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MmM

Quake II Strogg Flyer WIP

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I started working on this yesterday evening, and this is what I have done as of this morning. The head is almost complete; I need to paint some blood where the wires/cables enter the back of the head and maybe do a few other touchups here and there. Assuming I don't have an attack of the lazies, the figure will probably be finished early next week.



PC screenshot (for comparison):

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Either I somehow magically never ran into that enemy, or I just didn't notice the one I'm thinking of has a head inside of it. That's kind of morbid.

You should take a lower quality, pixelated picture of the final product, to accurately compare it to the game model. =P

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I highly doubt you could go through Quake 2 without running into tons of Flyers, so you must have never noticed the head like you said.

And I thought my photos were always pixelly and low quality? :P

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Yeah, that's interesting. I never knew the flyer had a head connected to the inside of it. Can't wait to see the rest of the body though. How are you planning to model it?

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I've got everything planned out in my head already. The Flyer's mechanical portions will be mostly hollow cardboard constructs. Which means I (a) get the old ruler and start measuring/laying it out, (b) fold the finished design up into the proper geometric shape(s) and glue it together, (c) make modifications and additions(fuselage, cables, rivets, or whatever) and paint it, and then, (d) pop ze head in. The basic geometry is pretty simple, so I don't forsee any difficulties.

Right now I'm planning on making the wings articulated so that they can adopt the firing position they do in the game. I had wanted to have the head articulated at the neck, but the wire 'hair' is fairly stiff, so it doesn't look like I'm going to be able to do that now.

Also, I'm planning on having detachable wing blades. In the game, the Flyer has retractable ones that it extends while fighting in close quarters to slash with, but the actual wing geometry isn't the right size to house them in 'real' life. Although I suppose I could redesign the wings a bit, so that they could house retractable blades, or have them swing out or something . . .

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Coopersville said:
Either I somehow magically never ran into that enemy, or I just didn't notice the one I'm thinking of has a head inside of it. That's kind of morbid.

Indeed. I was thinking "wait, is this something from Quake 4?" (which I haven't played). Perhaps we never got a close up view of them, as they're small, they are always moving around, and one has to take them down fast to avoid much damage.

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You never saw their head because you were probably playing in quake2's shitty OpenGL renderer which resamples everything down to blurry resolutions and drenches all the levels in saturated orange colored lighting that drowns out all possible colors

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Heh, Quake2's OpenGL mode is indeed horrible.
I knew the flyer had a head though, just like you see a face in those other floating red glass-tube-thingys if you take a closer look!

Anyway, pretty interesting start here, I'm curious how the final product will look.
Keep it up :)

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Printz: Vader? That never crossed my mind, but yeah, it does kind of look that way. Myself, I was thinking he looks like Astaroth from Soul Calibur.

Earthquake: There's some pics below of my hand holding the body, that should give you some idea of scale. Right now, without wings, the body is about 12 cm long, lengthwise, and about 5 cm wide.

As to the OpenGL mode, that doesn't want to work on my PC, so I always play with the software rendering--perhaps that's why I recognized the head and others haven't. I also tend to pay much more attention to monster details in video games than your average gamer does seeing as how that's mostly all I sculpt/model.

Anyway, here's some more progress:

Saturday afternoon:
Most of the body is complete, but unpainted. One wing design is also pictured.



Sunday evening:
Photo 1: Various wing geometry designs in different states of completion--none of which I like. Back to the drawing board . . .



Photos 2 & 3: Body and head pretty much complete and painted.





Assuming I can make my mind up on those wings, I anticipate I'll have this done Tuesday or Wednesday.

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Well, I didn't get as much work done on this as I had planned (due to my Water Dragon Clan 4 toy arriving in the mail, which needed some corrective surgery and a review webpage created), but I did get the wings completed and the first coat of paint slapped on them. All that remains is to dirty them up with a black wash, splatter them with some blood, and attach them, with articulation, to the body. I'm considering ditching the idea of having removable wing blades, and just leaving the wings as is, but I haven't made a final decision on that yet.

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MmM said:
I'm considering ditching the idea of having removable wing blades, and just leaving the wings as is, but I haven't made a final decision on that yet.

The problem with the wing spikes is that they don't seem very practical. The original has blades with which it should apparently be able to slash opponents with glancing blows, while the spikes would likely get the flyer impaled onto whatever it hits with them (perhaps getting stuck and also damaging the blasters).

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Did you use any special reflective paint for the eyes or is it just bright yellow/white?
They look as if they were really glowing in some of the pictures, wich is an awesome effect.

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Vader: The white eye paint is gloss which probably accounts for the degree of reflectiveness you're seeing. Eyes on figures almost always look better in gloss because it gives you a 'wet' look which is more realistic. Digital cameras, particularly crappy ones like mine, sometimes have some trouble with bright colors, which can account for things appearing brighter than they actually are as well (I read about it in a book about digital cameras that I checked out from the library a while back, something about brightness exceeding the upper thresholds of what the camera's optics can register, forcing it to render the really bright stuff as pure white--can't remember what the phenomena is called).

Myk: I was thinking some of the same things when I was writing up the background info on the webpage. I asked myself things like: What would happen if a Flyer were to take a running pass at a target, with its blades extended (maybe in an attempt to decapitate or cut a marine's legs out from under him/her)? If it worked out well, the Flyer would do some major damage. On the other hand, if it worked out poorly, and the blades got stuck, as you suggested, or didn't cut cleanly, the bad contact would likely result in an involuntary change in the Flyer's flight path, possibly even a crash. For practical reasons, I think that's why it's wise ID Software chose to have them hover more or less stationary when using the blades, as that would be the safest way to employ them.

Anyway, all finished. I completed it on Wednesday, but had to spend time Thursday taking final photos and getting the webpage in order. In the end, I decided not to make the wing blades, no big loss there.





Webpage with more info (material used, dimensions, background, etc.):

http://kramwartap.fortunecity.com/flyer.html

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On paint: The silver paint is identical (same bottle even) for both figures. For the red blood, I followed Shapeless' advice, that he gave me on the Castlevania JP Bonepillar figure, and added some green to the red for a somewhat darker tone on the Flyer (the basic gloss red is identical though). The browns are different: the Flyer's is straight out of the bottle matte nutmeg brown, while the Brain's was a personal concoction that I mixed up out of tan, brown, and orange. The black wash is gloss on the Brains, and matte on the Flyer.

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