A series models made from several parts all of which were textured with texturemaster first. A lot of cut and paste in photoshop for the composition.
I nearly didn’t finish this as I remembered that Ken used to work on Starship Troopers and he might just tell me I have given them too many limbs or an extra tooth.
Just in case they get out of hand I’ll show you how to skin them…
A nasty beastie to warm the cockles of me heart straight from one of my favorite movies! Nice TextureMaster texturing Glen 
:rolleyes: 
Now I want to see one of those big bombardier beetles…you know the ones that shot out the orange acid juice…or maybe a brain bug!!!
Ok heres the deal. You do the bombadier. See if we can coax Ken to do the Brain bug as he can woop-some-booty with his skin textures. Get Le Discot in for a marine or two as he can crank out Zbrush figures like a poser factory on overtime. Get ZStevie to do one of those flying nasties and if we can find him get Saint to do Jonny Rico…
Who is good at starships??? Can we do the Rodger Young grazing an asteroid on fire or even a Drop ship???
Maybe we could get a full-on-forum-frenzy of Starship trooper posts. It would be like the good old days with the Space Monkey thread when we even got Pixolator to come out and play.
Anyone else want a stab at a ST critter???
All are welcome…All levels of experience will be greeted warmly?
Hey now!! That’s sound like a grand idea! Count me in…now to do a little entomological research…muwhahahahahaha!
great work , I still remember that bug , but I cant remembers any of the other beasts except a really big one but i’m not sure how he looked. I guess I have to get the video somewhere to refresh my memories a bit 
Okay, as one who does not regularly do ‘monsters’, how about another idea here?
What about a thread where we invent new alien species, attempting to justify their design in terms of their environmental conditions, something that Lonnie for one has already had a successful run at…
And I have Starship Troopers, on DVD, and a second edition of the paperback, and I loved it because they stuck to Heinleins vision…
But I would be more interested in a thread like the one I propose, than a mere re-creation exercise…
Or as another possibility, a thread where we choose a common environment, perhaps through dicussion on the Community Forum, and we all fill the various niches of that environment with a species…
Just a couple of different ideas… 
But…A GREAT job on the Arachnid, Glen!
That’s a cool idea too Mike. What do you all think? How about this for an environment…
Apturis Major: Roughly 89% the size of Earth. No large ocean bodies. The major tectonic plates are comprised of high plateau land masses. These plateaus are pocked with fissures and large eroded canyons. Some reaching thousands of miles long and hundreds of miles wide. Many of these canyons contain vast lochs filled with deep dark waters. The equatorial belt of the planet is crisscrossed with these canyons. Lush tropical jungles thrive in the deep fissures. At the surface the plateaus are the equivalent of the steppes of Mongolia China. Semi-barren even desert-like in some regions. The poles are frozen wastes covered in huge glaciers. There are three moons and two suns. A red giant and a white dwarf. How’s that for a start?
I think that’s about as broad an ecosystem as anyone could hope for Lonnie…Niches galore!
Now how about a basis for the lifeforms, that is sufficiently bizarre to give lots of opportunity for experimentation?
I have in my science fiction library in my studio, a story from the 70’s about a spaceship crashing on a planet, only one small group survive…It turns out the planet has a spore-based ecology, and that the season the humans arrive in is the dormant season…They bury their dead, and are shocked to find that when the season turns, the planet has produced haeomoglobin-based ‘machine life’, which uses chlorophyll, haemoglobin, all the chemicals it can find in the bodies, along with gears, wheels, and synthetic polymers, including photosensitive membranes for powering…These are alive, but not as we might think of life…They can be dis-assembled, and re-assembled, but have organic components…
Add a high-tech, part flesh, part machine group of motile, and non-motile predators, and I think you have the makings of a strange world indeed!
How we all doin’ so far?
Sounds like a cool idea. Great idea for getting everyone’s creative juices flowing! Count me in too! Great bug by the way!
If you do not dream they cannot come true, can they? Dream on, you are doing great :ex:
Lots of room for development there Mike! And people can create their own ecogroups easily enough. For example we have regions for water dwellers, jungle inhabitants, flyers, walkers, burrowers, cold dwellers. And the lesser gravity combined with the alien anatomical peculiarities gives equals we can have everything from diminutive hive colonies to enormous (yes MUCH bigger than dinosaurs) land walkers! Oooo…the possibilities. Now to get enough people interested!
Well, Lonnie, I guess the first stage is concept art…
The planet from space, the planetary surface in fly-over…
I’m game if you are…
Oh, and it occurs to me that with the solar conditions you outline would come tremendous storm cycles, and heavy gravitational fields…Also the potential of bio-electrical weapons equivalents in the predators…
What would be really cool is to get the terrain artists out there in on this too! Juandel, DeeVee, Flycatcher and all you others are you up to the challenge? And Danile Sandner your vision would lend a great surreal atmosphere to this as well. I can name just about everyone here in ZBC. Everyone seems to have some specialty that would add to this project. Come on aboard everyone…the Starship Z is about to be lauched…
I am going to work on some of the outlining concepts…sort of a charter…then I will post it as a new thread and we can see where we all go from there.
Great idea! btw mentat7 did you just write out that enviroment thing or do you have some sort of generator? If its a generator I’d appreciate a link to where I can get it
Sorry Gerlon but all subcutaneous transponder links into my cerebral cortex have been disconnected at this time due to bandwidth issues…
I would like to formally volunteer to design the organo-tech protocols for the planetary lifeforms, a subject to which I have devoted literally years of thought…I have explanations of polymer bio-synthesis, motive power, and indeed a plethora of detail, which I would be glad to employ in this planetary level project we are undertaking here…
I think slow analysis, as if we were putting together an aquarium will produce a complex environment that people can add to for years, and would like to handle the taxonomy of the life forms…In an aquarium, you establish temperature, then plant life, then higher forms…I would suggest building this planetary system would also benefit from this care… 
'Nice Pic Glen! (awesome idea too.)
Hey thanks for even considering me to do Johnny. I don’t think I’m qualified to do the same kind of gorry stuff that you do. The closest I can get to doing “bugs” (I think) is doing a version of “Flick” from a Bug’s Life!.. LOL
Anyways, this will be a fun thread to watch…!
You are all suddenly reminding me of the 5th annual Contact convention, which was held in Phoenix while I was in college and I had the pleasure to be able to attend as a participant. The concept was to take sci-fi authors and true scientists, mix them together, and see what fell out. We were divided into two mixed groups, each with a different side of a scenario written by Poul and Karen Andersen. My group was the planetary group, and we spent an entire weekend creating the world and its cultures. Meanwhile, the other team (which was kept insulated from us) created the people that came to our planet. At the end of the weekend, we role-played the First Contact between the two cultures in front of an audience. Pure fun! Actually, that was the very first year (through no fault of my own, I assure you! ;)) that they had a best-case scenario outcome. The first year they did the convention, the aliens ate the humans…
Sorry to rabbit trail, but like I said, this really reminds me of that, which was one of the highlights of my college days. I think it’s a dynamite idea, which everyone can participate in – landscape artists, creature makers and realists, alike. I’d suggest adopting a standard from the outset where participants always start their topic names with “Apturis Major – Rest of Subject Here”. That’ll make the threads readily identifiable to the participants and observers.
It looks like fun!
Great organizational note Matthew…!
I think the whole concept is mushrooming here, and we have people here of such diverse interests, that there is room for everybody to contribute something…Maybe at the end we’ll have a gallery!
Lonnie, you and I have to talk…