Under The Couch

This little project was a commission for Yakface, from DakkaDakka. You can find the original Dakka Forum WIP thread here.

Yakface wanted a winged Hive Tyrant with a little battlefield presence. What we settled on is a combination of Hive Tyrant and Carnifex parts, which will be modified as we go to blend them together and to keep it looking sufficiently ‘Tyrant’ rather than blocky and ‘fexey.

I’ll be using Tyrant legs, with a Carnifex torso and head. We decided the larger torso fit in nicely with the increased chest muscle and lung capacity needed by a flying creature, while the proportionately slimmer legs represent the fact that he doesn’t need to run too far.

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The first job is to modify the Carnifex head to look more Tyrant-ey. I started this off by shaving off all but the first of the head-plates, and adding new, slightly smaller plates with green stuff, leaving the large, bulbous cranium area at the rear.

The plates need a little smoothing down, and then I’ll add the row of spikes (including the Tyrant’s signature massive nose spike) to the plates, and some exposed veins on the cranium.

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Weapon-wise, I’ll be magnetising a couple of sets of arms: two sets of Scytals, and two sets of twin-linked Devourers.

Since the wings take up an arm socket, the remaining arms need to have two weapons each, which will mean a slight rebuild.

I started with the Scytals, by slicing off the hand at the wrist and turning it sideways. I then added two Scytals as fingers.

These are just pinned in place at this point. Assuming Yakface doesn’t hate them on sight, the next step will be to glue them and then fill the gaps with green stuff.

Coming up: The head gets spikey with it, devourers get linked, and Doctor House initially thinks it’s one thing before deciding it’s actually something else, and then discovers that it was the first thing all along, but they missed it because they forgot to stand on one leg while doing the MRI…

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After some feedback from Yakface, I added some external tendons to drive the talons.

Still need to do the backs of the hands, which will have another tendon running from just under the rear armour plate back into the hand.

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Meanwhile, the head got spikey:

Still needs gap-filling around the base of the spikes. After a look at how this fits into the torso, I may also wind up having to remove the neck and reposition it, but we’ll see how that goes once I have enough of the body assembled to settle on a pose.

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I started on the Devourer arms:

Again, no putty yet. I’ll add a little detail around the tubes at the rear, fill in the hand socket on the bottom devourer, and possibly join up the three spines in between the two ‘barrels’ of the weapons.

My magnets arrived yesterday as well, so once I start assembling the torso I can get that bit sorted as well.

Coming soon: Fun with magnets, Building a better torso, and Agnes shows us how to feed a family of 4 with a coconut, a stopwatch, and the neighbour’s garden gnomes.

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Continued work on the Scytals, assembling the second arm, and adding the tendons on both sides of each. Also added magnets to the shoulders, although these still need a little filling around the sides yet…

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Also continued with the Devourer arm, adding some putty on the sides to start filling in between the two weapons, and added magnets on the shoulders of both arms to match the scytal arms.

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Started work on the torso.

The Tyrant Torso is shorter than the Carnifex one, with fewer ribs, plates instead of spikes down the breastbone, and flesh hooks running down the sides… so there was a bit to do here.

I started by drilling out the second arm socket and adding magnets for the weapon arms to link to. Then, I sliced off the spikes on the breastbone, and removed the bottom 2 ribs (which makes it a closer match to a regular Tyrant torso configuration, and allows a broader range of movement at the waist), and the tops spike of the collarbones (to allow a broader movement range for the head).

Finally, added some green stuff plates to the breastbone.

Coming up: Adding Flesh hooks, a weight on his shoulders, and masses of people completely fail to care about 4 new Neighbours moving into Ramsey Street…

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One of the noticable differences between a Carnifex and Tyrant torso is the spines/stacks/breathing tubes/whatever the heck they’re supposed to be on the back carapace. The Carnifex has three pairs, the Tyrant has four, with the front set armoured.

So, I hacked the front set off a Tyrant, and pinned them in place on the Carnifex’s front carapace section. They’ll have some GS added around the bottom to blend them into the existing carapace.

Also added the flesh hooks on the chest, which are again just waiting for some detail and filling around their stems.

So, as of this point, our little Tyrant looks like this.

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Obviously, a Winged Tyrant isn’t much good without wings… and now seems like a good time to make a start on them.

One of the problems with using Dragon wings for a Tyrant is that they don’t look like Tyranid wings…

With that in mind, I started making a few changes. I reshaped the shoulder, so that it will fit into the Tyrant’s arm socker, and shaved off all the little patches of scales.

Also removed the large claw at the ‘wrist’ joint, to be replaced with a Scytal hand. The outer edge of the wing can then be sculpted over with GS to look like a modified Scytal blade, with the wing membrane connected to it.

I’ll also be adding GS over the forearm, to give it the standard Tyranid carapace look, and adding a couple other little details to mesh it in.

Coming up: lots of filling, getting some leg, and Melinda is confronted by an angry, scary ghost that appears to be trying to kill every living creature in the town, but is actually just looking for its long lost spoon.

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Yakface had a few concerns about the positioning of the top vent, and the angle of the flesh hooks, so they got a little tweaking, and the first hook got some green stuff.

Also started adding the veins to the back of the head.

The gaps under the vents are only rough filled at the moment. They’ll be smoothed down and filled properly next.

Here’s a comparison shot with the vents before and after moving them:

The flesh hooks are still a little ‘bladey’ rather than ‘hookey’ so I’ll shave down the insides of the blades a little to make them a little more curved.

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Very early work on the base:

I’ll be adding in some rocks, and a nice skid-trail where the dreadnought arm has slid along the grounb for a bit after being torn off.

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Started the putty work on the wing.

I had originally intended to just do the outermost vane as a scyth blade at first, to see how that looked before deciding if the others should be done the same. But once I got the forearm puttied up, the existing wing vanes just looked wrong.

So I started on the scyth-vanes as well. Still need to do the outer one, and fill in where they meet the hand.

Coming up: Feeling vane, waisting away, and the Turtles discover the true meaning of teamwork when Raphael’s temper gets them in a bit of a jam…

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I put the finishing touches on the weapon arms, which included filling in the rest of the spaces on the devourers, and puttying around the shoulders where the magnets join on. I also repositioned one of the scytal arms at the shoulder, as with both scytal arms pointing directly forwards, it looked like he was blowing a raspberry…

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Next up, I finished repositioning and puttying up the fleshhooks, and finished filling and smoothing the lower back vanes (Still need to bulk out the frontmost vanes) . I also drilled a couple of 2mm holes under the second arm socket, glued in a small magnet, and then puttied over the hole…

Then, I grabbed a couple of monstrous creature Toxin Sacs, drilled a 1mm hole in the underside, and glued a small piece of steel wire in there, cutting it off flush with the plastic and adding a little putty to neaten it up…

So, when you place the Toxin Sacs against the sides of the torso, the steel inside the sacs is grabbed by the magnets, and you have a set of Toxin Sacs that can be added or removed as needed, for use with whichever arms the Tyrant is currently wearing.

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To fit onto the Tyrant legs, the torso needed a pin. So, as well as filling on the bottom of the ribcage, I drilled a hole in the Tyrant waist, and added a pin on the bottom of the torso. This will be filled in and detailed to match the texture around the waist.

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So now, he goes together looking like this:

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Did a little more on the wing, smoothing down the outside vane, and adding some detail to the ‘hand’:

The outside vane still needs to be smoothed down a little more, and then I can start on the underside.

Still to be done: attaching the head and puttying some detail in around the base of the neck, the underside of the wing, filling and smoothing the foremost back vane, attaching the body to the legs, finishing off the base, and coming up with something sexy (and removable) for Adrenal Glands and an Implant Attack.

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At this point, Yakface was a little worried that the Tyrant was too upright. We agreed a more hunched pose would be more fitting, as if he was slightly crouched from landing, or about to spring into the air.

So, after a quick spinal adjustment (ie, drilled a new hole in the waist for the torso pin) our Tyrant is now wearing a spiffy new hunch.

At this point, to try to give a bit of an idea of how he’s going to look, I have pinned the wings in place and tacked the tail on. The tail has also been re-bent to curl around to the front, rather than sticking out to the side. I’m looking at drilling into the end of the tail and adding a magnet, so I can do up some sort of spike that can be added to the end as an Implant Attack.

And a quick shot without the arms, for a better look at how the body goes together:

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Well, we’re entering the downhill run now… right into the ‘finishing off the little details’ stage.

I finished off a bit of gap filling around the hips, and then made a start on the tail.

I wanted a different way of showing the Implant Attack to the Genestealer tongue version, as it needed to be removable… Yakface wanted the Toxin Sacs, Implant Attack, Flesh Hooks and Adrenal Glands to be optional if possible for different configurations. The Flesh Hooks became permanent, because they’re such a prominent feature of the normal Tyrant model and helped to add detail to the Fex’s bland chestplate… but I wanted to keep the others removable if at all possible.

So, here’s what I came up with:

I took a small piece of plastic (the bottom of a Marine standard pole, actually) cut it into an organic spike sort of shape, with an angled and hollow end, like a syringe. I drilled a 1mm hole in the other end, and then a countersink hole with a 1.5mm drill bit.

Then I cut the pointy end off a pin, and glued it in the hole so that the pin head sits flush with the bottom of the spike.

Next, I grabbed the Tyrant’s tail, drilled a hole in the tip, glued a small magnet in there, and puttied over it. The end result being a normal looking tail to which the spike can be attached. So now, he has a nice pointy bit that can be rammed into his target, with the claws on either side to hold it in place while he injects whatever unpleasantness he has stored up in there.

On the model, looks rather a lot like this:

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Onto the Adrenal Glands. Yakface didn’t like the standard humongous Monstrous Creature Adrenal Gland. I’ve also always disliked the idea of just slapping it onto the back carapace… it seemed like it should be somewhere a little more functional.

So, I took a couple of standard Gaunt Adrenal Glands, sliced off the connecting tubes on the sides and flattened down the bottoms. Then, I added a couple of pins in the same way as I did on the Implant Attack spike.

Then I took the Tyrant’s head, and inserted a magnet on either side of the neck, puttied over in the usual fashion. This allows the glands to be attached on both sides, and removed when not in use. It’s not as huge and silly looking as the normal MC version, but should still be enough to show that they’re there.

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The vent/vanes on the torso needed bulking up a little. I smoothed a layer of putty on around the back of the vent, and then when set, added a second ring off putty around the top to add a little height and extra bulk where it was needed.

The left side is finished, the right is still awaiting the ring around the top…

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I added more putty on the wings. One more internal vane to go on the underside of one wing, and then it’s just the outer vanes and the wrist detail to go.

So, still to come: Finish off the second back vane, glue on the head and putty some detail in behind it, finish off the wings, and add some sand to the base.

Almost there…

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The outer scythe blades on the wings just weren’t working out… with them sitting in place, it was too hard to work on them without damaging the wing membranes as well.

So, I sliced them off, and started from scratch.

This time, I rolled out a layer of GS and sliced the shape of the scythe blades out while it was still soft, let it set, and then (after a little smoothing and filling where needed) simply glued them in place on the outer edge of the wing and filled in any gaps between blade and membrane.

While the blades as is worked out fine on the top sides, where they’re partially buried in the folds of the membrane, on the underside they were looking a little ‘tacked-on’… so I thought I’d try adding some connecting tissue both to integrate the blades into the wing better, and to move them one step further from looking like modified dragin wings.

End result on the first wing looks like this:

Assuming Yakface likes it, I just need to add the connecting tissue on the other wing, finishing puttying up the wrists and upper arm on the left wing, and texture the base, and that’ll be the job about done…

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Finished off the second wing, and a few minor bits and pieces here and there. The finished wing undersides look like this:

So, with all the icky finishing bits out of the way, he’s all done… Time for some all-together pics…

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You can find the rest of the completed pics over in the Gallery, and you can find Yakface’s painted pics in his Dakka Gallery.