Just for fun I've been playing around doing retextures of the aliens, I thought I'd make a thread out of it so that people could provide feedback as I'm working on them. Keep in mind, I've done about ten skins for each of these, so some ideas may be present in one place but not another. If these don't make it into the main game, I might turn them into a mod
Bloodspider: original:
For something with "blood" in its name, this thing looks pretty clean and sleek, bright almost. So the first thing I did was darken it up a bit, and add some blemishes to the metal, to make it look battle hardened. I have a few variations on this theme but essentially they look like this
then I worked on making it a bit bloodier, particularly the legs, which I can only imagine are likely to have ripped a civilian's guts out recently. I guess it might even be possible to have them looking all clean until they've killed someone, then bust out the bloody skin.
Ortnok: original:
When I encountered these guys in game for the first time I thought of them as scary, they are big and tough and mean looking. Problem being, currently their light green skin looks almost festive, its hard to be scared of something so bright and visible. So when I started working on them, the first thing I did was to add some more veins, cover them in scales, and darken the skin a bit, which really made them look more snakelike and creepy. I've also increased the resolution of the head substantially and brought out a lot of the details which weren't very clear at a lower resolution.
Once I'd done that, I did the same thing I had done for the bloodspider, these bastards have just been out butchering humans with their giant swords, they would be covered in blood. So I made one that looked like it had been through a battle or two.
Taman: I like the traditional alien feel of these guys, the big head and eyes. thing is, as it stands they are almost comical, with their bright red coats, glowing yellow eyes and symbols and their lime green space ships. So I decided to take a darker, more high tech line with these guys. I decided to take their skin colour as an inspiration for their colour pallete, a pale blue, which goes really well with purple, pink, aqua and blue. So to that end I made their coats purple with glowing aqua symbols
original
modified
And for the face, again the increased resolution allowed for more details, so I used shading to increase the fidelity of existing details and to highlight things were possible. Their eyesockets have been darkened which makes their thoroughly alien pink eyes all the more bizzare. I've also reduced the mouth size, turning it from a comical frown into a thin slitted frog mouth. I think these guys still need more work.
original
modified
Here is the album of images
http://imgur.com/a/Fjpgd