Micronauts Series 1.5: Radioactive Membros
I really like how the background to this shot came out. The landscape was created out of three elements: the sky is actually a distorted cylinder with a fractal "cyclone" procedural texture applied to it, the ground was made from a simple canyon-type mesh I found included with Lightwave as a public domain file which I applied two or three layers of procedurals to resulting in the nifty texture on the surface, and the liquid was simply a flat plane with a ripple procedural applied to its diffuse, bump, specular, and reflection maps which gave it the nice oily scheme. Originally I had planned to make the liquid a glowing green goo, but my roommate caught that this looked cliched and I thought it also distracted the eye from Membros too much.
The idea evolved out of showing Membros to scale in a sewer scene, then changed to showing him on his home planet, and took inspiration from Roger Dean paintings and some 70's astronomy books. The sky is meant to have a slight angry, jovian look to it and the surface is a bit based in particular on one astronomy book I had as a kid and its artist's conception of the surface of an asteroid. Note that Membros' brain is the same color as his weapons, a slightly more luminous version of his skin color (purely for effect, as I knew the whole figure was to be one color). In the final toy, he was given a translucent yellow brain and the weapons match his skin color completely, and his entire body is slightly translucent as well. I may later do a revision of this picture to reflect some of these final changes.
The original color model for the figure, with some added effects in Photoshop to help his "glow" and to give a kind of Mego packaging style zoom-blur to the figure that I did for fun at the time. You can see here though that the original model is entirely in one solid glow-in-the-dark green.
This is an interesting set of rather unique test shot figures from my collection. The two green figures are the test shots of Radioactive Membros, and are easily identified as such as their stands and shoulder joints are molded in opague grey plastic rather than clear plastic, and they are equipped with yellow weapons and backpacks that are the same as the one used by the exclusive "Bioscan Membros" variant, an error that was corrected for the final version. Also the rubber tube that supports the shoulder joints and neck inside the torso is made of clear material, rather than the usual black. These test shots did not include their extra hands. Only a very small number of these test shots were made for the purpose of doing final quality control checking. I expect I will auction of one of the two soon, though they do make a nice pair.
The figure in the center is a particularly rare test shot of the original series 1 Membros, and is more easily recognizable. His clear red arms are only found on these test shot figures. He is much better constructed than the flawed final series 1 toys. His foot-sockets are tooled too small for use with a figure stand, and all copyright info is missing from his torso, which was tooled on later. I think he looks kind of cool and ninja-like in these colors, a fit leader to these two radioactive minions.