Scourge Spawner
So the little neophytes have to come from somewhere, right? This is where. Then they visit the armory a bunch and level up, as they gain EXP or whatnot.
At any rate, Badger had always wanted to have this be pretty organic, thinking of the Zerg stuff in Starcraft IIRC, although I've never been a Starcraft player (it was always Warcraft and then AOE and other RTS games for me).
I was kind of uncertain how to really make this feel like the ideal fit for this particular piece, but I knew that I wanted it to have mechanical angular parts (Badger was also very specific about that), and I wanted it to be... kind of a messy, really.
The end product racial warriors, even the hybrids, have a certain grace to them even if they are kind of disturbing at times. They're bright and colorful and look intentional and possibly deadly. There is a slight hodgepodge-ness to them, which is intentional, but I wanted this to be even MORE so.
If you're assembling hodgepodge multi-racial part-robotic part-biological spacecraft, the place where you're doing it -- if you're an AI with no aesthetic sense and nothing to imitate -- is probably going to be kind of an organic/robotic scrap heap mixture.
I tried a lot of different approaches, all based on this webbing with different things in it different ways, but what really caught my eye was when I started making it look like things were tangled up and in a real jumble. Break every possible symmetry, make things protrude uncomfortably, but still give it the sense of a core... and there's almost a slightly humanoid shape to the core if you look at it with your eyes squinting just right.
This ended up being trickier than I expected, but I'm really pleased with the result. It's fairly high-poly, but with LODs it isn't that bad at most distances. And there's at max one per world, so it should be good.