Vrogy.net

Apparently Blizzard is introducing a new unit today- the Tauren Marine. It seems they even went to the trouble of modeling it and making it an actual playable unit. Wouldn’t this make a great costume? Several video demos after the jump:

Link. (via.)

I sat down with a sketchpad and came up with lots of frenzied scribbles, which aren’t as pretty as this ’shopping of the samething- which joints are where, and how many there are.

Technically, it’ll be something less; the fingers will tighten in sequence depending upon cable friction and spring resistance, so each of them can be mashed into one DOF.

So awhile back I broke down the different team colors that are in the current dev build of SC2. Naturally, I want to know what they’d look like on the marine armor.

White is indeed missing. I think it’d break the grimy space warrior aesthetic anyways…
Blue, White, Red, and a Green are all immediately doable- McMaster has the colored plastic. The other colors are… exotic. They might require an actual paint job, which will probably degrade quickly.
I’ve always thought a flat, almost grey black would be nice, too.

My favorite has to be the Korhal red or the Raynor teal.
Why the heck was Raynor teal in SC1 anyways?

I’ve managed to beat Solidworks’ loft tool into submission.
Now it produces this very nicely every time I ask.

Well, I figured out how to do more complex work in Solidworks, especially for vacuum-forming. This piece you see above could be turned into plastic

From here I think it’s on to the actual armor! I might try starting at the boots this time.

Well, I need to see if a passive external skeleton will work before I start casting aluminum. I’m not sure how I should mock this up, but the joints look like a good place to start.

Of the 14 main joints, 5 are straight hinges. Two have loose hinges or floating axes of articulation. Two utilize ball races or interlocking flanges to put the wearer through the joint, in conjunction with sliding hinges. Two are freely rotational with loads of axial play. The two hip joints are either ball joints or universal joints, and the torso rests more or less loosely atop the pelvic armor.

Ok, ok.. is this really possible? Will a standard human unit actually fit in there?

Looks like it. That’s my silhouette, and the silhouettes of the major armor pieces.

I’ve been working on this model bit by bit, and here’s the progress so far. Hopefully, this will be produced as a casting soon. Also, I have a hot-wire foam cutter working, to cut foam blanks for casting. It just needs a jig to be useful.

edit: I’ve also added the C-14 Impaler references to a page here.

Awhile back Blizzard released some new wallpapers for Starcraft 2. The ‘Nuke’ wallpaper has a couple great reference examples of the C-14 Impaler gauss rifle carried by Confederate, and presumably all, marines. I had something definitive to work from.

Here’s an unpolished view of my CAD model. Hopefully this is castable in aluminum.