Samson - Character Design (Patreon)

Samson the super-locomotive is the primary antagonist of The Brave Locomotive. His stoic, ruthless manner is a sign of things to come for Linus and Henry. He is the Darth Vader to Linus' Mickey Mouse (or Peg Leg Pete, if you like.)

The Titanic of the rails, Samson is the largest, fastest and most powerful train in the world the moment he is unveiled by Baron von Kapital. To accommodate him and his wealthy westward travelers, the entire landscape is renovated by the Straight Lines Railroad Company.

With Samson around, time marches brutally on and the human footprint out west grows exponentially. The future comes at a steep price for Linus, but there may be a glimmer of hope yet.

Because the story compresses several decades of American railroad history surrounding the turn of the century, Samson's design cues are mainly from heavy trains of the 1920s with 1940s scale. This makes him feel aggressively advanced in comparison to Linus' quaint 19th century design.

Samson's 3D animation rig is complex in construction, but straightforward and fun to animate. He has enough expressivity to coexist comfortably with Linus, but the understated approach favors consideration of heavy, rigid parts.

I will share more animation process scenes of Samson soon!

Your humble engineer,
Andrew