Last month at the Minimate Multiverse, MiniFiend posted a link to the upcoming Tron Variant Covers. While I'm apprehensive about Disney meddling with the Marvel universe, I do enjoy glowy things. My next thought of course was, Minimates! I quickly fired up Blender, found the Spider-Man model, tweaked the textures and came up with this:



It's obvious that it doesn't match the version on the cover, but I wanted to see if it would work at all before devoting a lot of time to it. Looked good to me so I set to work making a new texture package. I knew that it wasn't easy to convert a 'realistic' costume into a Minimate version that is faithful to both. But I had no idea how difficult until I tried it myself. To this point, I've just replicated existing designs. To make me feel worse, this Tron Spidey is a simply a series of glowing lines. (I'm ignoring the pads and costume seams for Minimate reasons.) Ultimately I was able to generate this.



It's not exact. I've taken some liberties with what was visible, and even come up with my own ideas for the stuff that wasn't visible. I figured there wasn't a lot of history with this costume, so the negative reaction to my changes wouldn't be too loud. Although not readily apparent in that image, the reflective eyes came out really nice.



That's better. You can see some of the extra stuff I added to play with the Minimate contours.


(1920x1200)

Originally I was planning to recreate the cover and replicate all the glowy buildings in the background. But when I flipped the model over to mimic the pose it just didn't look good. Minimates don't stretch and bend like Spidey does. In the end, I think that creating my own scene was the better choice anyway. Well.. it was quicker at least.