[MOC] Cerberus Chopper

[3rdeye88]

Hi everyone. For those of you interested, here's the first MOC I've completed since joining Eurobricks and marks the beginning of posting my MOCs on Eurobricks as well as

Deviantart, Flickr, and MOCpages(when I remember to ^^;).

About the MOC:

This is a MOC that happened kind of by accident or on a whim. After seeing Alex-Darkrai:'s Grind Star I was inspired to use my Dark red and black Marbled/gradient parts to make something. The end result became a chopper style motorcycle. I suppose thinking about how the wheels come from the Furno Bike or Speeda Demon's motorcycle is what led me to go the direction of a chopper. I started with an initial idea for the front forks which turned out very well.

Then I spent three days on the rear wheel. I didn't illustrate it here in the photos but when you turn the rear wheel, a series of gears connected to the turntable part on the other side make the hub/rim counter rotate. So if this chopper was roaring down the street the back rim would be spinning the opposite direction. This is probably one of the most complicated pieces of functional design I've ever created. I spent three days just working on this section alone. I first got it, then I spent two days refining it so that the turn table and rim were closer to the wheel.

Now I had sort of a back and a front and had to bridge the two. I struggled with this until I finally scrapped the front fork design keeping the ideas I liked(like the Pyrox mask and the Piraka feet), doing a lot of research by looking up many photos of the key areas of a chopper to really understand how they work and build the MOC like an actual chopper(i.e making the frame, then connecting the forks, building the engine, transmission, gas tank, etc).

This was quite an interesting build in the sense that it's both symmetrical and asymmetrical at the same time. It was a lot of fun chunking through this build one actual part of a motorcycle at a time. I felt like one of the guys on those chopper shows like Orange County Choppers or Biker Buildoff that used to be popular on The Discovery channel. :lol:

This is the first MOC of mine to really benefit from me moving my laptop into my MOC room. I relied heavily on photo searching Google to look at the different aspects of choppers. Looking back on it I realize I went for a "simplified realism" approach. The chopper features things like head and tail lights, license plate, gas tank with spout, brake controls and brake lines on the handle bars, functional drive line(wheel connected by Technic chain to "transmission" which is connected via belt drive to motor), engine with fuel line and semi-realistic foot controls(clutch). Though I didn't get too obsessed with the details. I thought about adding things like gauges and other technical bits, but felt they would have distracted from the simpler edgier look of the bike. Thinking back on it, the license plate is probably a bit much as well. =P The nice thing about Choppers is there's a great many kind, from very commercial to customization to the extreme of impracticality and everything in between. This in a way was freeing because I could make it as long or as short as I wanted, make the gas tank or seat however I wanted and I even came across some that had an open sided wheel like this one has. This also presented a bit of a challenge as I had to look at many different kinds of cycles to see what the "common denominators' where. At the end of the day. I think I did a good job recreating a chopper fairly accurately thanks to having a laptop handy to reference photos. Man I shoulda gotten into the habit of taking my laptop in with me ages ago. Now it'll be a permanent fixture in my MOC room.

I got the idea to call it Cerberus fairly early on, but the reason for it changed about midway through. Initially I was going to call it Cerberus thinking that it would figuratively have three heads, the Pyrox mask on the front wheel, the Kalmah head as the gas tank, and the rider's actual head. However several other head pieces were added as I finished out the build. So now I count the pyrox head and the two wolf heads on the handle bars as its "three heads."

For those of you who might not know, Cerberus is a rather famous figure in ancient Greek Mythology. He is typically depicted as a three headed dog with serpents all over his body, though modern depictions show him mostly as three headed dog of some sort. The serpents don't tend to stay. Cerberus guarded the gates of Hades to keep anyone from escaping. The Twelfth trial of Hercules was to subdue Cerberus without the use of any weapons.

Thank you for reading, viewing and commenting. :D I hope you enjoyed my first official MOC posting on Eurobricks.

[bacem]

sick man! this is awesome!!!!

[3rdeye88]

sick man! this is awesome!!!!

Thanks man. I'm glad I have something I'm proud of to present as my first MOC here.

[monsinjor]

Sick sick sick! And 666 :)

Awesome chopper 3rdeye88!

It looks so nice and mean, with a lot of details.

Wish I have it...

[3rdeye88]

Sick sick sick! And 666 :)

Awesome chopper 3rdeye88!

It looks so nice and mean, with a lot of details.

Wish I have it...

Sick Sick Sick is a good QOTSA son, 666 the number of the beast Hell and fire, were spawned to be released. :P

Thank you Monsinjor. :D

[DraikNova]

Beautiful. It's visually cohesive, stuffed with NPU's (the use of the brain is jaw-dropping) and for some reason actually looks scary.

[LegoPanda]

it looks amazing, i love the ignika sword and front wheel, i don't have enough words to expres how much i like it

[Csacsa234]

Wow it's so hellish, I wanna ride it, great MOC!

[3rdeye88]

Beautiful. It's visually cohesive, stuffed with NPU's (the use of the brain is jaw-dropping) and for some reason actually looks scary.

Thank you. The brain being "popped out" like that was a total accident. I was originally just gonna bend the tail up sharply but through working on it I guess I pushed it just right and it popped up like that. If I pull the connections off it retains that shape. Seriously if you have a brain bug lying around bend the tail up and push in on the brain part. It doesn't hurt the piece at all and you can pop it back down to normal. Rubber parts are so awesome cause you can bend em around and mess with them and it doesn't mess up the part. I'm glad it looks scary. Though I don't know if I wanted downright scary or just intimidating. Either way that's a compliment so thank you. :)

it looks amazing, i love the ignika sword and front wheel, i don't have enough words to expres how much i like it

Inika sword? Oh You mean the Toa Inika Hali laser harpoon. Right I had it and the light that originally comes in that one is green so I had to get a small screwdriver and open that one and another inika weapon that had a red light in it and swap them so that it'd fit the color scheme here. Thank you. I'm glad you like it.

Wow it's so hellish, I wanna ride it, great MOC!

...Bu...but then you'd squish it. Its only a plastic lego model. I kid. Thank you as well for your kind words. I'm glad you guys like my first MOC posted here. This would make a really cool custom Chopper. Quick someone call Paul Tuttle Jr. and get him on it. :lol: But if it does get made into a real chopper, I call...second dibs. Cause the guys who make it get first.

[Mikuri]

That's one hell of a motorcycle :P!

[3rdeye88]

That's one hell of a motorcycle :P!

Thank you. :3

[Saberwing40k]

Jaw droppingly awesome!

Edited February 25, 2014 by Saberwing40k

[Aanchir]

Very cool. There are not enough Technic-intensive vehicle MOCs in the constraction community, I think.

At the same time, there are some things that bother me about it. For starters, it has a real mish-mash of textures and motifs, rather than spreading a few defining motifs throughout the design. There are a lot of parts that share a beastly or monstrous look, but for each of those there are parts like the Toa Metru shoulder shells, the Toa Inika thigh shells, the Toa Mahri Jaller chest plates, and many of the Titanium Metallic parts that seem like they were added to fill particular spaces, without a whole lot of consideration for whether they meshed with the other motifs.

This is a part of why I like the more smooth, consistent look of many HF parts and some BIONICLE parts to the high-detail look of a lot of BIONICLE armor and some HF and BIONICLE masks and weapons. A model does not tend to have as much cohesiveness when a lot of disparate textures are being used. It starts to look a little bit cluttered.

What you definitely did right, though, is the Technic frame. It is clear that this is a model where the emphasis is on the overall shape, not the individual details. And to a certain extent, if you get the shape right, the details are not as big a deal. A model where these details were thrown on haphazardly just to use up connection points would surely be hideous, but here there is a certain deliberateness in how parts are placed. The Pyrox faceplate gives the front of the vehicle a focal point. The Antroz wings flow with the shape of the vehicle. The Piraka claws hug the front wheel.

This is part of why I really feel the bestial sorts of textures and motifs are the ones that work the most for this model — they tend to maintain a sort of visual language that helps tie it together, in contrast with the more mechanical textures and motifs that seem to slightly interfere with that order.

[3rdeye88]

Jaw droppingly awesome!

Thank you. :D

[3rdeye88]

Very cool. There are not enough Technic-intensive vehicle MOCs in the constraction community, I think.

At the same time, there are some things that bother me about it. For starters, it has a real mish-mash of textures and motifs, rather than spreading a few defining motifs throughout the design. There are a lot of parts that share a beastly or monstrous look, but for each of those there are parts like the Toa Metru shoulder shells, the Toa Inika thigh shells, the Toa Mahri Jaller chest plates, and many of the Titanium Metallic parts that seem like they were added to fill particular spaces, without a whole lot of consideration for whether they meshed with the other motifs.

This is a part of why I like the more smooth, consistent look of many HF parts and some BIONICLE parts to the high-detail look of a lot of BIONICLE armor and some HF and BIONICLE masks and weapons. A model does not tend to have as much cohesiveness when a lot of disparate textures are being used. It starts to look a little bit cluttered.

What you definitely did right, though, is the Technic frame. It is clear that this is a model where the emphasis is on the overall shape, not the individual details. And to a certain extent, if you get the shape right, the details are not as big a deal. A model where these details were thrown on haphazardly just to use up connection points would surely be hideous, but here there is a certain deliberateness in how parts are placed. The Pyrox faceplate gives the front of the vehicle a focal point. The Antroz wings flow with the shape of the vehicle. The Piraka claws hug the front wheel.

This is part of why I really feel the bestial sorts of textures and motifs are the ones that work the most for this model — they tend to maintain a sort of visual language that helps tie it together, in contrast with the more mechanical textures and motifs that seem to slightly interfere with that order.

Thank you for the feedback on this Aanchir. I appreciate it. :)

I agree. Vehicles are a vastly undertouched subject in constraction MOCing. For the ammount of vehicle sets that exist out there there doesn't seem to be that many correlating MOCs. I've honestly seen a few dropship style MOCs and two of them are from the same guy on DA. And I've seen nobody really hammer out a serious attempt at a Motorcycle, let alone a more customized chopper variant.

Well you're right about me using parts because they filled a particular space. First and foremost its a chopper. There's certain obligations that came with that. It had to have an engine block, a belt drive, transmission, oil tank, and exhaust pipes occupying that inner space of the frame, then the gas tank and seat that sit on top of the frame. Also, because of the unique wheel this is a bit of an unconventional frame but not too unconventional. In my research I did find motorcycles that had an open ended rim and one sided frame. Parts like the Toa Metru shoulder armor pieces were included solely because they fit in the space behind the engine block above the transmission where the oil tank is supposed to be.

Secondly, I think you're focusing too much attention on the individual elements and their respective aesthetics and therefore are losing sight of the big picture, this is a "hell hound/beast" themed chopper style Motorcycle. Its still supposed to represent a piece of machinery. Its going to have an organic and inorganic look throughout the MOC because that's what it is, an inorganic piece of machinery with an organic theme to it. The nice thing about bionicle is that it does have a lot of reoccurring aesthetics that pop up amongst parts from different years. Like Axonn's mask looking very similar in appearance to the Toa Nuva shoulder armor that came out three years before it. Or how Axonn and Brutika's weapons have a similar aesthetic to them with those interchanging square sections, or how Toa Jaller Mahri's sword the next year followed that same motif. If you really want to get technical and details. Most of these parts actually do share a defining characteristic, spikes/fins. From the Avak dril parts on the forks, the Antrhos blades, even the Hero Factory shields have little spikes on them. Overall I think it gives it a curvy but jagged vibe to it all. The Jaller Mahri chest piece looks really good being right next to the curves of the back wheel, and it holds in some tail lights pretty well. Form fitting and functional at the same time.

[Doc_Brown]

This is awesome! you should post in the Technic section, we need your kinda style! :thumbup:

[3rdeye88]

This is awesome! you should post in the Technic section, we need your kinda style! :thumbup:

Thanks Doc. I'd love to get more into the technic stuff. But I'd still mix it up with this stuff. I just don't have the parts. I've really neglected getting technic back when I could more regularly buy lego sets. Now they're mostly out of my price range. I tried making a flatbed truck a little while back but I gave the project up because I couldn't get the steering+suspension system to work well enough. It wasn't responsive enough with a bunch of weight all on the front end. I'm glad you commented. I could use a technic guy to get advice from. I've asked a few(sariel and sheepo) but they couldn't really be bothered. Sariel just told me to go buy a technic set and I never even heard back from Sheepo.

I like that Orange Muscle car you're working on. What is that suppose to be, the front end looks familiar but I can't place it. I wanna say its a Pontiac GTO but that's just a stab at a guess. Its too square for a Mustang so a charger or challenger maybe?