810NICLE Day 2020: Kopaka's Ice Spear 3D Concept
And just like that, I think I've done more BIONICLE posts on this blog than I have on any given college semester.
So inspired by a realistic take on the Master of Ice that my sisters Klenda and Leena made, I decided to recreate Kopaka's 2015 weapon in Blender; my main goal here was balancing a faithfulness to the toy's aesthetic with a naturalistic practicality--in short, what would the spear look like if it could be used as a practical weapon? I'd made this some time back, but decided to post it in time for BIONICLE's unofficial fandom celebration day, August 10th.
Here are the original weapon and my recreation side by side:
The creation process started with the spearhead, building the model from Internet-derived reference pictures before manually moving the model's vertices to better match the set (shout out to my main reference for this, an obscure 2003 video showcasing the same piece). For the daggerlike object below it, however (which I interpreted as an ice structure), I was able to use a physical copy of the piece and recreate my interpretation of it from direct observation, which I vastly preferred to working from digital images/video.
I decided to work with Cycles for the render, using an Emission shader for the ice dagger portion and a glossy/diffuse mix for the main spearhead (although, oddly enough, there was an occasional glowy phenomenon that appears at the bottom left of my recreation's first image; I think it has something to do with the roughness setting, though I've fixed it since then).
Overall I think my work is a success, though I have yet to add a visual history or details to it; once I potentially work on other tools and related models, I could possibly use this as a base for a sculpted, higher poly version with a few nicks and scratches on the model and not just the ones on the textures. In the meantime, though, I'm pretty satisfied with my work on it. Happy 810NICLE Day!
So inspired by a realistic take on the Master of Ice that my sisters Klenda and Leena made, I decided to recreate Kopaka's 2015 weapon in Blender; my main goal here was balancing a faithfulness to the toy's aesthetic with a naturalistic practicality--in short, what would the spear look like if it could be used as a practical weapon? I'd made this some time back, but decided to post it in time for BIONICLE's unofficial fandom celebration day, August 10th.
Here are the original weapon and my recreation side by side:
The creation process started with the spearhead, building the model from Internet-derived reference pictures before manually moving the model's vertices to better match the set (shout out to my main reference for this, an obscure 2003 video showcasing the same piece). For the daggerlike object below it, however (which I interpreted as an ice structure), I was able to use a physical copy of the piece and recreate my interpretation of it from direct observation, which I vastly preferred to working from digital images/video.
I decided to work with Cycles for the render, using an Emission shader for the ice dagger portion and a glossy/diffuse mix for the main spearhead (although, oddly enough, there was an occasional glowy phenomenon that appears at the bottom left of my recreation's first image; I think it has something to do with the roughness setting, though I've fixed it since then).
Overall I think my work is a success, though I have yet to add a visual history or details to it; once I potentially work on other tools and related models, I could possibly use this as a base for a sculpted, higher poly version with a few nicks and scratches on the model and not just the ones on the textures. In the meantime, though, I'm pretty satisfied with my work on it. Happy 810NICLE Day!
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