Crystallised Entertainment

So one of the things I wish to try in this cyberpunk scene project is the use of SDF modelling as I've seen it being a more artistic way of creating props. I knew of a specific plugin that I had in mind and checked to see if it has a public release - which it has! The reason for the hiatus is purely because I won't be able to afford the $35 price tag for a few weeks. Honestly $35 is not bad for a one-off, perpetual license thing; it's just not within this month's budget.

So today I finished modifying Axi Gerfa's Fiat 127 model to have a rig more constant with my inhouse props, and I've put the vehicle into the cyberpunk scene. Since this will be doing a drive-by I parented 2 lights onto the car.

Since I needed to have the headlights to glow to show where the lights are coming from: I decided to go the SFM-route and create material overrides to create the glow. The material itself uses a gradient to have the brightest point in the middle instead of being uniform. I did something similar for the rear lights. By default these elements don''t glow as outside of this specific use case, I don't foresee needing active night lights for this prop for the majority of times moving forward.

Hey everyone! Just want to let you know progress has paused again for the next 6 days. Mainly because I'm away from home at the moment and I forgot to sync my Blender files, so I can't resume work while I'm hear.

So last week I had an operation that temporilarly stopped progress (I'm fine BTW, it was nothing major), but for the last few weeks I've been working on adding some cars to the road at the end of the street to give some more life then just being empty. Took me longer then I car to admit to override 1 of the car models to change the livery to give some variety... But I think at the angle the camera is at that even just having 3 cars on the street has made the area look less barren.

Now I want to be clear that I didn't model these cars! That would've been too time consuming for something that has already gone over my time budget. So instead I took a page outta the demoscenes made in UE5 and downloaded some free models such as the VW Touran model by Igor Schmidt, the Mercedes Benz S-series by Brabus/Prynex3D, plus 1 additional model I plan to use as a "drive by" car which is the Fiat 127 model by Axi Gerfa. All I did is quote unquote "port" them to use the same rigging and grouping system as my inhouse models - but I can't take credit for actually creating them!

Sorry for my sudden disappearance and lack of updates. I've been "all hands on deck" to grind out a video for my secondary channel for the last 6-8 weeks as I wanted to get the post work done pretty quickly (IE not take half a year) so I could free up the usual slot for concept art work.... Otherwise unfortunately there I can't fit it into my day and it's a long overdue thing.

So I'm slowly adding additional lights to aid the emissive textures as it appears they can only do so much... And I noticed one of the lights I placed wasn't centre and was casting a weird angle to the shadow, and while recentering the light I was reminded how the dynamic, real-time shadows was showcased in the exact same way for things like Unreal Engine 4 (like you did not need to recalculate the lights). Like just clicking on the light and moving it around and seeing the shadows just update in real-time was a BIG thing back in the day! And here I am just doing it and having my creative vision unhindered... Just fascinating, honestly!

While this happened last week but I got caught up in stuff and just didn't get around to it when it happened in a classic Evie move... But 6 days ago marks 10 years since I created this Tumblr so I could have a dedicated blog to talk about and showcase whatever animation project I am working on... And a lot has happened in those 10 years (both as me as a person, and my projects).

Howdy folks! It's been a hot minute, huh? Well truth is I haven't really touched Blender in the last few weeks due to time; even though there was very little left to finish on the street lamp prop... However I managed to fit some time in today and I wrapped up the model, including fixing up a rogue mask in Substance Painter turning the backside completely black, and placed it into the street scene today.

There's 3 that's visible in the camera, and I feel they will be an excellent source of light when I do that pass. There are 2 small jobs I want to do before I move onto the lighting pass: the first is adding some cars on the street, but I think I'll see if I can find a cyberpunk car pack as modelling cars will be too time consuming, and the other is doing a new version of my fire particle. The one I created and rendered out as a texture isn't fir the purpose - the texture just tanks the framerate to unusable levels, while the particle itself is a lot more resource efficient. The only reason I rendered is as a material was to cut down on disc space... which didn't even happen because the sequence consumes like 6GB. ^^"

So last week I didn't really work on the street lamp model because a combination of wanting to finish the first draft for a video on my secondary channel, and being away from home for half a week.

I opened up the project today and saw it was honestly mostly done; There wasn't much more detailing I wanted to do going back with fresh perspectives. With the exception of the actual bulbs which I left as a "last thing" job - so I've using an emission fill texture to have it emit light when exported to Blender. I have the colour set to white so I can easily set to whatever colour I want inside Blender: by default it's gonna be blue, but I could do a "material override" in a project that has this model linked and set a different colour dynamically without the need to re-export the texture.

Didn't do much last week because of lack of time... But regardless I have tried to give a worn look to the light sensor plastic. The idea was the rain and sun had worn away the paint. I think it looks good but at the same time I may have gone a bit overboard; so I'm a bit conflicted on it.

So since my graphics tablet has been unshackled from the Christmas decorations adorning it, I've slowly been adding wear to what I've done so far during the last "Behind The Crystal" livestream. The warning sticker took some work to get right. I tried initially for the paper underneath to use a bump map but it end up not looking right, so instead I did a fractal noise diffuse layer to give the illusion of torn paper which has turned out much more desirable as seen.

I hope everyone had a Happy Holidays and an amazing New Year! As you can guess I'm back from my 2 week holiday. ^^

Looking back at 2025 personally: I'm not gonna sugarcoat it - I spectacularly failed on all my personal objectives I set for the year... They weren't resolutions so I have that going for me; but it's still a yikes! I suppose only being able to spend a maximum of 1 hour per day on a hobby will do that to ya, though. =P

My only objective this year is to finish the Cyberpunk street project. Anything on top of that will be a bonus!