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Friday, October 23, 2009

Bionicle MOC: Toa Nidhiki

This is my personal interpretation of Toa Nidhiki.  Click it for a bigger view.


If you haven't long since read about it, Nidhiki, most commonly known as a Dark Hunter, was originally a Toa of Air before being morphed into his four-legged freak state by Roodaka.

Breaking from the way I normally work, I searched the Web for examples before starting on this guy because I knew wih the popularity of Toa MOCs, there were sure to be some previous attempts.  Sure enough, there are some out there, but I didn't look them up for inspiration -- I looked to see what was already done to make sure mine wouldn't look like any of them!


I used the correct canon mask (per Farshtey himself) and included the breast plate that was preserved in the popular mutated form.  Most commenters on previous MOCs have insisted that Toa Nidhiki must be built with a typical Toa Metru body, following the style of the Iruini set.  Well, I briefly looked at that possibility, and I hated it. Looked very weak and spindly.  Sorry, I will not rebuild this with a Toa Metru body!  It's much better like this, trust me.

I used this Nidhiki picture as my main inspiration during the build to get the appropriate mix of colors.  Since he was a Toa of Air, I wanted to give him wings, and the Mistika pieces looked just right.  It was extremely tricky and took hours to get them mounted, because I wanted them to fold into a diamond neatly behind his body.  I ended up setting them up on a beam that would slide straight down about 3/4ths of an inch to extend the wings, and move back up to keep the front profile heroic in nature.  When the wings had a fixed mount low enough to fit under the arms properly, they looked all wrong when folded up.


Finally, there's the whole deal with the Air Scythe.  I'm sure there are plenty of concepts about how this should look, but this is my simple take on it, using a piece from the TRU titan Toa Mata Nui set, mounted at an angle and with a curvy handle.  In putting this together I just looked at pictures of real scythes and tried to find what would approximate that look without inspiring images of the Grim Reaper.


 So there you go, Toa Nidhiki!

14 comments:

  1. i dont think he would have wings. great job though, that is almost exactly what i thought he would look like.

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  2. nice moc.this realy inspired me to make a version of my own toa nidhiki =).

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  3. face...weird...body...pretty good...feet...good choice!

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  4. Mask is the exact one specified in the official story. Had to use it.

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  5. Awesome, that is really cool. Although I always
    imagine him with a green Pohatu mask of speed, you
    did make a VERY fitting moc.

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  6. hhmm looks like an ice toa actullay

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  7. what is with the wings lewa does not have them matau does not have them kongu does not have them

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  8. to Anonymous on Sept. 6, 2010

    for the record, Matau does have wings. look at

    http://www.brickset.com/search/?theme=Bionicle&year=2004&query=BIONICLE

    scroll down to Matau. click on the picture.those are wings if i ever saw 'em.

    and jang, nice nidhiki. like the scythe.

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  9. though i have not read many of farshtey's books and have no idea who Nidhiki is i believe this is awesome and a manifestation of the creativity inherent in bionicle. nicely done. nicely done indeed. p.s. loving the scythe!

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  10. Jang, please make MOCs of the Toa Hagah! We only have Toa Norik and Toa Iruini as actual Toa sets, compared to the other 4 who only came out as Rahaga. Will you please do this?

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  11. This looks very good in my opinion. Not sure if I agree completely with the wings, but so far it looks amazing.

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  12. good MOC! it really inspired some storys of mine now...

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