http://www.ew.com/article/2015/10/22/rwby-season-3-rooster-teeth "Many RWBY viewers also felt a special connection to the show’s creator, Oum. “Cosplayers especially, they loved Monty,” says Jones. “He was the first person to be like, ‘I’ll design characters specifically for cosplayers.’ He’d make sure you can buy those items, make sure you can be properly equipped, so fans took to that immediately.” “He made sure that every character had very functional pockets,” continues Rooster Teeth director of animation, Gray G. Haddock. “So, cosplayers going to conventions had places to put their keys and wallets and so forth.” ... Oum’s death also devastated the remaining RWBY team, who had lost both their friend and the show’s main creative force. Haddock explains that, at the time of Oum’s death he had just begun work on planning season 3. “We were between seasons,” he says. “He had barely gotten started when we lost him. We do hope to have a couple of shots here and there throughout the season that we’ll be able to point out to the fans later: ‘By the way, that particular moment right there, that was a Monty shot.’ [But], for the most part, volume 3’s animation is from scratch, without him.” The good news was that, before his death, Oum, Shawcross and another member of the Rooster Teeth family, writer Miles Luna, had mapped a dense outline for several upcoming seasons. “Before we were even generating scripts, we were building the show bible,” says Luna. “We were laying out this adventure that our characters would go on.” “Monty had ideas for seasons and seasons,” says Jones. “He was like, ‘Ruby’s going to do this.’ I was like, ‘When? What year from now is that happening?’” The particular adventure dealt with in season 3 is a tournament involving both our heroines and newly introduced fighters. “The second we were like, ‘Cool, we’re making this show,’ we said, ‘We’re going to have a tournament, right?’” recalls Shawcross. “So that’s the big thing this year.” “The tournament is like the Olympics of our crazy world,” adds Luna. “It’s going to be a lot of fun to see some of our favorite characters pitted against each other, and against people from other kingdoms, and far-off lands. It is a lot of fighting. There is more fighting than any other season — maybe combined.” Haddock admits he is trepidatious about how season 3 will be received by fans but is personally satisfied that the team is doing everything it can to continue fulfilling Oum’s vision. “On the animation side, we have some animators that had been mentored by Monty over the last several years and it was basically now their time to grow up a little bit faster than anybody thought they were going to have to,” he says. “But I couldn’t be prouder — everyone is rising to the occasion. They want to do right by Monty. They want to make sure that the fans still think that the show looks and feels like it’s supposed to. It’s a challenge, it’s a struggle. But everyone’s doing their best.”"