#VoodooHeads

[boxturret]

Voodoo Heads

Faber released this amazing video that detailed several Voodoo heads prototypes recently, which was amazing timing as it came out the day I was this close to quitting the hobby entirely and it completely revitalised me. I decided to work on the 3 brown and tan Voodoo heads seen in the video first, as they all feature very similar parts and focus on the same basic function.

This is the first one I made, I call him Hammer because of his personality. I spent a lot of time beforehand working on trying to piece together the central ratchet part that all 3 of these builds rely on and came up with this as my best guess. You never see it on its own or its back so I had to infer a lot. The latch part would be made of a more flexible plastic to allow the ratchet to function, and to allow it to be released when you press on the lever.

I made this guy second, named him Whip, because he has a bunch of whips on his hand. I guess bite could have worked too since the function makes his head go forward, but there's a Voodoo Head era Muaka too...

I know its heretical*, but my purpose here was to make the builds as accurate to the prototypes, so I had to modify several parts in somewhat extreme ways. Notable is the fact that the "Voodoo Ball" piece used in the Toa didn't seem to exist yet, so in its stead they simply snipped the balls off of the existing Slizer limb part.

And finally, here's Punch. He is incredibly unstable, with a friction pin being all that's holding the top of the body to the torso, and the same for the legs. A single axle runs the length of the body to keep everything aligned.

One final note for them is, to go along with what we understand of the Voodoo Head story, their heads are all made to be completely modular, just change some targets the heads pop over to the assigned character. Their jaws and eyes are even set up to be controlled from the parent rig as well!

They're all also set up to have symbols that can be easily swapped out, like some of the other ones you can see.

These were very fun to make, they're very expressive and silly, and the reference came at a really fortunate time :)

Also it gave me a chance to try out something I've been mulling over for ages, gradient backgrounds like the Slizer product images. I really like the look and will probably go with this or variations going forward for this sort of thing.

*but more importantly I don't care at all about purism lol

[coldgoldlazarus]

Admittedly the Toa aren't like, as wild? At least aesthetically speaking. The comparison to Power Rangers and ATLA's Benders is a pretty well-founded one, but even that is still a connection you wouldn't think of every day, and while they're more standard color-coded humanoids, there was still stuff like the Mata's mask designs (not as blatantly tribal as the Voodoohead concepts, but still with enough Polynesian-feeling attributes to connect with the tropical setting) and the Metru's more hexagonal shaping and industrial art-deco detailing made them distinctive enough from each other. (And the Hordika were an interesting case, while they're definitely some of the weaker canister sets and their torso is more gaps than actual plastic, their stretched-out proportions, uneven arms, and elongated heads managed to give a more wild flavor whilst maintaining the same sort of industrial detailing as the Metru, so at least broadly visually they still worked for me)

The Inika I don't care as much for, tbh even in 06 I remember being kinda ambivalent toward them. I don't think the sameness of the design was the issue (yet, heh) since they actually branched out again and had different options for feet, chestplates, and limbs, but still. I think the issue was more that they felt very basic? The super-flat torsos, the chestplates looked more like knight armor(?) or something than anything else, and the masks, aside from being rubber and ugly, all looked like they had bald caps on, lol. It wasn't just that they were different from either of their predecessors, but also that just on their own merits they looked kinda nondescript and naked. (Except for Nuparu, his shoulder-mounted launcher really worked in his favor somehow, but still)

But then they turned into the Mahri, and not only did they look different from each other now (though that was definitely a big draw after so many years of clone builds) but they also just had a sense of personality in general again; livelier colors, the return to proper masks that didn't look like bald caps, and armor placement and other features that gave them a sense of actual presence again. (Ironically, Nuparu again being the exception, now he looked like the other Inika did, even if the giant tower shield kinda covered for it.) That's why I personally think of them as the Mahri first and foremost, with the Inika being just kind of a weird nothing phase on the way to becoming their best selves.

But anyway, point is, even if the Toa feel a bit more standard compared to the rest of Bionicle's world, they still are relatively conceptually unique in the context of franchises in general, and in the context of Bionicle specifically, each team's most iconic appearances gave them their own distinct flavor from each other that fit with their roles in the story.

[boxturret]

I uploaded all the animations and some of the renders I've done HERE

I've also made the 3 animations in to one longer animation that thankfully doesn't get turned in to a youtube short that can be viewed here:

a minute and a half of silent spinning, its quite excruciating!

[boxturret]

This was fun because I finished it, then noticed something that needed fixing, so I had to redo it from scratch :)

I sincerely apologise for it being a short.

[boxturret]

I realised something I messed up only 95% of the way through this time and had to restart from scratch, I'm improving!

[boxturret]

I didn't have to rerend-

you know what, I'm not going to risk it.

I like how if you copy the tags from the dashboard you can just paste them in to a new post, but if you do it from the actual blog view it pasts as one long string