Welcome back to The Hydromecha Monthly! I’m going to continue this new tradition of keeping these in text while covering either specific projects or doing other stuff in video. Without further ado, let’s get into the projects from the past month or so:
SCORPIO MAXIMUS
The giant robot scorpion I talked about last time is done! It also won 2nd place in Robot Day on Newgrounds! After starting on it all the way back in January it was left to collect dust for several months before I finally kicked it into high gear a few weeks before the deadline. The sheer size of this model is honestly inhumane. I have to turn it sideways to get it through a doorway.
This thing is made of a smorgasboard of junk, model kit parts, and foam. The tail uses a phone receiver, the main body is an empty spool of printer filament, and the legs are largely made from deoderant stick parts. Every single rivet on the model is a tiny hemispheric bead. The entire underbelly of the model is covered in riveted panels that you can’t see because the thing’s so close to the ground. You’ll be able to see that and more in the making-of video that should be finished sometime before the end of the month.
If you want to take a gander at more images of SCORPIO MAXIMUS, head on over to Newgrounds to see the art post: https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/hydromecha/scorpio-maximus
Website Updates
The Hydrosite (Hydromecha.Website) has seen some major renovations recently. The old layout was way too cramped so I moved the monitor to the new landing page and painted a tablet sorta thing in Krita for the main website content.
These updates also saw a new website button along with new About and Home pages. The button was made in Blender, recycling the same scene and assets from the landing page render. Below you can see the new button along with what the Blender scene looks like outside of camera view:
Autoscout Activating
Remember that drone Soundwave only ever used in a single episode of the G1 cartoon? Me neither (I mostly watched Cybertron as a kid), but I saw it on a list of Decepticon cassettes on TFWiki and thought it would be a cool basis for a custom so here we are now. Below you can see a digibash of what the figure will eventually look like along with what I’ve painted so far. I picked Blurr as the base figure since he’s got that antenna sorta thing on his head that resembles what I’m assuming is a camera/eye on Autoscout.
Once this is finished I’ll post it (and all my previous customs) on TFW2005’s Radicons board. I didn’t know they had a forum for customizing figures until I started using the site earlier this year. It was cool to find a message board for this very specific hobby.
Comic News
There’s been a change of plans with Bugalo. I’m going to be putting it back on ice to re-focus on some more serious storytelling with other stuff. Bugalo was certainly an amusing experiment but I’ve lost interest in making it and I don’t think anyone’s seriously invested in its continuation.
There’s one last page for Bugalo that I’m (as of writing) still waiting for a friend to add dialogue to that should go up on the website sometime this week. Here’s a (textless) preview:
So what’s next for Hydrocomics? I’d like to get back to working on the P.I. Periscope one-shot and later Hazardous Materials. I also want to see if making comics in Blender is a viable option. It would require a lot more up-front work to make models for characters, objects, and environments, but it also means I can recycle assets easily (once a model is complete I can reuse it endlessly) and use different camera angles and perspectives that would be a pain in 2D.
I’m gonna try making a single page of Periscope in 3D once the scorpion video is done and we’ll see where I go from there. Oh, and while we’re talking about the world of Hazardous Materials, I also did a quick headshot drawing of Coal Dust while I was working on SCORPIO MAXIMUS.
There’s still room for improvement but it’s leagues better than the earlier drawings I did of the character. I started going through an anatomy book (Anatomy for Sculptors) a little while ago and I really oughta get back to it at some point.
Anyways, I’ll see you again next time with another newsletter.
Have a good one,
-Hydro