by Geminii » Mon Nov 23, 2009 8:23 am
- Motto: "Ideas may hide in plain sight."
- Weapon: Twin Turretted 8MM Electro-Static Cannons
I'm waiting for the day someone creates a P/CP homage where the head actually transforms a bit more than 'helmet rocks forward ten degrees'. Or even has a straight headswap.
One possibility, retaining the rotating-mask-over-head aesthetic, might be to have the combined head carved from a cube mounted on a balljoint, with a masking piece attached roughly at the ears and going up and over the top of the head, a bit like the flip-up visors on some toys. The head would be able to rotate 360 degrees and look 90 degrees upward. To transform it, have it look the full 90 degrees straight up, so that the underside of the chin is facing forward. Then rotate the head 180 degrees so that the underside of the chin becomes the back of the new head. Rotate the masking piece from what is now the front of the head back up to the top of the head, covering the previous face and uncovering a new face.
It has the advantages that it only needs two pieces cast, allows full balljoint movement for both heads, and both the front and back of the head in both modes are unique (although the back of the head in each case may be a little flat) and can thus be different colors, or at least have different highlights, textures and shapes. Only the visor piece, travelling up over the head, remains identical, and it switches orientation from front to back so there's some visual variety in there. You could even have arrangements like making one edge of the visor jagged, matching with a corresponding jagged detail on a chinpiece, so that when opened for one face it would seem feral, but when closed for the other face there would be no evidence of the pointy surfaces. The side pieces of the visor could stand out in one mode and merge seamlessly with the side of the head in the other mode. If they were translucent, they could even simulate changing color as the different color of paint rotated under them. Make them yellow, for instance, and you could have a red-and-green scheme switch to orange-and-blue, where red and blue were the underlying paint or plastic. Or use red, and have red-and-blue switch to purple-and-white.
Ooo, you could even have polarised plastic both on the sidepiece and the side of the head, allowing a switch from a grey or darker color (blue, orange etc) to a full black.