2013-12-27

Some archive stuff

I was doing a sort of Christmas time cleaning on my computer, deleting useless big raw images and such, when I stubled over some MOC pictures which I never edited or published. Here's some, as there weren't really any good-quality photos of Qwena (original version). So nothing new really, but decided to show them anyway. There won't be any new uploads for a week now as I'm off to have some good time with friends and board games and such. See you later!









-Pate-keetongu

2013-12-24

MOC: Father Zeeron

 No, he's not Father Christmas despite the date. He doesn't eat ham or turkey or gingerbread or whatever people use to stuff into their mouths during the Christmas season. No, this old Matoran guy who lives in a tree in the deep Lehu-Forest only eats mushrooms. A lot of mushrooms. A lot of mushrooms that no one seems to care about.

But Zeeron's not a complete madman, even though he mutters to himself and reads other people's thoughts all the time. He's an ancient telepathic cleric, one of those who know the religion and lore of Athism by heart.

This MOC is sort of a revamp or mod, but then in other hand it is not. I have mentioned the Klaanon project few times in this blog. It is a bionicle-ish story written by group of Finnish old sort-of bionicle fans. It's a huge thing and I can't really explain it here, but some of my bionicle MOCs hopefully give some bits about the project.

The character Zeeron is not created by me, but it is actually based on one anonymous MOC by me:  the Athist Monk. The character turned out to be rather interesting and likable, so I decided to revamp the MOC to make it feel more the guy appearing in the story.

The tweaks are mostly basic stuff - filling the caps on the torso, making the arms more poseable with some fingers, adding some interesting eyes (taps they are) and updating the accessories, giving him a rotten wooden stick and a mushroom; the mushroom is important.

-Pate-keetongu

Post Scriptum: Merry Christmas!

2013-12-14

MOC: Zero Suit Samus

 Video games are a big thing on the Internet, and two of most popular creations on this blog are based on video games: Big Daddy and Power Suit Samus. But I can't say I'm a heavy class gamer, no no. I have some history and some quite good achievements with Game Boy Micro and I have beaten Super Mario Land in something like half a hour, and I still enjoy great Super Smash Bros. Brawl matches with my friends, but the truth is that I'm not an video game maniac.

But still here's a rather big and time-consuming MOC of a video game character, Samus Aran in her Zero suit. The reason for this build was not, believe or not, "Popular character brings lot of views". I have played Samus on Brawl quite a lot, and if you have "AFOL MIND" that makes you wonder how to build things around you, you might know what happened: Play, ponder, think techniques and tricks, build it. Pretty much same thing than on Power Suit Samus and the Daddy. I have barely played any Metroid games and never Bioshock (though I have many friends who love both of these) but there just happens to be a wacky spin-off multiplayer stuff that I stumble upon from time to time. Brawl is awesome, and while I'm not very familiar with Sony characters, smashing stuff with Big Daddy in PSASBR (what a terrible "word") is quite cool work too.

The design here is not the Brawl one, though. It is more like the Other M suit with those (probably impractical?) heels. This figure worked as a reference, though I made some changes on the color scheme (because the lack of parts in some colors) and proportions, making the length of the arms more accurate. The torso is a bit longer on my MOC too, though it is in a bit odd posing on that statue.

The shoes were the first part built, as usually, though I reworked them a few times during the building. The legs came out rather painlessly with a lot of black placeholder parts (made an order on Finnish Bricklink store Lapasen Palikka later) but the torso was the real problem. Not the lower torso, I was easy. The upper torso. Hard shaping there. I pondered for a long time if I use Nuva shoulders or not. They are quite mundane, and sometimes look too big, but there isn't really alternatives in blue and the allowed me to put the pink marking on the left breast. The upper torso is still a bit wonky and is only connected via a half of a pin, but I think it looks good enough. The arms weren't easy neither, the rest of the arm is connected to the HF shell via ball joint and it's connected to the ball socket with 3-long bar. It took some time to figure out the best alternative there, but I'm happy with the results. It's quite sturdy.

The head was a challenge. A real challenge. The only somewhat good-looking female LEGO faces around are anime-ish and wouldn't really work here. It's vast different from the dwarves who don't look that glamorous, so headlights-as-eyes would have looked terrible too. My design sure is rather flat, but it at least has a nose, a mouth and rather stylised eyes similar to Qwena. It has some really, really tricky SNOT stuff inside. The hair is pretty basic thing with dinosaur tails and robot arms, but the forehead hair was hard to arrange correctly.

Samus also has her stunner pistol. I also took some action shots (which is always hard with tall MOCs like this) with a plasma whip she has on Brawl. At least it uses one of those odd TECHNIC slopes I have never used on anything before.

The scale is bigger than on Power Suit Samus, so these don't work on same scenes (except on the humorously one in the end of this blog). I was going to built this on same scale than Belsa, but the shoes were just too big. The MOC stands around 40 cm tall.

-Pate-keetongu



Dammit! Another one shrunken on the wash!