As an anniversary creation, here's Toa Umbra (again, no relation to canon character), and he's one of the most important heroes we've got, especially lately. He's a Toa of light, with interesting balance of light and shadow powers (when a Toa of light uses his elemental energy, what is left? Is darkness just absence of light), great fighting skills and lot of experience of adventuring. He was an agent of the Order of Mata Nui, but recently left those hypocritical bastards to aid Bio-Klaani in war. He's the boss moderator, though he haven't been much in that business lately.
Like Sheelika, I hadn't built Umbra before as the creator of the character had done his own version years back. But then again I felt it my responsibility to make a MOC, as I am mostly the only "serious" builder on our community. Well, mostly, from time to time we can enjoy others build as well, like at the end of this post.
Umbra begin with the legs. I'm quite happy with them, they came out easily. The lower legs were prototypes for Purifier, but they were ultimately too normal and human-like for Purry's odd posture. the drifted around my Bionicle table for few months, until I decided to use them on Umbra and replaced the yellow pieces with keetorange ones. The rest of this was done slowly during a long period of time, until I finished if during the last two weeks.
Hewkii Mahri's Kanohi Garai was pain to work with. It looks really cool as a chest plate, with the marbled pattern and everything, but the shape isn't that easy... The "nose" tried always to block the head, and the angle of the lobe felt too steep. Fortunately it doesn't look bad on the photos, and a lot of tweaking with the neck (Which was hard to get right due to parts used on the upper torso) solved the head problem.The infamous color blocking was another challenge here. In the form seen here Umbra has lost most of his elemental energy due to extreme use of light powers, and his usually yellow armor has turned partly black. It's sleek color combination, but I wonder if they are too clustered around. At least replacing keetorange 1x6 tiles on the upper legs helped here a bit.
The cannon arm was fun, by the way. It is an Exo-Cannon in Klaanon, taken from Exo-Toa, so I wanted to use one of those TECHNIC cannons (I loved them as a kid, built very fragile bricks walls just to gun them down) but alone it looked too puny. So I bulked it up a bit... a lot, actually. A "hand" gun!
By the way, I put the cannon arm on the wrong and just flipped the photos on gimp. I always forget those! Goddamn asymmetrical characters.
-Eero
6 comments :
Alright, so I've stared at this for a while and I have no idea how you've gotten the hand, spacer, and ball joint connected together. Specifically, I'd love to know that the part between the arm and wrist is, because it should be familiar and is dancing just outside of recognition. Regardless, this is a pretty good, streamlined moc. Especially with that chest piece.
Other than that, I'd love to get into Klaanon, but don't think I'm up for learning Finnish any time soon. Any pointers on how to start learning it? Or am I going to have to go through google translate and get the rehashed version?
Thanks, Mrjane!
The part on the wrist is regular 2x2 dish (inverted). The bar-clip-piece (robot arm) goes through its bar hole, and the dish's stud connects to the ball joint.
Finnish is, I'm afraid, rather complicated language, especially for speakers of English or similar language; Finnish, for example, lacks prepositions so words conjugate pretty madly. I also don't think Google translate would give you any better result, as Klaanon is thousands of pages long so far.
But, at least we have our TvTropes page in English for beginners!
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/Klaanon
Ahh, that makes sense. Can't imagine the wrist is very strong though. I was thinking that you'd have a 2x2 round tile with a hole in the middle, connect a axle pin to the tile and ball joint, and then put the robot hand in the axle pin to connect the hand.
Darn, figured as much about the Finnish. I think Klaanon would be a good place to start, though I bet I won't be making much headway for at least a year if I begin learning it.
Well, thanks for being so forthcoming, and I hope you have a good weekend. I'm off to hike a mountain and get rid of these love handles because it is a beautiful day out!
It's actually strog enough, as the bar of the robot arm goes through the dish into the ball joint, thus strenghtening the bare stud-to-balljoint connection. I've never had any problems with it.
Hiking, good stuff. There are no real mountains in Finland but fortunately we have some other cool routes and national parks.
I think I found out where I was mistaken. I'm still a bit used to the new ball joints that have the axle hole all the way through. Just looked at one and I think I get how a stud would make a great connection.
Gotta order that inverted dish now. Just another item on the ever growing parts list it seems.
Well that hike was technically up a foothill. Still, 2.5 miles and a 1500 foot difference each way is nothing to scoff at. So what sort of routes? Cycling or dirt footpaths?
Hmm, it's actually old ball joint with an antistud. Dish's stud goes into the antistud and the bar of the clip-bar strenghtens the connection.
On the hiking business, both of them and some duckboard routes on swamps. I personally like paddling, too. Nice lake paddling routes here.
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