Austin TBi

I must first say that I was blown away with the positive reception that post received! I did see some concern that it was now too small, but I believe that's mainly down to how absolutely MASSIVE the final size is. A 90% reduction in size by no means makes Mata Nui small.

But I know not everyone has spent as much time obsessing over the size of Mata Nui as I have, so I decided to enlist everyone's favourite Ta-Koronan George to help illustrate how large this "small" Mata Nui really is.

I scaled the image of Mata Nui so that it matches the measurements on the side, so it is roughly 35km long and 17km wide. I also made a simple height map to get the Mangai volcano the appropriate 2km high.

I started out with just some simple pegs at the locations of the villages to first illustrate the basic distances.

George here starts out at the location of the iconic beach from MNOG and the end of QFTT

The beach is actually shockingly equidistant from most of the villages, Ta-Koro is closest at 2km, Ga-Koro is second closest at 6km, but the other 4 are all between 11 and 13km from the beach!

Here's a little animation to show the size of the pins, they're by no means small.

They had to be this big to be visible at all, which just goes to show how large the island still is even at 1/10th scale.

I did several shots of George standing on the edge of the Mangai's caldera. I extracted the villages from Bionicle the Legend of Mata Nui and scaled them accordingly, placing each of them where the village should be. See if you can spot them!

From the top of Mangai its 20km to the tiny islands at the very tip of Po-Wahi.

And 13km to the end of the chain of islands in southern Le-Wahi

The view of the Mangai volcano is quite impressive from the villages too. Even at this 2km height its still around 2/3rds the height of Mt Fuji or half the height of Mt Kilimanjaro.

My heightmap could use more work, the Ihu mountain range isn't really apparent, I was mainly focused on getting the Mangai at the right height.

Here's what it would look like if Onu-Koro wasn't underground.

I hope these visuals helped to show the size of the 1/10th scale Mata Nui. I really do feel it is more in line with what we see from most media and fits well with the story.

Even with this size there's one thing to remember: Raw size isn't everything. Terrain matters a lot. Its easy enough for someone now to walk a kilometre or two over straight paved roads, but considering that Mata Nui is a lush volcanic island, half the place is covered in a jungle full of massive trees and swamps, much of it is very hilly and steep, this isn't an easy place to get around in.

I'll leave you with two things: first is an old animation I made of a zoom out from Tahu on top of the full final scale Mata Nui:

This is the most I can really do with an island that scale, blender doesn't appreciate having a view distance in the hundreds of kilometres while also rendering something human scaled.

Second is a comparison between the island I've just shown you overlaid on top of the full scale.

The whole island itself has a footprint roughly the same as the full scale Mangai volcano!

Hope you all enjoyed George's vacation photos. Good night and/or happy May :^)