So this.... This was a labor of love (and maybe little bit of insanity...)

See, next to the Xzeejees (you can find out about them here: http://shadechristiwolven.deviantar.....ejee-256042454) the Beiy are my oldest original specie. The problem being that when I made them up I was only 12 or 13, so they were just humans with an odd sinus-cavity, cat-eyes, sharp teeth, and weird iridescent skin. Along with the Xzeejees, I'd made up the Beiy for a story-project between me and my best friend ReKay http://rekay.deviantart.com/ At the time, when we were still working on what I would call the pre-rough-draft phase of the stories, the form of the Beiy kinda fit the stories.

The problem being that was all over a decade ago (goodness gracious I'm old!!!!) We've grown up, the stories have grown up, Xzeejees and all the other races and factions of the stories have grown up, so it was time for the Beiy to grow up, too.

I started working on the redesign of the Beiy last year, around about the time we started talking about working on a new, official, we're-for-real-this-time, rough-draft. The other problem with the redesign I started working on last year was that I was still hung up on making the Beiy ape-descended*. I kept trying to re-work it, and I came up with a few aesthetic-choices that I loved (such as four arms! and long, spindly legs, and biiiiig eyes) but I couldn't get it all to "stick."

So last week I had some time to sit there and just sketch, so I started just sketching the Beiy. I got the odd idea to base their heads and faces of off Oviraptorids (some of my favorite kinds of dinosaurs) and suddenly BAM!!! It all fit! I was able to come up with a good, solid direction for the redesign and in redesigning them I even came up with a good explanation for their development.

Then yesterday I decided that I needed to figure out a basic "mass silhouette" for the Beiy, so I plopped on Sculptris and spent the day sculpting them out.

There's still a lot of work I need to do. Now that I know the "mass silhouette" I can work on refining their anatomy. I'll be able to sit down and actually develop their skeletal and muscular systems, and their organ systems.

This model just about pushed my little laptop to the limit: at over 800,000 triangles, if I'd added any more detail my laptop would have started to get bogged down and eventually crash. As it was, working on the details of the face really pushed that limit. So this model is missing the main emotive feather-crests on the back of the head, between the shoulders, and on the tip of the tail; I also didn't paint it because 1) RAM and CPU are a thing and 2) different Clans/sub-species of Beiy have strikingly different coloration and I wanted to make a general-model not a specific Clan.

*Yes. I know. If something were to be descended from apes then it wouldn't *really* be an alien. So I guess technically Beiy aren't "aliens" so much as extremely-distantly-evolved earthlings. If it's any consolation they're no longer descended from apes, they're descended from dinosaurs. And other things happen that makes their genetics really-not-terran but that's part of the story so I'll shut up now.