Barghesi
Boarding Action [40K fan art]
This scene features a small team of space marines from the “Hadal Reavers” chapter assaulting an alien installation.
I’ve been working on these assets for quite some time: I initially just wanted to create a bolter! It then grew in scope until I found myself making not only a space marine and chapter lore, but the xenos creatures, weapons, etc.
Aliens (Barghesi? Saharduin? Or something else?):
The aliens – which until recently I have been calling Barghesi – were based on a small collection of images but mostly drew from the version presented in “Peril’s Unknown” by Lewis Jones (Perils Unknown). I leaned into the idea they were eyeless, and that the helmets were key to their sensing of the environment. Then I wondered, how do these helmets interface with the user? The model itself is rather suboptimal in terms of topology, but it worked fine for basic stills posing.
Space marine:
I iterated on the design a number of times, including the chapter name and theme. Initially they were to be called the “Abyss Striders” but I felt “striding” did not really fit. I made a basic model of the marine using subD techniques but improved things as I encountered issues in texturing and rigging. Eventually I decided to spend time on the topology to try to make it as even as possible for sculpting. As for rigging, I hit my limit and decided to ask for help on Blender Artists. Will (magpie: https://blenderartists.org/u/magpie/summary), kindly offered to share his expertise and created the rig for this model as well as the control UI, widgets, and other vital tools. This collaboration was immensely helpful and made exploring scene ideas and finalising poses very efficient.
Other assets:
I modeled and textured everything else with the exception of muzzle flashes (blenderkit) and the background cables (adobe substance assets). I also used a few stock adobe meshes for the alien gun greebles. Texturing was done with substance painter. I used fluid simulations for the blood splatter, and cloth sims (with sculpting) for the various cloth covered pipes in the wall panels. The distance fog is just an emission shader plugged into a volume socket, with a bit of procedural noise to give it some colour and density variation. The wall and ceiling panels used a simple geometry nodes setup so I could arrange them and randomise their ID and rotation. In general I kept background assets simple, as I wanted the focus to be on the marines.
Thoughts:
Overall I am very happy with how the project turned out. I would like to create more artwork featuring 40K “stuff” in the future, perhaps with more emphasis on the more horrendous aspects of 40K – it’s so easy to fall into the trap of making space marines look “cool”, when they are intended to be really quite monstrous.
