Original post:
There’s been a few postings of Chiara MOCs lately, all of which look great! In particular seeing @Lamentte’s post (love your design by the way) inspired me to get some decent photos up now before someone else posts a similar idea
MOC Background
I fell in love with the glow-in-the-dark barraki pieces when I picked up Nocturn early last year, before I knew about the canon contests. I really wanted to use them in a MOC, and thought it would be a cool alternate take on the blue/white lightning colour scheme (the Toa Inika also used transparent pieces for lightning powers).
Overall it took me about 3 months during lockdown last year to refine her design, then another couple of months to bricklink the missing pieces and get a 3D printed mask.
I really love KhingK’s non-aquatic Volitak and I think it fits with the rest of her armour shaping much better than the official part.
The Build
The barraki pieces turned out to be surprisingly difficult to work with. In particular, integrating them into the torso in a way that looked natural took more work than any other part of the design. As a result she’s a little more buff than I originally intended, but I think that still fits with her confident personality.
I decided to give her twin axes for Toa tools as I felt they have a bit of a Thor vibe, while also being quite different from the other Chiara MOCs I’d seen. They can also be stored on her back in a method similar to the Toa Metru.
Using the custom hands I’ve seen around the place (sorry I have no idea who invented them) gave her a lot of extra personality when posing.
The Build Continued
I really value poseability in MOCs, and while building her I discovered the magic of waist articulation!
Also, right from the start I wanted to use rahkshi heads as shoulder pads, and the final build allows the pads to ‘float’ slightly above the arms. This let me keep a wide range of motion without any major gaps around the shoulder joints.
There’s still parts of her build I want to tidy up, so any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
I’ve got a black light somewhere so I’ll try to get some photos of her glowing properly (she’s also got a glow-in-the-dark round stud in her chest armour for a heart light)
The Takadox armor color works amazingly well for the lightning color scheme; compliments the white very well and looks like it’s packed with energy. Really nice looking moc.
The Takadox armor and white creates a fantastic color scheme, and I really like the Rahkshi shoulders! I think my only gripe is the relatively large amount of visible dark blue in the shin area compared to the rest, but that may be unavoidable given piece colors.
Thanks everyone!! Eventually I plan to have MOCs for all the secondary elements, and I’m hoping to make them all a little bit different in their own way. There’s quite a wide range of colours available to the ‘primary’ elements, so I reckon other toa should also be able to break the mold a little…
Thanks! And yeah that’s partly down to colour availability, and also because I didn’t want to go too overboard with custom limbs where standard pieces work well. I wanted to have metru blue as an ‘underlay’ colour overall, but had to settle with black for stuff like the lower sections of the upper arms. maybe I’ll have a look at how well a lighter blue would work for the shins…
Maybe you could just make the shins black. I like the current colour scheme (except for the dark blue shins), and I feel like a third Elemental colour would take away from it. Plus, black is always a solid choice for a generic tertiary/filler/non-Elemental colour.
So with the latest Greg news revealing that Chiara wields a spear, and the release of the Sidopack for Stud.io (which contained the takadox armour), I decided it was time for an update!
I’ve been working on polishing up her design, specifically trying to clean up the colour blocking and consistency. I’ve removed several white sections of armour, mostly on the back of her waist and legs, and replaced a lot of the previously black pieces with metru blue. I think this gives her a much cleaner look, whereas some of the areas on the earlier version looked messy.
(Thank you @MooCowsRock and @TheJerminator for your feedback around the shins! I tested out black shins, as well as several other limb pieces. While I ended up keeping the dark blue in the end, it was your comments that led to me re-evaluating the colour blocking and introducing more dark blue overall )
I was initially quite frustrated by the spear news because I was fond of her axes, but after working on it I really like the design I came up with.
I wanted it to be elegant and not too bulky, but still be visually distinct (after the hagah contest spears look pretty boring haha).
I based my design on a lightning rod, with a spiked focal point near the tip of the staff. The Sidopack also came with a Knight’s Kingdom sword that looked fantastic as a spear tip, and also came in white!
As with the rest of her design, all pieces are available in these colours (except for the mask of course). This includes the glow-in-the-dark stud I used as a heartlight behind her chest armour!
Neat update. More dark blue works very well in favor of this build, and I like the spear design quite a lot (but why is Farshtey running around telling us what weapon Chiara uses…?).
Thanks And yeah I was surprised to hear that he’d volunteered that information. It seems to have ruffled a few feathers but I’m glad this happened now and not when the Chiara contest would be about to start.
For comparison’s sake here’s a before and after of the colour updates. The downside being some of those pieces are much more expensive in dark blue… but go big or go home right?
Dark blue is the base layer of the MOC, with fluorescent blue above it, and white above both. Making the shoulders d. blue would screw up that colour blocking.
I wanted to show off the shoulder articulation a little more clearly, so here’s a quick gif:
The Rahkshi head rests very naturally against the Takadox armour, then slides back along the ‘collarbone’ when the arm angle gets high enough (this also happens during forward and backward movement). The overall effect looks really natural, and avoids the ‘gappy joint’ problem.
I’ve tried to replicate the effect using other pieces, in hopes of making a toa team using the technique, but haven’t managed to make it work with anything other than Takadox armour yet. Most pieces are either too wide, or shaped in a way that catches on the Rahkshi head when moving the arm.
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In other news I’ve changed the socket connectors in the shoulders to be dark blue instead of transparent (for colour blocking)
Eventually I plan to have MOCs for all the secondary elements, and I’m hoping to make them all a little bit different in their own way. There’s quite a wide range of colours available to the ‘primary’ elements, so I reckon other toa should also be able to break the mold a little…
maybe I’ll have a look at how well a lighter blue would work for the shins…
)
And yeah I was surprised to hear that he’d volunteered that information. It seems to have ruffled a few feathers but I’m glad this happened now and not when the Chiara contest would be about to start.
