Bionicle MOCs: Lost Rahkshi

Today I present two of my older Bionicle MOCs, both non-canon Rahkshi.  The first is the Great Rahkshi Kluurakh.  Kluurakh was formed from the exceedingly rare act of fusing a live Stage 7 kraata of Confusion into a Stage 7 armor.  The unexpected result was a creature of extraordinary size, strength, and, to Terridax's dismay, intelligence.  Kluurakh's will was strong enough that he was able to escape the Makuta's mental control, even in close proximity, and live as a free being.  Not much is known of his life, though it is believed that he lives in deep caverns beneath Metru Nui to this day.

Here's a size comparison with the normal type:

Next up is Tierakh, pronounced "tee-eh-rock."  Tierakh was raised & trained to be a personal bodyguard of Teridax.  His most exceptional feature is his Shadow Shield, an intangible device powered by pure elemental shadow energy.  It appears as a very small, shadowy field, but when an attack is inbound, whether physical or energy-based, the shadow force extends forth and concentrates ahead of where the attack is aimed, absorbing it and rendering it ineffective. 

It is believed that Makuta Teridax absorbed the life force of Tierakh to supplement his own power in advance of usurping control of the body of Mata Nui.

Bionicle MOC: Shadowed Vengeance, leader of the Dark Hunters

At last, this MOC is unleashed!  You should of course read the brief Bionicle-world story of the rise of Shadowed Vengeance, but here as usual I'll just explain the backstory of the creation of the piece.  I actually built this guy several months ago, but didn't have a compelling story for it.  It was one of those MOCs that I started by getting inspired by a color (in this case translucent orange) and just going from there.  When it was done (minus the staff), I realized it would make a good Dark Hunter, but I couldn't decide which one.  It had wings, horns (which were slightly different at first) and a strong shield like Vengeance, but its overall appearance looked way too much like this drawing of The Shadowed One.  It wasn't until last week that I got the idea to combine the two official concepts into one, but after that, the pieces really fell into place with ease.  All I had to do was to build a Staff of Protodermis and slightly adjust the head, and I would be set.

For the staff I again referred to this pic from the Dark Hunters book, since I was really underwhelmed by the official version that was used in the combiner set.

The figure has pretty decent articulation and stability.  The only thing that's really lacking is strength in the articulated right hand, which makes posing with the staff a bit tricky.  The final head came out pretty decent, though.

Bionicle MOC: Toa Nidhiki

This is my personal interpretation of Toa Nidhiki.  Click it for a bigger view.

If you haven't long since read about it, Nidhiki, most commonly known as a Dark Hunter, was originally a Toa of Air before being morphed into his four-legged freak state by Roodaka.

Breaking from the way I normally work, I searched the Web for examples before starting on this guy because I knew wih the popularity of Toa MOCs, there were sure to be some previous attempts.  Sure enough, there are some out there, but I didn't look them up for inspiration -- I looked to see what was already done to make sure mine wouldn't look like any of them!

I used the correct canon mask (per Farshtey himself) and included the breast plate that was preserved in the popular mutated form.  Most commenters on previous MOCs have insisted that Toa Nidhiki must be built with a typical Toa Metru body, following the style of the Iruini set.  Well, I briefly looked at that possibility, and I hated it. Looked very weak and spindly.  Sorry, I will not rebuild this with a Toa Metru body!  It's much better like this, trust me.

I used this Nidhiki picture as my main inspiration during the build to get the appropriate mix of colors.  Since he was a Toa of Air, I wanted to give him wings, and the Mistika pieces looked just right.  It was extremely tricky and took hours to get them mounted, because I wanted them to fold into a diamond neatly behind his body.  I ended up setting them up on a beam that would slide straight down about 3/4ths of an inch to extend the wings, and move back up to keep the front profile heroic in nature.  When the wings had a fixed mount low enough to fit under the arms properly, they looked all wrong when folded up.

Finally, there's the whole deal with the Air Scythe.  I'm sure there are plenty of concepts about how this should look, but this is my simple take on it, using a piece from the TRU titan Toa Mata Nui set, mounted at an angle and with a curvy handle.  In putting this together I just looked at pictures of real scythes and tried to find what would approximate that look without inspiring images of the Grim Reaper.

 So there you go, Toa Nidhiki!

Bionicle MOC: Valtys, Fire Titan of Bara Magna

If you haven't yet seen the story of Valtys, you can check it out here.  What was my inspiration for this MOC?  Basically out of nowhere I wanted to do another being that would tie into the Bara Magna storyline, and the first things that came to mind were the colors red and yellow.  This is how most of my builds begin -- a random spark of inspiration, which leads me to start pulling parts out of bins and spreading them out on the floor.

Now, we've already had some official Fire Tribe releases from LEGO, including two Glatorians, and Agori are pretty easy, so I decided to go with something on the larger side, and the idea of an original Glatorian titan emerged.  Here's the direction I was going at first:

I felt like this had too much Mata Nui in it, though, plus the Brutaka mask, even with the Bara-esque translucent shadow-Matoran head underneath, didn't really feel right to me.  I think mostly it was just too large, making the whole figure seem smaller.  When I substituted Mallum's head, it was perfect, making this guy look really tall and buff, and I rolled with it from there.

The horizontal part of the shield actually can be pulled out slightly and rotated parallel to the vertical part for carrying.  I don't have a good picture of the left hand but I set it up so it looks like he's holding a real shield handle with his clenched fist, rather than integrating a ball socket into the structure of the shield itself.  The axe uses two Axxon axe halves back to back, forming parallel blade edges.  There's a hand & wrist guard only on the right side for a little extra protection -- he didn't need one on his shield side because, well, there's a shield there!

Valtys has a little bit of twist available at the waist thanks to one of those sturdy two-way rotating joints from the original Makuta Teridax set, buried deep in his lower core.  Yes, I use a Zamor launcher as a Thornax launcher.  No, it doesn't really shoot, but visually I think it fits together nicely, especially for a shoulder-mount where proper Thornax launcher jaws would be pretty long and unwieldy.

Well, that's Valtys for ya!  Hope you like 'em!

Bionicle MOCs: Rilovian history adjustment

In Zeyek's introductory post about the Rilovians, there was one photo that bothered me a bit.  It was this one:

The thing is, though I had tried hard to mix up masks and equipment to both ensure good variety between all of the Rilovian MOCs and also to keep them from looking like Matoran analogues, I accidentally failed at the latter part with the elders.  I see some serious commonality with a couple of like-colored Turaga in there!  Matau & Nokama anyone?  Argh.  Today I got a package from an eBay seller that helped me to remedy this embarassing predicament like so:

Voilla!  Now I feel much better.  Here's the whole crew with the updated old dudes: