Barbaric
Round 2 of Bio-cup 2024. Round of 27, playing in the big leagues now. I stumbled here in 2023 so I put in all on the line in 2024. The theme was classes, as in Dungeons and Dragons, and my group's class was "barbarian."
It was a struggle. First WIP was actually the barbarian himself as a wolf beastkin but the proportions weren't working with the head, it was a bit boring, and I was generally struggling with making a human body. Despite liking the head I was convinced to scrap it (with the torso getting repurposed into the dead body of a too-confident barbarian warrior in the final entry).
So I decided to make a monster instead and built a new head that I liked even more.
Once again it was all the rest that was a problem. A large head necessitates a large body, and I wanted it to be ripped, too, as a friend had recommended the Galian Beast as a good reference. Started with the chest just using the biggest parts I could find. Chest parts make for pretty good chests, even when doubled up. Big chest needed big abs, so big macs got the nod. Filling in the obliques took a little experimenting. The solution wasn't very elegant, but it was good enough. Dino tails have very pleasant curves.
The shoulders had to be done next as I judged them to be the biggest challenge. So much rounded musculature to try to capture. Shoulder proportions were wrong, though, and trying to make bigger shoulders wasn't working because I couldn't effectively overlap them over the chest as much as I wanted and I couldn't go wider without screwing up the proportions in a different way. So I backed down to one chest, went back to the trusted big macs for the bulging shoulders, and then finished out the big wide upper arms. It was a bit awkward blending the shoulder muscles into the biceps since while cones can cap big macs, smoothly capping cones isn't so easy. I mostly ignored the problem and just trusted the silhouette to be striking enough to carry through.
And at this point I was mildly panicking about the size of the guy and the looming deadline so apparently I stopped taking WIP photos and was just forging blindly ahead; you'll have to make do without visual aids for the rest of my commentary.
I added the belt and loin cloth at this stage, eschewing the beautiful bottom abs and windscreen pelvis. Sadly the ziplines don't make it all the way around the waist and I didn't have enough chakrams, so I had to do some trickery to make it look fine in the photo.
Distracted myself from the impending doom by working on the feet. Main thing to note here are the essential rubber tread attachments for traction. Then I moved back to the forearms. I had forgotten steering wheels have absolutely useless clutch so it did take a minute to figure out how to get the fur to stay in place, the secured gold chains being the solution I settled on (this was before the existence of the handy Sonic ring which has since done away with this clutch problem). I also took advantage of the jewelry idea to fill the massive wrist gap the steering wheels left me with. Added a quick hand design to round it out. I wanted meatier fingers but ran into trouble. Macaroni create too sharp an angle, I did not enjoy the pin holes in technic connectors, and more complicated solutions were more trouble than they were worth. A fight for another day.
I didn't come back to fill the mane until after the arms were done because I knew the mane, while visually important, would be easy to develop and so it was. Couple fur pieces, some flex tube, and a lot of cattle horns and bar holder clips.
Then I moved on to finishing up the legs. Pretty quick process to fill out the thighs and the mid leg section. The shins took a little extra work on account of the fur, but not bad. Hot dogs and clips, baby. Pretty boilerplate stuff, they're not as well formed as other parts of the build but I was getting lazy and all the double joints were harder to work around than my usual fare.
I was also experimenting with the tail during this time, just looking for something simple for visual and physical balance, but didn't have much success at the time. The tail is returning in my in-progress update of this dude.
Then it was time to paint the final canvas, essentially. Some kind of highlight color was needed to pop a bit, you'll notice the red jaws in the photo below, those were the beginning of that effort. My deep desire was to go with bloody hands and mouth to provide the red accent. Perhaps with red on the parts that would otherwise be white and dark red/brown on the grey fur on the chest and forearms? My most likely alternatives were bright light blue and/or lavender as natural highlights in the hair, similar to the way Woomy used teal on his Karashishi. Red bloody paws seemed like the best bet but without a way to convey wetness I decided it was necessary to make the idea of blood much more obvious, which led to the rest of the scene in the final hours.
I also had doubts the big guy stand on his own (no pun intended, he very much could not stand on his own) as a "barbarian" to fulfill the theme. I had been planning to use the bisected remains of my earlier WIP as a dead barbarian in the scene for the theme, but would that work out well? How to position him? I went through the color ways and scene versions with my trusted crit partners and settled on the final photo. In retrospect, the blood dripping from the front hand is both poorly executed and a bit much.
And thats how I made it to the Bio-cup semifinals for the first time! I don't love this build, it was just too much of a struggle in the design phase, but I was proud to win my bracket against other great builders and move on to the round of 9 for the first time (where I promptly stumbled).
You get a little mini gallery, including a picture of the back, for making it this far through my rambling.
As I mentioned while writing about the tail, this guy is in the midst of a rebuild to complete the full 360 view and make him sturdy enough for display at cons, so you can look forward to that sometime in 2026.