If you have one, what do you think is the best prehistoric animal toy/figure ever made? Or line of figures.

A funny story about some designs: they did show me unreleased in-game models, but not any cinematics department stuff, presumably to avoid leaks. So for units like the Archon, I based mine the latest public concept art, and they approved them, despite knowing they were about to release a new design.

(Working with their producer to create the book version was a really positive, smooth experience for me! But that all had been wrapped up 6 months earlier- probably a totally different set of people worked on deciding what concept art stuff to display at a convention)

A Zealot model kit was also prototyped that looked great from the front but also had a very inaccurate back, so it's also possible that Blizzard just only provided Academy/Nucle with the same promo renders that the public had, and left them to fend for themselves for the backs.

It's also possible that Blizzard didn't like the way the back of the 3D model looked, so they didn't care if licensees mixed it up. The back of every hydralisk product is very different for example, so I assume it looked unfinished/had nothing connecting the carapace to the back on the real 3D model

The action figure is surprisingly much more accurate than the scale model kit, despite the lower level of polish. Here is the back of that one, with some obvious mistakes. For example you can see in the Amerigo cinematic how high up the opening at the back of the calf armor goes.

I made this lowpoly / low detail interior for some depth and scale. The pilot's head is based on the unit's portrait, the rest is just made up, but I tried to keep the design of the interior still based in 90s scifi sensibilities, leaning more for cassette futurism era than 2000s scifi.

If you had asked me 10.5 years ago, I might have been up for the challenge. But I think I'm too far removed now. I never tried to do any KMC-specific stuff, it would all be headcanon. I was/am more interested in making idealized versions of existing designs than making new ones for SC.

I had the whole thing modeled, but some areas like the hands not finalized. There is just barely sufficient reference (also the action figure version is not too far off, though the scale model kit version is, so Blizzard didn't provide them enough). Here were some random helpful refs

I can only imagine that today's Dinosauroid should look something like the Rito in the Legend of Zelda series