there's snow everywhere. Where did it even come from? It looks a blizzard went through this place. It doesn't look regal in the least. In fact this whole trilogy looks lazy, improvised, claustrophobic and bulky instead of awe-inspiring, wide and magical. Just look at these textures in the original:

Gee, I wonder what they're going to look like with the new PS4 graphics:

Ew.

How can the new one, in a PS4 game, have such empty walls entirely devoid of texture? Oh and those fat ugly columns. It doesn’t look like a beautiful room at all. It just looks chunky. Everything in this game is chunky. They should’ve named it Spyro: the Chunky Trilogy.

There’s no texture on these platforms and the top of them is made up of cracked rocks. It’s just ugly. The original architecture looks like a product of skilled workers. The new one looks like someone just glued a bunch of clay together. And it’s not surprising, one of the artists working on the original actually had a degree in architecture. If you told me any artist working on Reignited knew a lick about architecture, I’d laugh.

[conceptisms]

Medievil is an excellent example of how to properly update a crude character design that has potential. Aside from making the proportions more pleasant to look at, they also made the belly skeletal to add some skeletal elements to his torso, and changed the massive shoulders so he doesn’t look like a linebacker. He’s a skeleton, so it’s good that he isn’t too buff. And of course some small changes to make the armour look more like knight armour.

Also wow, sketches where the artist isn’t in a rush to slap on shading and as many textures onto the design as possible before even nailing the actual design? Truly this is a decade old concept art.

[conceptisms]

Man, the new Spyro Reignited trilogy, where do I even start? Whose idea was it to give the company that ran Spyro’s name into the ground with generic snorefest Skylanders the task to remaster the classic games?

At least the Crash Bandicoot remasters, as ugly as they were and similarly lazy in preserving the artistic direction and mood of the original, didn’t feel entitled to completely change the original character designs, which is what the new Spyro is doing. How full of yourself do you have to be to think that, as the company behind freakin’ Skylanders, you can make the original trilogy better than the actual creators could? And they’re marketing the whole thing as a remaster, despite the games taking so many liberties with everything but the gameplay (ironically the thing that least needs updating). It’s honestly sad that they knew they couldn’t make a good Spyro sequel that would revive the franchise so instead they went the easy route of “remastering” the original for guaranteed sales based on nostalgia and fame of the original games.

One post won’t do it justice so I’m going to make several about how much they’ve botched almost every aspect of the original.

[conceptisms]

Unsung Story

A few years ago a Kickstarter disaster happened called Unsung Story, a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy Tactics that had managed to gather over $600,000. After a lot of inactivity from the devs, development on the game discontinued (it still baffles me how these cases don’t end up with someone in jail). I only heard about the whole thing half a year ago when a new developer, who until then had only dealt in licensed games, took over the project to try and save it despite receiving none of the kickstarted money, even promising to deliver the backer rewards. Unlike the previous developer, they've been very active and open with the backers from the start. It’s hard not to root for a small studio trying to save a serious project like this so I’ve been checking up on them here and there, but recent artistic developments have left me very disappointed.

The project initially had Akihiko Yoshida on board, the original artist for FF Tactics, with a fairly recognisable style as far as JRPGs go:

Of course, after the project's initial failure, he wasn't available anymore, but instead of hiring someone who uses a similar style, they chose to go with the most generic option possible, what I call the moba style (alternate names include “Blizzard style” and “mobile game style”):

I was hoping the small studio maybe had big ideas on where to take the game, but this just makes me wonder if the rest of the game is going to opt for such easy, uncreative solutions.

One of the reasons given for the change was that they were unable to copy Yoshida's style. Really? There's a huge leap between being unable to copy the style of one specific jrpg artist and doing a 180 and switching to a completely different Western style that has no resemblance whatsoever to the original one. Even if no-one on the team was capable of drawing anything similar, you can still find a ton of artists online drawing in similar styles. And even if hiring new artists wasn't an option, a more realistic style with more muted colours still would've been better than this. But hey, concept artists can only possibly work in one toony style and that's this one. Guess all of their “style practice” exercises were for nought.

Other reasons given for the change were that they are a small studio, they are running out of time and money and they need to play up their strengths for this undertaking. I suppose they’re at least honest about it, but man, what a way to alienate your audience. I wonder if they’re also hoping to attract new audiences with this style. I doubt that’s gonna work out for them since the people who love this style aren’t exactly fans of tactical RPGs.

On the plus side, at least most of the backers criticised the style and (unexpected from anime fans) the stupid sexualization.

[conceptisms]

Aaand another one for the “classic-design-but-albino” bunch.

[conceptisms]

A realization dawned on me as I compared the new Star Trek to the older ones: I don’t think a sci-fi show with an aesthetic as unique as Star Trek could be made nowadays. Concept artists now dictate what a sci-fi franchise needs to look like, and there is little space there for innovation. The innovation we got in the new show amounted to giant space tardigrades that can teleport using magical spores. Yeah. Sure.

I consider TNG to be a shining example of how to update a property successfully. It pushed the sci-fi design of the original that was very much rooted in the 60′s and made it into something truly unique and recognizable that you couldn’t find anywhere else. There’s so much great design there, the new Enterprise, the famous uniforms and consoles, the badges turned communicators, the engineering with its warp core, the way the bridge looks, the sound design...

Then you look at the new one where someone turned off the lights and everyone is wearing almost entirely dark uniforms with only thin gold, silver and bronze lines. Colors? There’s no place for that in our dark new Game-of-Thrones influenced Star Trek! We need to drag Star Trek away from its unique style and "modernize it", which means shoving it into a generic sci-fi aesthetic that concept artists are being trained to churn out. People like to joke that classic Star Trek characters are wearing what look like pajamas on duty. What’s wrong with that? It’s hundreds of years in the future, why can’t their sense of fashion look a little unusual? Or more precisely, why does it need to match our generic ideas on what “cool” sci-fi future should look like, for no reason other than sci-fi being expected to look like that? Why does everything that isn’t “cool” have to be treated as childish or ridiculous nowadays? Are blue floaty holograms with limited visibility and barely any colors (because apparently people in the future will only require blue-colored images) cool and realistic? No, but they need to be there because they’re a cliche of sci-fi aesthetics.

On a final note, my sister made her own smartphone theme in the style of a Star Trek console.

Meanwhile, the Discovery consoles. Can you imagine anyone associating this with Star Trek and wanting to model something based on it?

I rest my case.

[conceptisms]

Ah, the new Klingon armour in Star Trek Discovery. It's comical how they had to slap the Klingon logo onto the shoulder like a glowing "It's a Klingon!" sign because no-one would be able to tell otherwise. Barring the complete lack of resemblance, it's also incredibly generic and looks like it belongs on a box for the latest graphics card. THIS was your brilliant design idea that you thought was so much better than the original?

Not to mention the whole thing is a complete mess from a design standpoint. It's like the designer was trying to cram as many shapes and textures into the design as possible without ever considering how they are going to work together. Yeah, let's make a weird deformed melted mess of a helmet, then add these metallic spiky things onto the chest and neck, then swirly thin lines on the neck, then a chain mail texture onto the shoulders for some reason, oh, and put some Giger spines on the belly (because concept artists just love ripping off Giger's aesthetic), and how about some horizontal lines on the biceps, oh, oh, and little shell-like things on the lower arms and some kind of a cable etc. etc. And of course we have the classic case of horror vacui, can't have even a centimeter that's not crammed with detail for our modern ADHD audiences.

What's funny is that I found the concept art for this armor and it looks exactly the way expected it to look: a ton of textures slapped onto each other with no sense of volume or consistency. This is what passes for design nowadays. I feel sorry for the poor 3D modeller that had to try and get something comprehensible out of that.

[rahabs]

before you get on my case by telling me “cheyenne!!!!  ofc the beauty and the beast was colourful look at all those colours!”

look me in the eye and tell me that this entire movie didn’t just look like the Masquerade scene from the 2004 Phantom movie.

like look at that, and then look at these stills from the new movie:

now look at these stills from the original animated movie:

look at those fucking beautiful colours!  all that beautiful contrast!

everything just looks so muted in the new one and everything’s some shade of gold with maybe a little bit of blue mixed in, but even when the blue is there it’s so muted it might as well not even be there?  it’s just so unbelievably boring and i am unbelievably tired of washed out colours and zero contrast just.  ugh.  Belle’s dress is boring enough, but there’s nothing for it to stand out against in that background.  where are you supposed to look?  even Gaston doesn’t stand out, especially since other people in that scene are wearing similar colours; the only reason he stands out even a little is because he’s been placed on a physically higher level than the other characters.  basically every single one of these costumes blends in to the background when it should stand out against it.

i’m not an artist, i’m not a designer, but there’s just no focus.  what is an audience supposed to focus on when the characters look more like part of the woodwork than the focus of the movie?  where are our eyes supposed to go?  this movie is just a couple hours of bland aesthetic when it should be bright and vibrant.  at the very least i should not feel like i’m looking at a bunch of fucking chameleons scurrying around a dead forest.  this movie is supposed to be bright and vibrant so why doesn’t it look bright and vibrant?  this isn’t Saving Private Ryan, so why is every single movie trying to code its colours to be that?

it’s frustrating and it looks ugly and dull.  there is no contrast where this movie desperately needs it, and to be honest it’s feels like looking at a talking hardwood floor for ninety minutes.

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Using actual colours in a shot seems to have become a lost art. Can’t have colours when we want to be serious. Please take us seriously, we’re not like those childish colorful movies from the past.

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Head of indie team: I hope I won’t have to put zombies in my game. I’m kinda tired of zombies.

Me: Um, don’t put them in, then? You literally have complete creative control over your game.

Head of indie team: But every game has zombies nowadays, so you gotta put them in.

[conceptisms]

I focus a lot on bad examples of concept art because there are just so many, but here are a couple of games with good concept art.

The first is Syberia with its beautiful steampunk visuals that don’t feel overdone for a change. The game is French and the artist behind it is a comic artist named Benoît Sokal. Yes, big shock, you do not need a specially trained “concept artist” or even worse, “game concept artist” to do art for your game when regular artists would probably do the job better.

Here are some lovely concepts for the game:

Another example of good concept art is the concept art for Fallout 3 by Adam Adamowicz. Again, simple, practical, usually done in traditional media. Not that traditional media is automatically better, but too many artists abuse digital tools to cover up their flaws.

Go here to see more: https://www.flickr.com/photos/47857688@N08/sets/72157629320774861/

There is so much unnecessary detail nowadays in concept art and there is no clarity when you prioritise making the design pretty before you’ve even decided on what the design is going to be. It’s a waste of time to focus on shading and texturing when you’re merely in the first phase. This only aims to please the “clients” who consider sketches unfinished while unnecessarily finely rendered work is better just because it has pretty colours. Or maybe they also aim to look pretty as promo art and in art books.

The simpler, clearer concepts were common in the age before digital media became the norm and you couldn’t rely on a bunch of brushes and textures to cover up your inferior design.

Here’s an example from Ratchet and Clank:

Shadow of the Colossus:

Resident Evil:

Really, what more do you need at that point in development?

I find it absurd that only digital artists are accepted into the position of concept artist nowadays. Are we forgetting the “concept” part of concept artist? If the idea and its execution are good, who cares what you make it with? I’d rather have someone who can only use a pen and make killer designs than someone who’ll throw a bunch of textures onto paper and make me wonder what in the world I’m looking at.

Also shout out to Silent Hill 3 sketches that looks like they were drawn on paper ripped out of a notebook. And much of the Shadow of the Colossus concept art was drawn on graph paper for some reason.

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Helmethead: a human with a head either completely or partially (that is, excluding the mouth) covered in a dumb, unmemorable sci-fi helmet.

You can usually find at least one on the front page of Artstation at any given moment. Here’s one I found right now:

And here’s one I got a few weeks back when I originally wanted to write this:

Generally comes with an equally messy and unmemorable armor. Compare to actual memorable designs like Stormtroopers, Robocop or Ironman. Random sci-fi fragments glued onto someone’s head does not a good design make.