I looked at the sketches, but none of them really showed the full face of one of the crow beasts except for those first couple of pictures. I tried to incorporate a beak into it too, and I thought that it fit under the helmet nicely that way too.
As for colors, I don't mind having it a little more gray-scale, but I don't think that it needs to be 100% black and grey. I like the current look of the torso, and the feathered helm I'm also liking. I still like my head though... Maybe if it were a little less green it would fit in better.

I might work on arms tomorrow. They will be pretty tough though, They look like they are supposed to be pretty long. I can't just resprite the default arms

I dug up the sprites that Allen did early on in this thread and threw together something using them. Like you guys, I'm not done with the limbs yet, and that just makes the actor look really weird since the crow and dummy are on completely different scales. I also changed the wounds and materials on the stuff I did edit, so the mask actually acts like bone and the body is made of flesh instead of dummy foam. Oh, and some different sounds, so now it caws when it gets hurt.

It's going to be fun working with this: Once I get some basic limbs working, I'll see if I can make the long rifle and machete.

EDIT: This may be more trouble than I thought. There are two things that are problematic with the sprites I'm using: First off, there's almost no contrast between the colours of the arms and the body. It's really hard to see where the arms are. This isn't as big as the second problem: As far as I can tell, arm and leg sprites are supposed to be drawn in such a way that you should be able to trace a perfectly horizontal line between the shoulder/hip and the wrist/ankle. The sprites I'm using don't do that, so the arms look all messed up in action.

There's also the issue of me not knowing what half of the offsets in the leg code do, but that's another can of worms.

EDIT 2: REVENGE OF THE SON OF THE EDIT: All right, I've just about reached the limit of what I can do with the sprites for now. The limbs are messed up, the arms are nigh-invisible, and I haven't messed with the walkpaths so our friend Crow squat-walks everywhere. Still, I can see the finished actor hiding in there, and that one looks pretty cool.

FINAL EDIT: THE EDITING: Removed the attached .rte to save forum server memory. This means I've got a new version posted later.

Yeah, the reason I didn't use those sprites is because they're way too big: the Crow is meant to be a small and nimble soldier. Hence Aspect and I's little guy will be slightly smaller than a dummy.

I was under the impression that everything was intended to be on a bigger scale than vanilla Cortex Command actors. If we've got a completely new standard to work with, "small and nimble" can be whatever we want.

Personally, I like the detail the bigger sprite has, and if I can tweak the walkpaths and get limb sprites that are formatted correctly, this will be an impressive new actor. But we'll see how that works out, eh?

The scale is going to be different? really? Intriguing.

But yeah, that's all for that line of discussion. I'm not quite apt at sprite work, so I'll have to wait on somebody else for some limb sprites that work correctly before I can finish the actor. Or I could make some guns as long as I get something that's to scale... Basically, I'll do whatever coding needs to be done as long as somebody else draws everything.

Hmmm... I'm happy to do offsets and attachables all over, so keep me posted. What we really need is an excellent spriter...

Holy sh*t guys, you're doing really good work here. I've been gone from the thread because it's finals week, and i haven't posted any drawings because a friend is borrowing my tablet for some powerpoint she's doing. Anyway, i've got lots on paper but no scanner. I'm bursting at the proverbial seems.

As per grayscale: Don't worry about it at all. Colorize them in whatever way you want, the color-palette can be changed with a few clicks once we've got everything behaving the way we want in-game.

Concerning the scale: that was an idea i had that nobody objected to, but if it makes things problematic or halts the process at all, don't worry about it for now.

I'll test what's made as soon as i can. When i came back to this thread i was imagining nothing more than that joost idiot vomiting leetspeak half-thoughts all over the place. You could say this sort of made my night.

While i doubt you guys have a lack of material to work from, i'll keep posting drawings as i'm able to get them onto the computer.

Stay golden.

Holy ♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥ thread. I would just fix it then give you all a warning or something except that it's so messy that I would get a headache trying.

What part of "WIPS GO IN MOD RELEASES" do you guys not understand? It's really not that hard of a concept.

You guys bring to light just how badly I need to find a way to prevent anyone from ever uploading files unless it's in the OP of a thread. Then we wouldn't have this problem.

Now I am going to try and split this thread without deleting it.

EDIT: Yeah, that's not happening, you guys can just figure this crap out on your own. From what I see, you uploaded something on the order of 150 megabytes of data that should have been placed off-site to the server, and none of it is relevant enough to warrant being here, and then the mod itself is in too poor of a state to be placed in Mod Releases judging from what I read. Rapidshare/Filesmelt and whatnot exist for a reason.

All of the pictures can (and probably should) be consolidated into one post. I have a photobucket account, it wouldn't be hard for me to just go through, upload all the images to the hosting site and make them display with BBcode. I'll take care of everything i'm responsible for before too long. I hadn't put it together that such a large number of pictures would cause problems. Sorry.

And yeah, since this is a pretty organic, evolving topic it's been moved once already (it first appeared in "art"). I'm sure that most of the admittedly huge space this takes up was my bad, so i can fix that. If this needs to be moved now or in the future i'll leave that up to the people in charge, i've got no objections.

I'm leaving it as-is, but keep in mind that WIPs belong in Mod Releases.

Pull the stick out, Alenth. This thread is great because so many people are working together to make something cool real.

I lol'd @ Alenth, just chill. this thread is a monster, but it'll go places soon.

Also, I think we should keep scale as is: It's easier all round.

Wait, so what's the real problem with the data storage? Is it just the pictures, or is there some issue with the attached mods as well?

Regarding scale: I'll just keep on trying to do a big Crow, you guys do whatever. It's not like we really have a firm idea of exactly what we'll end up with. To Allen: Making bigger actors means we can't take the same shortcuts that we do with standard ones. Walkpaths, for instance, are a series of points that govern how the actor's legs move. If we make something new on the same scale as the vanilla actors, we can just steal their walkpaths and avoid that much more work. It still works just fine once you've got everything done, and you can see a lot of perfectly functional big actors in mods like Kloveska.

Last night something crawled up Alenth's ass and he realized that DRL had no moderation, so he donned his cloak and wizard hat and set out to right the wrongs (and rights) of Datarealms. The result was pure hell in the form of a proverbial kick in the nuts.

Don't take it completely seriously, just get some kind of releasable work done on it.