Following up from my last post, due to the post size getting quite large I decided to make a separate post for a couple of Bionicle themed projects that I started. Bionicle is another series which is very special to me, so I guess it was inevitable that at some point I would attempt to create something related.

Matoran Builder (Unity)

I’m not really sure what my objective was with this one, I decided to make a simple customisation tool for the original 2001 Matoran (previously tohunga) sets, maybe to learn about making character customisation systems? Either way it works okay, I imported colour data from the bricklink website to try and make the characters look as set accurate as possible. I was originally inspired to make this after the Bionicle Masks of Power team released their assets for free, they were originally set up to work with unreal engine but I was able to batch convert them using the built in python scripting in blender.

I may come back to this one to make the UI look better and just generally jaz it up a little bit because the project scope is very small and I had fun putting it together.

Metru-Nui Defender (UE5)

I had a very brief foray into UE5 last year which basically just entailed me taking Toa Vakama and putting him in an arena. The plan was to make a sort of wave defense game (potentially multiplayer) where you would fight enemies from various years like Vahki, Bohrok, Rahi etc inside the Metru-Nui colosseum featured in Bionicle 2. Vakama would’ve had a disc launcher, the Huna and Vahi abilities (short term invisibility and time slow down/stop respectively), and probably melee too. I made Vakama’s rig by building him in stud.io, exporting him as a mesh and cleaning it up in blender, before rigging him in a set accurate way, i.e, with the arms limited to the set movement and the ball joints having accurate constraints. This was a fun exercise but I imagine I would’ve ultimately made him more flexible had development continued! The arena model was kindly provided by a friend of mine.

Both of these projects will most likely never see the light of day, as not too long ago Lego decided to take legal action against a large and very promising Bionicle game project, Masks of Power. Sometimes we can’t have nice things unfortunately.