You know him, you've (probably) fought him, he's a staple of this blog...
It's Raven Beak! We're finally doing this.
Today, I'm providing a comprehensive look into Raven Beak's model. I probably won't have enough space to cover the entire thing, as the image limit for Tumblr posts is capped at 30, but we're starting with the head and working our way down.
The rest of this post is under the cut for your convenience.
Navigation:
Fullbody turnaround and helmet meshes
Helmet details
Shoulders, arms, and hands
Arm cannon
Wings and torso
Legs and feet
BONUS: Naked head
Raven Beak is referred to as chozocommander in the files: his textures are abbreviated to "commander[whatever]" in the files, with the name of a mesh or general purpose specified in the square brackets (commanderbody, etc). Raven Beak appears in three maps: Hanubia, Artaria, and Itorash. As Metroid Dread's cutscenes are executed in-engine, his model can be extracted from the map packages for the aforementioned regions.
There are several models linked to him during cutscenes that aren't part of his base model: chozocommander_arm, chozocommander_face (appears in Hanubia and after the mask breaks in Itorash), chozocommander_wing_r (which he rips off during the cutscene preceding phase 3 of his fight). chozocommander_arm is a more detailed version of his left arm that exists in the actor files for both Artaria and Itorash, the two zones where a cutscene involves the camera getting close to his arm while he chokes Samus out.
With that out of the way, our first order of business is his helmet, and there's a lot to look at.
Here's a list of all his meshes. We'll go over each part as they become relevant. Relevant to our current objective is helmethead, helmethead_clean, helmethead_cinematic, and brokenmask.
You'll notice that each of these have two meshes to their name. The names that are lower on the hierarchy are the actual helmets, and those higher on the hierarchy are overlays for the eyes to make them glow.
Here's what that looks like without scene lighting:
With the overlay...
... and without the overlay.
helmethead_clean features Raven Beak's helmet without the crack from the Super Missile: this is what we see during the opening cutscene in Artaria.
helmethead bestows the crack over the right eye.
Of all the helmet meshes, the cinematic version is the cleanest and most detailed: this one is used during parts of cutscenes where the camera zooms in on Raven Beak's face.
I'll be using this model to explore the smaller details.
All helmet meshes except the broken mask have their own textures: the broken mask uses the basic helmethead's textures.
brokenmask (left) and brokenmask01 (right). These are used to animate the sequence where the helmet breaks in the post-boss fight cutscene.
Earlier, I mentioned that the cinematic mesh is cleaner than the others. The textures and geometry on the cinematic mesh are crisper and more defined because it's used when we want to get a good look at his face: you don't need to see every plane of his beak in high definition during combat.
Here's a closeup of each primary model for the helmet to demonstrate. From left to right, we have helmethead_clean, helmethead, and helmethead_cinematic. helmethead_clean appears to have the lowest clarity in its textures. helmethead is passable, but the planes on helmethead_cinematic are leagues cleaner: there's very little artifacting (the janky crunch affiliated with lower quality jpgs), the colors appear richer, and effort was made to define the negative space.
Look at the owl-shaped crest in the center of the headdress (helmethead left, helmethead_cinematic right): there are darker lines between the arch behind the head, and care was put into darkening the spaces between the eyebrows, around the eyes, etc.
I've already hit the image limit, so we're going to examine the details on his face even further in another post: I've waited so long to share all the little differences between these helmet meshes in excruciating detail, so I suppose it's only fitting that our first entry is more about that than it is showing off the finer details of the headdress and mask themselves.
I would not have been able to dive this deep a year ago when the image limit was capped at 10. I hope they increase it further so I can inflict you with more model facts.
I am working on the second post. The navigation section at the top of the post will be updated as things go live.
I drew this a while ago for my husband when he was feeling down. If you’ve been having a hard time, I hope it gets better soon. You’re not alone. Sending pidgey hugs
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