Kathid/Aerosynth design rework

University and other hobbies both have me quite busy right now, but recently I did a bit of a design pass over everyone's favourite spaceplane gremlin, Kathid. Initially I just wanted to redesign the Terran space fighter, but I realised I could take this as an opportunity to rework some lacking features of Kathid's character design.

My main issues with their old design was a lack of body articulation and expressiveness, as well a general proportional un-neatness. I also wanted to emphasise their synthetic being nature by making them more animal-like, and lean into creating a more stark visual difference between sapient/living machines of Light Era and inanimate vehicles.

I didn't want to give Kath a "screen-face" as it sort of implies a cockpit and, thus, a "pilot"; iakans like Kathid don't have pilots, and the "cockpit" is more or less a glorified passenger seat. In the end, though, I figured the need of having Kathid be able to express themselves richly was more important.

A fun part of this project was creating a Blender proxy model for their general form, since they're a little more complicated than a mesh of boxes. Plus, I found out I was able to use a simple curve deformation modifier to sort of "pose" them in bendy ways. The resulting model tended to be rough and distorted, but it served as a good enough reference for the way they move.