Cuz why not. The Space Pirates from the Metroid series were always so cool and iconic. Every game would have a few different variants unique to the environment you explored. I’ve decided to model the base Space Pirates from the first Metroid Prime game as that was the first game when I encountered one that evoked an emotional response. They were creepy, fast, and could climb up walls and lunge at your face. The first level introduced them in a battered and half dead state as if to ease the player into the hell that would follow. Or at least that’s how I saw it when I was 12 years old. Hehe.
For a bipedal form like this I could either start out with a blob in Mudbox and mold out the shapes or start out with individual parts and put it together Lego style. Given the ridged bug like features, I opted to make individual parts. An old school way of doing things, but will take about the same time.
Once I have all the parts where I want them they are ready to be imported into 3D coat where I will Re-topoligize over the parts to make a solid mesh with correct topology. Note that all the individual parts are different colors. This is a habbit I carried over from using 3Ds Max. I never was a fan of how every mesh in Maya was always grey by default…
Anyways, re-topologizing in 3D coat is basically like tracing a drawing. You draw on your quads overtop of the existing mesh. I’ve always been a fan of this work flow since I was introduced to 3D coat. It allows you to focus on the shape and features FISRT, and worry about edge flow and poly count after. It’s the exact opposite of the traditional method where you must be aware of your poly count and edge flow as you shape every peace. I find it to be a bit quicker and more relaxing, but to each is own.
When the manual re-topology is complete, all that is needed is a bit of tweaking to get the shape just the way i want it. Next week I’ll get into the UV mapping and texturing! 
pollopesca 