Symbiote Spider-Man

Description
Straight from the labs of Phonock Inc comes another Spider-Man product, this time the symbiotic variant. Just to note, this skin is based on [file="31435"]Elandain's Spider-Man 2.0[/file], which in turn was based on [url="http://jediknight3.filefront.com/file/Gray_Fox;10764"]ksk_h2O's Gray Fox[/url], which is a JK2 model. So there's one minor bug right off the bat - some new JA animations will refuse to function, including any dual saber animations (the off-hand lightsaber will be bolted to the model's left hand and will remain static). Just a fair warning of that.

Anyway, onto the skin itself. As far as I can see, the patterning and overall design is perfectly accurate to [i]Spider-Man 3[/i]. The term "as far as I can see" is used because unfortunately, the textures are rather darkened. A little extra brightness and/or contrast would be good for a future version, so that the detail is more apparent as per the movie.

I suppose out of fairness, the kudos for having almost perfect accuracy on the patterning should go to Elandain, but you don't need to be eagle-eyed to spot the difference between Spider-Man's basic and symbiote outfit patterning. The first thing to point out is that Pissed Off Peter has thinner webbing than his standard incarnation. Whether phonock has retextured over parts of the webbing or it's just a side effect of the blackness being added, the same is true for this skin vs it's original counterpart. Score one. The second difference is that Symbiote Spider-Man has extra, much thinner and much more spider webby patterning between the obvious web lines on the Standard Spider-Man outfit. phonock's version lacks these tiny details, and while they would be a pain in the butt to add, they would make the skin more accurate, so it's a shame they're missing. (Also, doesn't the Symbiote version have a golden tint to it's eyes?)

Christ, is it me or do I have the innate ability to make a giant paragraph out of what should essentially be two short sentences? How.... annoying.

What? WHAT!? Oh. Right. The review.

Aside from that minor inaccuracy, the skin itself should more than suffice once phonock makes the detailing more visible.

Extras are included, in the ways of NPC and bot profiles, which is good. No team colors, though. What I'd do for team colors, is seperate the white webbing and spider patterns from the black texture underneath with Photoshop's handy layering, give the white layer a red tint (and a blue tint for blue team), then save, and apply a subtle metallic shine to the red and blue via shaders. Just an idea....

Also, this will overwrite Elandain's Spider-Man, if you use that. It's not too hard to change that, though, so no worries.

Overall a good addition to your Spider-Man collection. Could use a few improvements of course, but then, there's no such thing as a perfect file.

So, to all you webheads out there, lasso this one in!

~ Kouen

[b]Bot Profiles:[/b] Yes
[b]NPC Profiles:[/b] Yes
[b]Team Colors:[/b] No
[b]Custom Sounds:[/b] Yes