Models and Stuff

Links to places I do stuff in/at/around: Flickr Youtube Tumblr Bluesky

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Released Media Index

Made an index page for many of the things I've made available for download for easy access. It can be found HERE and also at the top bar of the site, under Releases:

Currently it leads to sub pages for:

Dolphin (Original) From Pikmin 2

The GSR model

The Mask Pack Game

My older scratch built 3d Bionicle Models.

And all the scans of Bionicle media I've done

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They Use Every Part of the Crab

Mata Nui Online Game is one of the most core parts of Bionicle for me, I'd even go as far as saying I'm more of a MNOG fan who is also a fan of the tie in action figures.

I think one of the most endearing things about it is its art style, its sometimes quite rough, but it just comes together to make some very evocative imagery.

One of the most interesting examples of the very economical way in which this game was made is, I think, the Ussal crab.

The Ussal is first introduced in the Onu-Koro chapter of the game, an area focused around a large mine, and in keeping with this there's a lot of machinery. A few years ago I 3d modelled a lot of them, which is where I first had the realisation that the bulk of them are actually reusing Ussal graphics.

Its something that's come up quite a bit since so I feel I'd like to have a document that covers it all in detail for future reference.

To begin with: this is the Ussal. Its a cute little crab. It has a little rubber band function that lets it do little punches. Even though it first appeared as a set in 2002 it was all over 2001, from MNOG, to the card game Quest For The Masks, to the video games Quest for the Toa and the cancelled Legend of Mata Nui, and its even one of the first creatures you see in the comics!

MNOG, being a flash game, constructed the Ussal out of several simplified collections of parts that could be animated separately. They then reused these parts, flipping them around, overlapping them, scaling them, all sorts, to make all the various machinery you see throughout the area.

So I thought it would be a bit fun to tear apart a couple Ussals for purely demonstrative purposes.

These are all the main usages that I'm aware of. Note these aren't 1:1, there's some scaling involved in some plus extra little bits here and there.

Small Lava Valve

Large Lava Valve

Lava Pump-aka Tower of Crab Corpses

Drill-This one also contains parts of Whenua!

Light Stand-As I recall this was the what made me finally realise the Ussal connection, the bent beam was confusing me until I worked it out.

Lever-Yeah every time you ride this thing you're grabbing an Ussal's eye.

Elevator Winch-its up there, looming out of the darkness.

This object also includes many parts seen in the ziplines.

And while that may be it for the Onu-Koro chapter the Ussal bits make one last surprise appearance in the little electric bug from the next chapter, Le-Koro.

This one is playing a lot with scale, and its using the back of a Kewa bird for the abdomen. it means that the little guy isn't really buildable, but I've tried.

These are all the usages I'm aware of, I'd love to know if anyone's found any others! I'd also like to quickly note where the Ussal was not used, as I find it interesting.

When the Toa Kaita fight the Manas, a much larger, treaded crab, they end up having to smash these large control towers. The towers are full of miscalaneous mechanical bits, but no crab bits.

And at the end of the game, the void features entirely Toa bits and tubing, so no crab bits there either.

I just wanted to make a note of that since it was something I once wondered when looking in to this.

In conclusion, I find it so inspiring how effectively they used their assets. Like, did you know that Lewa's head here when he gets the infected mask knocked off is just reusing the foot graphic?

Wild stuff. Its just very in keeping with the whole building system Bionicle is based on and I love it.

Hope everyone filed their taxes on time. Good night.

[lucisphere]

Bionicle -The Chronological Cut- The Journey to One (Movie) ... [part 2/2]

Previously on Bionicle:

Post by @lucisphere · 1 video

💬 0  🔁 4  ❤️ 6 · Bionicle -The Chronological Cut- The Journey to One (Movie) ... [part 1/2] · Gathered friends, listen to the legend of how

Transition From ... LOMN to MOL

The bulk on my time on this project was concern this segment. Which is fitting enough since between this cut from LOMN to MOL a thousand years pass by in a cross-fade. The labored issue is that MOL has credits over its opening shots. Seeing as its atypical to see credits crop up in the back third of a movie, I wanted to scoop those out for the sake of the picture. But to get there we have to get from ocean waves to lava fields, much like Takua himself in MNOG.

Again I had to cut off Vakama's closing thoughts as we're not quiet done with this legend yet. Ducking down to Nathan Furst's "Island of Mata Nui" as the camera pans up, the Unity Duty Destiny symbol, pained out of the sky. Kidtoon's "The Legend Reborn" had just the footage I was looking for to get us from here to there. Under Mata Nui's opening narration on LRB we start on the sandy shores of the name sake island. Next we travel to Mount Mangai, named in tribute to Toa Lhikan, a continuation of what we saw begin on the beach. Finally high in the clouds looking down over the entire island. This mirrors the tour that LOMN begins with across Metru Nui, and establishes us in a new place. I kept John D'Andrea's beautiful "From Endings to Beginnings" over the LRB footage, that track crescendos as the island would be destroyed. Instead I segued into Nathan Furst's "Legends of Metru Nui" since we missed out on hearing it early on. The pounding drums on the track also made it easy to hide the audio cuts. Until finally the original audio comes back in, including Jaller's initial dialog. I performed some color correction on the LRB footage to help give it the same temperature as the Creative Capers trilogy footage.

Now that we're up in the clouds we can come back down. Returning to MOL as we inevitably arrive at Ta-Koro.

Cleaning up ... MOL

There were six scenes that needed doctoring.

Screenplay by Henry Gilroy superimposed over the clouds above the island. This one was simple, since the text was over the noise of clouds, I applied mosaic to the image to get just the blocks of color. Then blurred it to cover up text.

2. Story by Henry Gilroy, Alastair Sinnerton, Bob Thompson, and Greg Weisman over the castle gate. This is where it started getting tricky. There were enough clouds for the mosaic and blur trick again. But eventually the clouds part, revealing the definite shapes of the castle gate. So I extended the noise of the clouds and created a heat haze effect to obscure the text. The effect breaks just as the text clears. The camera zooms into the castle gate.

3. Music by Nathan Furst over the courtyard. This shot introduces a character moving through the scene, luckily Jaller doesn't walk under the text, yet... I painted together several frames into a single matte. I masked around Jaller's walk for 152 frames. Then matched the matte painting position and scale with the original camera movement.

4. Executive Producers Conny Kalcher and Bob Thompson. This shot finally sits still but Jaller strolls right below the onscreen text. Hiding the text was the easy part, an empty still covered up the text. For the moments Jaller intersects with text I painted over 45 offending frames.

5. Produced by Sue Shakespeare over the tower. This shot was basically a repeat trick. I made a composite matte painting of the tower from multiple frames. Then tracked it over the original scene to obscure the text. I recreated the original lens flare effect from the source to keep the life of the shot.

6. Directed by Terry Shakespeare and David Molina over lava. This was the most complicated shot of them all. I started off with the same matte painting trick to cover up the text. Then combined with the mosaic-blur method to bring back in the evolving smoke over the frozen image. Finally Jaller enters back into the scene. Unfortunately he walks behind the entire length of text among the smoke. My first try at fixing this was reanimating Jaller from scratch with flash animation. But it looked as janky as you could imagine. Instead, since Jaller eventually clears the text I masked out the last leg of his walk and re-timed it over the edited scene. Now he enters the shot at the same moment but further along the path than before.

The final result:

"TAKUA!"

Saucing Up ... MOL

MOL acts as the bookends to the Toa Metru story, and I wanted to bridge the two arcs together with some visual flare. Between the halves of the movie the theme of heroic transformation is a constant. LOMN introduces us to each hero and their home with their own title card, so I created graphics to match for the destined seventh toa, Takua.

This also provided an opportunity to elaborate the ludicrous lore that one thousand years have passed between the transition from LOMN to MOL.

Finally MOL can play to the very end. The Makuta is finally defeated (?) and the matoran return to their abandoned home. The epilogue from WOS comes in to close the whole thing out.

Ending with ... WOS

I amped up the beam of light at the end of MOL into a full screen flash to transition back into Vakama's shining story stones. He finally gets to finish his final-finale speech. Fade out on the Unity, Duty, Destiny symbol. This was the way of the Bionicle.

Finishing touches ... Subtitles/et cetera

I re-enumerated all of the chapter time codes from their original films into the super cut. I wanted to include subtitles with this edit as well. I'll sum this up with this image:

It was an extremely convoluted and annoying process. The result, you can watch the whole movie subbed in the original Matoran:

Thanking you for taking the time to read my rambling, I hope you check out the movie, and enjoy it!

May the great spirit guide you.

[lucisphere]

Bionicle -The Chronological Cut- The Journey to One (Movie) ... [part 1/2]

Gathered friends, listen to the legend of how 3 movies became 1 movie, how Bionicle -The Chronological Cut- was built. This project was kicked off a year ago, after seeing a reblog of this post from 2018.

So one afternoon I followed steps 1-5 and bashed the original Bionicle Trilogy of films into a single movie file as directed and dropped it onto youtube. People enjoyed the new super movie and I enjoyed some very strange comments, up until Lego laid a copyright claim on movies from decades ago that have been freely available for just as long... So naturally I turned this into a much bigger endeavor, out of spite.

Starting with ... MOL Prologue

A movie can only start once, so only one of the 3 opening sequences could make it into the edit. Vakama's first amaja nui circle was the greatest option. The intro narration of LOMN and WOS are too literal to the events of those specific films. MOL broadly gestures at the conflict between the matoran and makuta. This sets up the story across all 3 individual films that make up the 1 movie medley. With LOMN starting immediately afterward, it also capitalizes on the classic history becoming myth that is so much fun about Bionicle lore. The MOL introduction has the iconic Bionicle aesthetic and makes a good left side book end for the ping-pong between releases of the re-edit.

Making of ... Title Sequence

A "new" movie needs a new title. For this I grabbed Faber's first Bionicle logo with its striking design, but never used in anything official. I wanted to recreate the original movie title treatments with dawning light cascading through the letters into the surrounding darkness. I vectorized the logo and extruded it into a 3D shape. Then set up materials for volumetric light capture.

Even this simple effect took up a lot of render time, so I opted for a different solution to get that smokey feel to the light. I painted a smearly texture and spun the uvs on a distorted circular plane to produce that wavering light effect.

Composited all together you get something like this.

Which then crescendos with a lens flare to transition out, mirroring LOMN starting with a lens flare as Toa Lhikan opens the Great Suva. Then all of LOMN plays up until the Toa carry the first batch of Matoran spheres through the hole in the Great Barrier.

Transition from ... LOMN to WOS

From there LOMN connects to the start of WOS with the Toa adrift in a raging storm. There is a more clean cut with their boat crashing into the sea earlier on, but cutting from here would unfortunately miss out on their first dramatic confrontation with the Makuta. Theoretically I think these shots could be rearranged for some smoother continuity. However; the goal was to give the effect of swapping out the discs, but sparing the strain on the knees. So I didn't want to alter the integrity of the film segments themselves with this version. From LOMN I cut with a wavy transition, into WOS own opening choppy cuts to compliment each other for the "lost at sea" feeling of the original edit.

Then all of WOS plays until the Toa are finally leaving Metru Nui with all the Matoran onboard their blimps.

Transition from ... WOS to LOMN

Heres were the edits start getting involved. Vakama starts up his narration as the blimps ascend into the light above. The sense of finality in his words of course conflicts with the entire third length of movie that follows afterward so it had to go. Nathan Furst published all of the Bionicle original scores a decade after the films in 2017. I replaced the film's audio with the same piece of music from the scene, "Off to Mata Nui." I recreated the humming drone sound effect of the blimps levitating. Then mixed it all together to match with the original audio best I could. In the original edit, the blinding light of the surface faded into Vakama's story stones. Instead it transitions into the bright shores of the island. All the matoran safe in the sun. Then the final bit of LOMN plays out.

To be continued... Next time: Things start getting really complicated.

[lucisphere]

Gathered friends, listen again to our legend of the Bionicle... Available for the second time ever, its all three of the original Bionicle films edited into a single, chronologically accurate movie! Featuring heavily revised cuts to make the movie as natural as possible and rewritten subtitles!

PACKAGE VERSION: Includes movie, subtitles, extra art.

https://mega.nz/folder/24J11ahY#6_av98GFqvXBy8eSHm0VnA

TORRENT VERSION: Includes movie, subtitles, extra art.

https://zippyshare.day/jjUwrgGFHZY0dxo/file

VIDEO VERSION: Includes movie.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11dGLswRH1oGWj1D9-YNLgutk_91iOhIC/view?usp=drive_link

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I had the pleasure of seeing this get put together and it can't be overstated how much work went in to this.

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Bionicle: Find the Power Tour Truck-Part 3

Photo Catalogue

(I've heard that using that term can flag something as adult, which is funny, and not going to make me stop using it.)

I have two other posts more focused on the construction of these trucks, Part 1 and Part 2.

Click through for many images of trucks!

KOPAKA 1

TAHU 1

LEWA 1

ONUA 1

GALI 1

POHATU 1

Action

Dioramas

Figures and Accessories

Tahu boy

Group

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Bionicle: Find the Power Tour Truck-Part 2

In Part 1 I talked about the moulding, painting, and decorating process of the trucks in this project, but there's still a few aspects I want to cover.

Read on for more details and my struggles against glue.

One of the most noticeable parts of the truck is the giant sized canister lid sitting right on the top. One feature of which is the ability for it to become a big prize wheel that can be spun to win things. Probably socks.

The actual mechanism of this is a mystery, if there even was a mechanism and it wasn't just manually popped off and stuck to the back somehow.

So I had a couple options. Pegs and holes came up first, but I didn't like them as either way you displayed it that meant that there'd be holes. Magnets also crossed my mind, but ultimately I didn't want the lids and the trucks to be separate.

Eventually I settled on a little 3d printed hinge. When I 3d printed the back cover for the flatbed of the truck I left in a recess that fit the 3d printed parts, and after casting, with some sanding and fiddling, I was able to get everything to fit together pretty well in the end. Mostly. I really need to keep in mind how much paint adds to the sizes of things when designing them....either build in the tolerances or be more judicious about masking.

I'm very happy with the final look and function of the mechanism.

While I'm on the topic of the canister lid I'd like to talk about the prize wheel and another reason I wanted this to be a physical project rather than a digital one: Quality of references. Comparing it to the tours that came later we actually have a lot of really good reference for these trucks; the fact we've got photos of all 6 is something you can't even say for the others. But even still they're photos from 2001, some taken off the web, some scanned from print media, so the quality isn't super high overall. So while for some decorations its fairly easy to be sure of what they are, like the big Toa vinyl wraps, for smaller details, like what was actually written on the spinner, there's nothing readable.

I feel like if I had done this as a digital model I'd have wanted to make everything legible, which would have meant having to make up details, and one thing I really want to avoid is someone then seeing these made up details and coming away thinking that they're real. So I wrote some nonsense and blurred it a bit.

Similarly with the little circles on the back windows, I have my ideas of what they might have been, and with a physical model where these details are less than 2mm tall I feel I can fudge it a bit more to just get the look across.

One really lucky thing about the trucks is that they were silver, which is close to white. With my set up, using a normal ink jet printer, I can't print white. Normal printers assume a white backing so for white they print nothing. I did consider trying to get a printer that did white, but they're so expensive. I thought of getting the decals printed by someone else, but again, the cost.

Since the truck bodies were silver I could get away with printing white, as long as it was surrounded by another colour, but the canister lids were the one place I had to admit defeat and just use black instead. I tried stamping and 3d printing and so many other things, but in the end the black decals just look so much more clean than anything I could have done in white.

Now for something I alluded to in part 1. This project began in earnest because I asked if anyone could identify this truck on twitter. Someone did, they said it was a Nissan Navara, and to my car blind eyes this seemed bang on. I searched around and found the UN toy of one, and the rest is history.

Only the problem is right as I was finishing someone unearthed an interview with someone who worked on the tours who said it was a Nissan Frontier...

I was incredibly devastated and considered tossing out all of the mostly complete trucks. But I got through it. There aren't that many differences really. Apparently they ARE the same truck, its just that for the usarican market they renamed it to the Frontier, put some rivet holes around the wheel arches, and changed up the front grill. The most obvious of these is the grill, but luckily this design features a big mask stuck right over the front.

So on the one hand, its annoying and if I had learned it just a week earlier I could have added the rivets as decals, on the other, from my searching there isn't an equivalent model of a Nissan Frontier out there, so if I had gotten the correct information the project may never have started in the first place!

At least the wheels match.

This is the first project I've used super glue on, since it required some plastic to metal joining. Usually since most of what I do is plastic to plastic I've gotten away with just normal model cement.

It was quite fun honestly, though there was a bit of a learning curve as I figured out how to store, apply, and most importantly dispose of it. Had to eat dinner one evening with my middle two fingers stuck together on one hand and my thumb and forefinger stuck together on the other. But outside of that the speed at which I was able to stick things together and have them be workable meant I was able to get the Tahu boy done in an afternoon.

The biggest issue in the project came right at the end. I really messed up the wheels completely and utterly. For the wheels themselves I made the mistake of drilling out the centres with the not flat side down, which meant that the holes were all wonky. And then for the holes in the body I drilled the forward ones too far forward so the wheels didn't fit even if they were straight. Just a complete and utter mess.

What I had to do in the end was build a jig to have the trucks all at the correct height and then mark out where the holes should go to have the wheels centred in the wheel arches. Then I drilled the hole and had to glue the wheels in place in a very specific way so there was minimal wobble, meaning all 4 wheels were on the ground. It wasn't the best note to end the project on all things considered...

This project has been the most complex project I've completed to date. It features: -3D modelling and printing -graphics design and decal printing and application -moulding and casting -lots and lots of painting And all the complications that come with doing this not once, but 6 times!

Very enjoyable project. Continue to Part 3 to just see a lot of photos of the individual trucks and none of my prattling.

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Bionicle: Find the Power Tour Truck-Part 1

Recently I finally finished quite a big project! Recreations of the trucks used in the 2001 Find the Power Tour!

Read on for more images and detailing of the build process.

I've always been fascinated by these trucks. They're so ostentatious in a way later tour vehicles just weren't.

What really motivated this project was an idle post on twitter asking if anyone could identify the type of truck these were. I got an answer really quickly (The answer would prove to be incorrect, but that comes later) and after some searching I was able to find there was a die cast model of this type of truck available. In UN livery of all things! After a few weeks of waffling about I finally bought it and began to plan what would become on of the most complex, and probably the most costly, projects I've attempted.

Now you might ask: "James, you've done a lot of 3d modelling, and you have a 3d printer, why not just 3d model it." and to that I'd say, my name isn't James. I'd also say that....I just am not really a "car guy". I've messed around with modelling cars before and just kept getting too in to the weeds. I knew if I started on something like that I'd easily lose weeks to seat belt clips and dashboard details.

So I decided to try moulding. One thing I really wanted out of this was to do all 6 trucks, not just one. at first I tried what I had on hand, which was this brush on silicon stuff that smells like fish. It failed completely and utterly and nearly killed this project.

So I began experimenting with proper silicon moulds. Had a lot of issues, from having to cut moulds apart because the mould release didn't work to the silicon not curing due to reacting with something I'd coated the originals with to the resulting casting being so full of bubbles it looked like something from the end of a mafia movie.

But eventually, several jugs of silicon and resin and a vacuum chamber later I was able to get repeatable acceptable castings. Also messed around a bit with colouring the resin.

By some weird coincidence all the best castings I had could all be matched up to a Toa. You wouldn't know it now since they're all hidden under several layers of paint, but I think its neat.

The paint job was a fairly basic affair. Ended up doing a lot more hand painting than I thought at first. It was quite relaxing really. A few months ago I'd suffered an arm injury that meant I couldn't hold up my left arm while painting so this project was kinda stalled for a while. Mixing up the colours to match the canister lids was quite fun.

Next came one of the more daunting parts: the decals. The most eye catching thing about these cars is that they're decked out on every surface with vibrant Bionicle vinyl wraps, and luckily due to certain water fowl related incidents at around that time there were psd files floating around that featured some of the graphics this project needed.

The fact I took so many tries to get it right proved useful here, as I had no shortage of truck bodies to experiment on. First I poured over every image I could find of the truck and marked out and numbered every decoration I could see, then I did a simple tape transfer, covered the thing in tape, drew out the decals, cut them off and scanned them, and then did the final layouts. Once I'd done the graphics design I did a couple test prints, first just in paper to test the scale, and second with the decal paper to test the transfer.

It was quite fun, but the actual process of applying the decals was incredibly stressful. These are waterslide decals printed using an inkjet printer, so I had to coat the decals in many coats of varnish and had to be really quick about applying them. The good thing with having to do 6 was if I did one part at a time by the time I finished the 6th one the first one was dry enough to move on to another part.

It was so satisfying to see them all take shape. Doing multiples of something is much harder than just a one off, but its also a more interesting challenge, you have to think much more about orders of operations and the most effective ways to accomplish something.

Early on in the project I'd really wanted to incorporate some people. In most of the photographs of these trucks they're always surrounded by groups and I wanted to capture that a bit. I searched and searched but the best in scale people I could find were these guys:

They're just so....70s? 60s? I don't know they're definitely not 2001 though. The annoying thing was also that there were only two younger boy figures there, so I had to get a two pack to at least have a couple people in the target audience.

This would go on to be a surprisingly fun part of the project. I took all the children and a couple of the younger seeming adult figures from the pack and modified them, in some cases hacking limbs off and repositioning them, adding the masks that the trucks carried that allowed people to watch videos, and giving them whole new paint jobs. This tour was in the summer months of 2001, so I felt the need to give everyone shorts and t-shirts. I did the adults up to resemble the employees seen in the photos, yellow shirts with some Bionicle logo decals I had left over from the main trucks.

And then because I was just having so much fun I went crazy and made a couple tiny folding tables and stuff to adorn them. Tiny comics, and even accurately scaled Toa canisters. They're not even 4mm tall! They were quite delicate to put together. I nearly lost one.

Around this time something Bionicle related got announced and I just had it get stuck in my head to do something, and by completely hacking up a random guy I managed to make a little Tahu boy.

And then as one final little touch I added this cardboard standee of Tahu that was seen with the trucks. This is actually a unique render of Tahu not seen anywhere else at this time. Its only one of these popping up on ebay that let me recreate it with any accuracy.

It was such a lovely feeling as the last few details came together. The little lights on the roofs of the trucks especially. They really complete the look.

I've run out of images on this post and there's still a lot more to go over so this is continued in Part 2!

And concluded in Part 3, which is just a lot of photos of everything.

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A New Boxer??

Its weird when somethings literally in front of your face for years and you don't really notice it.

A new trailer for the upcoming Patlabor show EZY came out the other day and it really put me in a Patlabor mood. Since the trailer features the AV-X0 I ended up watching bits of the first movie featuring it slaughtering helpless innocent robots that did nothing wrong.

What first caught my eye was this shot:

I noticed this guy.

My first thought was "Oh its a damaged Boxer with only one headlamp!" But then I played it a bit more and got to the next scene and got really confused.

I guess in my head I always wrote this off as a Celkee, it has the same recessed head with one large "eye". Even has those angled cylindrical bits coming off the bottom. In fact one gets jabbed right in the throat a few shots later.

But when you pay attention to the scene layout, its clearly the same Labor the AV-X0 picks up and smashes over its knee, which is blatantly a Boxer.

Its very interesting how intentional this seems, its not just a one shot mistake, its consistent across several scenes. It even has this very distinctive moustache like piping detail that both the Celkee and Boxor lack.

You can even see this piping flailing about when the Zero's hand jabs through the back of its head.

And normal Boxers and Celkees appear within the same scene, sometimes within the same shot!

So it seems very intentional, they specially made this Labor variant to get brutalised by Kanuka. I think that's neat!

There's a much more well known variant of the Boxor that appears in the TV show. Its actually very different, having basically entirely unique arms and legs and a different style of headlamp.

But it was clearly detailed in the art books. as far as I can see though this movie variant hasn't appeared anywhere. There's been a model kit of a Boxer being attacked by the Zero, but they went for the later scene of it jabbing the chest. And this is just a normal Boxer.

Its just so neat how they basically made this whole new Boxer variant just for this one sequence. I'm really tempted to make it one day.

They've actually just recently announced a movie version of the Hercules, which is really cool, but that variant has been well known for a long time, its clearly documented in the art books.

But who knows, maybe one day both of these guys will be reissued with movie variants.

There's a lot of really subtle variants throughout the series, like the firefighting Crabman. its only really seen out of focus, behind another Labor, or in really close up so its hard to really tell what it is.

There's so much depth to all the Labors in Patlabor, I love them all so much. I can't really express how happy I am that we're currently living in an era where so many of the smaller Labors are getting model kits. I love the Ingram but it was pretty much all you could get for ages.

(It was so hard to write Boxer and not Boxor...I ran in to this issue back when I was making my little Boxer arm years ago and wasn't sure why, then later when I got back in to Bionicle I was like oh riiight, they spell it like that for the Boxor set lol)

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Drawing Game Maps is Fun

Recently I've been in a bit of a Metroid mood. Quite a bit really. Its a bit of a problem. I can't stop. One of the games I played was Metroid II The Return of Samus, I found a pretty nice mod that adds colour to it and it was a nice fresh was to play the game.

I played it before in the normal greyscale, and back then I just kinda went with my best recollections of AM2R and ended up getting hopelessly lost, so this time I wanted to try and do it a bit more methodically, so I drew a map!

And it kept growing and growing....

I don't know why it took me by surprise, as I'd also just replayed the remake Samus Returns right before hand, but soon the map got so big I couldn't fit it on the desk.

It was a fun exercise. And it did come in handy! Being able to very confidently know where the nearest health and ammo refill was was really helpful, and some of the later Metroid nests are quite maze like so I was able to really wrap my head around them.

It wasn't a very smooth process, I wasn't really measuring things, just kinda doing what felt right, so there was a lot of places things got really cramped. But in my defense, there's also a lot of places where the map just doesn't make sense, paths will loop around and then go down right through where they came from, its why many maps you see online will split the areas up in to chunks and connect them with lines.

So that was quite a fun time overall. Its not the first time I've mapped out a game as I've played it.

Technically my first time was Zelda 1's final dungeon, but this was a bit of a cheat, as I just copied the map from an online guide in to one of my sketch books. Ah...the good old days of playing Zelda 1 on my 3DS at art school.

When I replayed Zelda 1 again more recently I decided to do a proper map as I went along too. This one was much more manageable as the game world is a nice manageable grid.

And in my latest play through of Wind Waker I decided to make a map as more of a check list, since I've played this game several times by this point and I know the end game always comes down to me visiting every single sea tower and sub again once I've got the maps because I can never remember which ones I got this run. It worked pretty well!

I got in to games pretty late, my first console was the Wii, so I never lived in an era where game maps and guides weren't easily available online, so I do like to sometimes go back and forgo the modern stuff and just use a pen and paper, its really fun! Just maybe start quite small unless you have a lot of space...

[biomediaproject]

Bionicle (2003) and Quest for the Masks Additions

Visit Original Link

Betcha haven't heard this before! Its the background music from the ending FMV of BIONICLE (2003 videogame), but isolated from sound effects and voices. This and the other FMV tracks have been added to the archive, courtesy of the original composers kindly sharing MP3s for the entire OST.

Also added, some new-to-the-archive concept art of Le-Wahi in the game!

now. did you think we were done with trading card game updates? no. never. @boxturret scanned basically everything related to the TCG and we added it:

...and thats not even everything! Read the full details of this update here.

[boxturret]

that was a lot of scanning

[boxturret]

Bionicle: The "Power Lies Beneath" Tour Van Cardboard Model

I made a little cardboard van based upon one used to spread the word of Bionicle to the masses.

For some quick history. In 2002 there were several vans done up in Bohrok themed livery. Presumably there were 6, but photos only seem to exist of the Nuhvok van, the most powerful and oft overlooked Bohrok.

These vans would travel the world (aka continental united states of america) telling children of the wonders of Bohrok and giving them branded socks.

But they had a darker side. While one side projected bright and happy imagery of the Bohrok, the other side depicted cruel and twisted images of the Toa Nuva.

No photographs exist of this side, only the severed head of Onuava decorating the prow.

Pictured: Children in 2002 being baffled by Toa Nuva.

This wasn't the first, nor the last such expedition.

But who would care about such silly trucks.

So, back to the cardboard van. This is actually a recreation of something I did ages ago when I was a child. The popular 9/11 memorial website BZPower was, if you can believe it, a somewhat well known Bionicle news website and web forum back in 2002, and they occasionally got some interesting things.

One such thing was this layout, done by the company that did the printing for the van(s). Unfortunately JMR Graphics' website is down and their last social media post was 5 years ago, so they seem to no longer be in business.

This is very low res, but everything was back in 2002. Its probably some document the company provided for review, but to me it just looked like a papercraft. I remember printing it out and gluing it to a piece of cardboard, cutting out all the pieces and gluing it all together. So I did the same thing now!

I would have used hotmelt glue back then though, since I was a foolish child that didn't mind constantly burning my fingers in exchange for making something that looked terrible. This time I used white glue and clamps. I also got a bit fancy and put silver tape on the backsides of the mirrors.

Quite happy with the results. There are some gaps as the layout image wasn't really made for this. For example the windshield doesn't fit in the space due to it being an orthographic drawing and the window being at an angle. I did consider modifying it, but that was outside of the spirit of the exercise.

Its all so low res that any attempt at modifying it would have inexorably led to me attempting to recreate it from scratch and I just do NOT have the time or investment in tiny recreations of promotional vehicles to do that.

I've been kinda toying with doing this for a while. In 2024 I went and recreated something else I did back then. When my family first got a printer I messed around a lot with it and printed off a bunch of Bionicle images. And printed the envelopes too, because the printer could handle envelopes and that was cool in 2002. Still is now honestly.

It was shockingly hard to actually get the images to print the way I remembered them printing. For all our progress we maybe lost something along the way.

~

Fun fact: A very similar model of van makes a brief appearance in the popular period comedy show Better Call Saul. The show at this point was in 2003 so its the right era.

It looks very similar, but I'm not a Car Guy.

Happy January 18th to those who celebrate!🥳

[boxturret]

Gone Fishing

Hello,

A few years ago I had some builds of some of the various Rahi I'd assembled sitting around on my desk and I was idly messing around with the fish one day and came to a sudden realization that wasn't really obvious looking at the builds digitally: the larger one naturally has its head angled up, and combining that with the smaller one also having a gap between its front rod and the ground made me wonder if some sort of fishing mini game wasn't planed for these designs.

I got a Gali hook and tried it out, and it worked surprisingly well!

Another thing that made me really interested in the idea of fishing as an intended game was this image from a Quest for the Masks card game manual that featured a bunch of Ga-Koronans fishing with rods for a lost staff and mask. The idea that this game seemed to exist enough to have been featured in official renders was very interesting to me.

I made a quick mock-up of what a Bionicle fishing rod could be like, but that was as far as it went.

Recently I've been getting in to the wonderful world of non-major named brand brick parts, and I found how to buy individual parts for pretty cheap. This kinda revitalized my interest in the fish, as up to this point this is the best I could do colour wise:

But now thanks to ali express.....

The tiny fish is quite neat in that every single part it uses is currently available in a multitude of colours. I even went and used black low friction pins to show off. Honestly the cam part they make is closer to the original part available back in 2001 compared the the current official one.

I was also able to finally finish the larger fish. It required tan and red painting, both of which I was a bit trepidatious about, so seeing that they had the parts I needed in the colours I needed was fun.

Also had a lot of spare parts after so I managed to make a couple extra in light green.

And this really motivated me to finally try out some ideas for the fishing game I'd been thinking about for a while. I made a couple rods.

One has a simple winch builtin to it, while the other features a more fixed design, like what you would see in other similarly scaled children's fishing toys. This was an artistic decision, not driven by me lacking the parts to do another winch.

They work pretty well! The smaller fish are harder, there's more of a knack to it, so logically they'd be worth more, just like real fishing.

The larger fish also can be reconfigred to be more or less difficult, with their tail being able to angle them up and down and their front fins can be positioned to stick their head in the air.

Also features some alternative ways of being caught!

Its quite fun once you mess around with it for a bit. The winch rod can also function as a difficulty slider, as the longer the string is the harder it is to control.

She needs a smaller shark.

Feels quite good to get this thing that's been floating around in my head realised in some form.

Since its a new year I'd also like to point out how, starting with this post in July of 2023, I've managed to do at least 1 post of some substance a month, even if its a joke that only I find funny. I think that's quite an accomplishment personally, that's 31 months! It started with me doing a whole year without noticing it, but since then I haven't really forced it. I'll occasionally schedule a post for a few days later to get in in the next month if one month already has a few (definitely not writing this post in 2025 no siree...).

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Here's a video of me accidentally throwing a hook at a fish.

[boxturret]

What does the word "Polybag" mean to you, personally?

A bag made of Polypropylene

A bag made of Polyethylene

A bag made of Polyurethane

A bag made of multitudes

Choice 4

A bag made of Polynomials

bag

Other (please specify)

Voting ended onJan 7

[boxturret]

I Painted More Bionicles.

Real official irreplaceable ones this time.

I said I would. And I will do it again happily.

I'm really happy with how these came out. They've been sitting in various states of incompleteness for what feels like years at this point. Puku for instance had light green feet! I actually completely forgot about Puku and had all the others almost done before remembering her and getting it done.

The LOMN crab I had to modify the parts slightly. With a knife. To make the build accurate to the game model, as the arms it used lacked the little nubs.

I'm really happy with the yellow. It looks even better on camera. This guy had a dark red and silver mask for ages too.

The dark grey was more of a "good enough" sort of thing, as you mix paints you just end up with more and more and it was taking so long it had overflowed in to another paint pot, so I had to call it there. Might go back one day, but for now I'm happy with it.

I can't believe I lived with George with tan arms for so long. He looks great in the QFTT colouring.

Now he matches tiny George.

There's still a few Rahi I'd like to get properly finished, like the Maha.

I have this problem where I kinda want to be efficient, so if there's several things I want to do that involve airbrushing for instance I want to get them all ready and do it in one go, but then one of the last things gets held up so then all the other things that are perfectly ready to be done now just get caught up in this need to do things in big batches and end up never getting done. I'm trying to work on it.

[boxturret]

A Massive Compendium of Bionicle Quest for the Masks Scans

At approximately 8pm on Tuesday I suddenly got possessed by the spirit of scanning and over the next few days I went crazy and scanned pretty much everything to do with QFTM in my possession. And I have quite a lot!

This resulted in an archive of seven and a quarter hundred images! They can be seen HERE. The images of the original sketches I've also scanned are included. There's a spreadsheet listing off all the cards that were scanned.

Read on for a quick overview of what it contains!

My collection is by no means complete, but it has normal cards!

Art carts!

Can't forget the Rahi expansion art cards!

With their lore filled backs!

And rules!

And every single Bohrok expansion card as well!

No collection would be complete without every variation of the back of the Bohrok cards!

This isn't even half of them there's so many!!!

There's also a lot of non card things, like all the card play mats! Both sides!

And every page of every book that came with the deck packs for QFTM and Bohrok Swarm!

Also many supplementary things, such as this fancy brochure and various promotional cards!

This is something I've wanted to to for a while, but the thing that's always put pause to a large scale scanning initiative for me is just how long the exporting of all the images takes, so I had an idea: why not do it in blender!

Found it worked really well! I did over 50 huge scans of 9 cards each, imported them(in reasonably sized batches) in to blender and set up a camera and series of animations to rotate and crop every image, then I could just let it run while doing other things, it was so liberating.

Glad I finally got this done, scanning the sketches went so well I just carried that momentum on for most of a week!

Just a quick note: Through my collecting I have a large number of extra cards, especially the art cards, so if anyone would like to trade for them I'm willing to talk! There's quite a few cards I'm missing myself.

[boxturret]

Bionicle Quest for the Masks Original Card Art

For a while now I've been quite obsessed with the trading card game that came out in Bionicle's first year, Quest for the Masks. I traded a friend for a couple cards back then and I always cherished them, and more recently I've been working on collecting them in earnest. One of my main milestones was being able to get a complete collection of the cards featuring a comic style illustration of the characters with a little story blurb on the backs. More recently it seems a company involved in the production of these cards unearthed some original inked sketches and began selling them on ebay, and I jumped at the chance to have a tiny bit of Bionicle history.

To date I have 7 cards worth of sketches, and I've been scanning them all so that others can see the original line work that went in to these cards. I think they're rather neat!

Please note: the images in this post are cropped and shrunken from the full sized scans, please go HERE to see the full sized scans!

I've decided to list them in reverse order since its roughly the order I got them in and it leaves the most interesting for last. I've also included an image of the final card art for comparison.

Card No. 282 Manas vs. Tahu

This was the first one I got, I was always a fan of this art, as there's so few depictions of the Manas. Getting the sketch made me really realise how messed up Tahu's arm was.

Card No. 273 Nui-Rama Patrol

Quite a lot of card art has been listed on ebay, but I limited myself to just one of each of the 5 Rahi because I'm not made of money, and also I don't want to hoard everything for myself. I hope all the other art has gone to loving homes. Thankfully the photographs on the ebay listings are quite good, but I urge any who also purchased these, or who have any other rare Bionicle materials in their possession, to please scan them and share them!

Card No. 263 Nui-Jaga Underground

These first few cards are all from the later Rahi Challenge expansion. While the initial release of cards contained several story cards dedicated to the Toa and Turaga this expansion focused on the Rahi, each of the main 5 pairs getting seven whole cards!

Card No. 262 Infected Tarakava

The interesting thing about this art is, outside of the special painted Infected Hau from the Muaka and Kane-Ra set, this is one of the few depictions of the Rahi bearing infected Kanohi masks! Each rahi has one Infected card in this expansion.

Card No. 133 Walk Quietly

Now we're out of the Rahi expansion and in to the first wave of cards. Even though the focus was the Toa the Rahi still made many appearances, even very rare ones like the Tarakava-Nui. The orange background of this art really makes it pop out from the other Kopaka ones.

Card No. 111 Tahu vs. Dragon Lizards

Now this one is very interesting. The sketches were seemingly all drawn on larger layout sheets that had space for two images and were later cut down, but occasionally you will see ones that remained together. This Tahu card art was paired with an Onua one, a very interesting Onua one.

Also it doesn't really break my Rahi rule since it features the Hikaki :)

Card No. 105 Onua vs. Manas

This is kinda underwhelming. Yeah its the background, but there's no characters!

What made this listing so interesting was that it also contained two loose sheets of paper, one of Onua.

And one of a....Manas??

This is why I had to break my rule and jump on this right away, its a depiction of the prototype Manas! Its such a rare thing. Being able to see the full art not obscured by Onua's body is such a treat.

Looking at it its most likely based on this image, so there isn't really much NEW here, but its fascinating all the same. I've tried my hand at reverse engineering them a few times, with varying amounts of success. We only have this one image of both of them, its tragic.

And just for my own curiosity, here's a quick and dirty edit of the 3 elements recombined. overlaying the final card really shows how much was cropped out for the final card. I wonder if it was cropped before or after colouring...

Also as a small note, its interesting that these two Toa's fifth cards were grouped together on one sheet. This pattern seems to have held true for other cards, as the next cards in their series', where they have their golden masks and Makoki stones, also shared a sheet.

But then some earlier cards have multiple illustrations of one Toa on one sheet.

Its intriguing.

Its just very cool to look at these, and see the real pencil and pen placed on the paper over a quarter of a century ago. I will cherish these always. I like to display them along with the final card. I've only just gotten the Onua and Tahu ones so I've yet to mount them.

(I was very happy about being able to play Bloodborne at the time.)