As with a lot of Bionicle combiners, the official Spiriah model leaves a lot to be desired. I decided to take a crack at giving him a new build while still keeping the important features of the original.
The most obvious change is the removal of the Tridax Pod. This is because he never would have used one in-story, and Greg has said that it was only included in the original model to promote the play features of 2008.
As for the things I kept the same, the most important thing for me was his body shape; the original model has extremely wide hips, and I wanted to keep that. I’ve slimmed them up a bit relative to his shoulders, but they’re still pretty wide.
Next was his colour scheme; dark red and lime are the main colours of the original model, though the gray shins stand out as well. I translated the latter into a kind of boot-like appearance, being partially inspired by the large Mantax feet. I also made the colour more metallic, to stand out more.
The large feet, combined with the wide hips, lead to the entire leg design being really bulky, which I think works pretty well. He now has a second knee joint, but this was more for poseability reasons to offset the thicker limbs; I would still consider the model to just have standard knee articulation in-story.
There’s nothing too special about the arms; I cleaned up the colour scheme a little bit, and added some more red. The hands, though, both now have finger articulation. His right hand has fairly standard Exo-Force fingers and a connection point for his Skyblaster, while each of his claw-fingers is on a ball joint.
Next, his wings got a massive overhaul. I kept the original colour distribution, but that’s about it. I moved them closer to the middle of his back, and added more poseability. Each wing has two points of articulation, plus a rudimentary open/close mechanism. While I wouldn’t exactly call it a “function”, per se, each wing has a four-bar mechanism that stops the blades from rotating independently, and maintaining a nice “sweep”.
Finally, his torso. The skeleton is made up of a number of ball joints, so it should have some amount of flexibility. Pretty much all of the armour pieces can pivot as well, to adapt to whatever pose it’s put in.
It’s worth mentioning, though, that this torso flexibility is theoretical; stud.io doesn’t play well with multi-joint constructions, and the armour alignment would have to be pretty precise. Besides, I never really intended to introduce torso flexibility; it was more of a side effect of the choice to use Bohrok limbs for the hip joints.
And finally, the tail; there’s nothing to really say here; I liked the original choice of blade for the tip, and I integrated the bat wings a little smoother. I’d imagine he could use them as a kind of stabilizer during flight.
Credit to Khingk for the non-shapeshifted Jutlin.
Thoughts? Is there anything you would do differently, either in terms of creative design decisions or build details?
