Random Render: Assuming too Much

While I normally tend to present the context behind random renders – along with an optional small preview – before getting to the actual images themselves, this particular case is… well. I’ll describe the context and what led up to these happening after the actual images rather than before. Why should hopefully become clear once they have been seen. So, without further ado…

So. Uh. Context. Yeah.

A few nights back, a friend of mine and I were both feeling somewhat frustrated with random and completely unrelated events that had been occuring, and for some reason or another resolved to find better moods by hunting for Mass Effect fanarts and linking finds we liked back and forth. This was then further built on when a second friend of mine grabbed me in for a discussion with a third friend of mine about what kind of guild we might try to form in The Old Republic to gather those of our old World of WarCraft group that are interested under one banner… except that discussion actually didn’t happen, and instead friend #2 attempted to enlist my aid in convincing friend #3 to play Mass Effect.

And then I got to sleep really late that night, and woke up tired and confused and with my mind filled with either a brilliant light or visions of the apocalypse, depending on how fantastic or horrifying you find the imagery above.

The armour is actually directly from Mass Effect 2, as you might guess – I once found a handy little program that can technically read the rendering cache of games using DirectX 9 and output that into a series of models, textures and shaders that then other programs hopefully can read. I say technically, because occasionally it’s unstable, occasionally it’ll be a bit confused about where to output things, and occasionally the game in question will be using all manner of pixel shader tricks which’ll make the output textures near useless.

Mass Effect 2 happens to be in the latter category, meaning that while I had hoped to be able to extract Kate – my own Commander Shepard – into a viable model that I could attempt to do Awesome Renders with… I instead ended up with Kate’s albino cousin in flat white armour, and while I could tweak the armour through aggressive use of colour layers… I simply lacked the skill to turn her face into anything resembling human skin colour.

So I had the extracted armour model around without using it for anything… and suddenly had this idea… and I just combined the two, and… well, yeah.

Though to be honest, this is the second thing I do out of that idea. My original idea was simpler, only one image and no backdrop – I’ll add it at the bottom. Staghelm ended up mixed into the idea because for one, he was apparently possessed to do evil at first, and secondly because his transformation into Fire Staghelm just seemed too fitting to match.

And that kitbash in the background? It’s a Harvest Reaper! A Harvest Reaper!

Clearly Westfall was a goblin scheme to take over and harvest the entire universe.

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