Kyanekton

Brief

Deep, deep in the Pit—the ocean prison for the Matoran universe irredeemables—something is stirring. It’s PITtober, the annual collab reimagining seafaring freaks from Bionicle lore.

This year, the goal was revamping the alternate models from the 2007 Barraki playsets.

Concepts and research

I chose the strange blue creature from the 8925 Barraki Deepsea Patrol alternates. The collab’s organizer, TheUnderscoredDouble, shared pictures of transparent deep sea life for inspiration, including comb jellies, sea angels, and amphipods. I also drew inspiration from the barreleye fish and mermaid’s purses (the egg capsules of certain sharks and their relatives).

Build

I kept the original version of this model out on my desk for the past few months to get a feel for the little creature. I wanted to reuse the trans. blue 7×7 Technic domes^?, layering other transparent and translucent panels around them to give the model depth and complexity.

I picked several other large elements for the main shapes, including two Bionicle G2 protector masks^? that extend the original’s yellow-orange sphere into fleshy mouthparts.

My final build is roughly 50% larger than the original—the same upscaling used in the 90th anniversary Galaxy Explorer^?. For that set, the new size was chosen to make the model “grow up” to match those who would have played with the original as kids, and the extra detail feels like imagination come to life. I hope that this build inspires similar feelings for anyone who played with the minifigure-scale Barraki sets growing up.

Presentation

I moved while working on this project, so I no longer have access to my previous photo setup. My options for soft natural light are more limited now. It was harder to find a location that minimized reflections, and the spherical shapes were particularly unforgiving.

However, I found a workflow made for retouching reflections in eyeglasses that I was able to adapt to mask the harsher reflections in the clear panel. I learned a few new tricks that filled gaps in my retouching toolkit:

• Camera Raw filter: Exposes all the same settings used in Lightroom (non-destructively if used on a Smart Object), including those that I’ve struggled to find other Photoshop equivalents for, like the dehaze slider that does most of the work here. Used to mask large reflections and match them to the surrounding areas. Easier than managing many adjustment layers with multiple masks.
• Healing brush tools: Correcting larger imperfections based on surrounding content. Used to blend edges of the areas adjusted with the Camera Raw filter. Previously, I used the clone stamp tool to brush on fine corrections (dust, scratches, noise artifacts) and content-aware fill to automatically cover large areas (hiding stands, extending backgrounds)—but I didn’t have something for intermediate size and complexity touchups. This fills the gap, and there are lots of variations within that tool family that I still need to explore.
• Color blend mode: Applies a layer’s color onto underlying layers’ brightness, part of the HSL group of blend modes (source: Adobe). I found this was a good way to neutralize differently toned areas, especially around the reflection of my phone camera where multiple regions of lighting and correction touched—a kind of defect that neither clone stamping nor healing brushes easily cleaned up.

I think this group of tools will also help streamline edits where I need to recolor individual elements as well.

Reflections

While the underside of the model isn’t fully filled in, I’m happy with the scale and overall flow of the result. I really enjoyed being a part of this collab, especially bouncing ideas off Double and the rest of the builders in the group. Seeing the range of interpretations on these creatures makes me want to build more Barraki-inspired characters.

Don’t forget to check out the rest of the awesome 2007 alt-build revamps in this Flickr gallery!