all purpose creative

I started modeling Porygon, for some low effort fan art, and it turned into this. I only had the idea of making Magnemite after starting the computer, (because magnet+computer). Magnemite has always been one of my favorite Pokemon though, so that might have had something to do with it.

Porygon is rendered in workbench, then composited into a screen designed in affinity designer.

the magnet/crt effect is a fractal animation rendered in Jwildfire, controlling a distortion in blenders compositor, and an aggressive application of the lens distortion node for color distortion.

Then I used that composit as an animated texture on the computer screen. Magnemite and the computer/desk were rendered in one pass, with some light post-processing (mostly glare)

The computer is based on the old "computer search" pokemon card, but I've made it beige for extra nostalgia.

Venonat! everyone's favorite puffball/moth/bug/thing!

So, turns out Esher's reflecting ball pieces are pretty close to a 'MatCap', and if cropped can be used as a reflection map in blender

'MatCap' is short for material capture, and is an older way to handle reflections in 3d rendering. It's not as realistic, but because it doesn't require ray-tracing is much faster to render

If you want the MatCap, I added it below

Historians remain divided on whether the launch-bays are loaded with mecha or salvage drones in this photo

another version of my "pinecone carrier" concept! this one has 64 launch bays, and no armor. the parallel bays are meant to allow faster deployment and recovery. In this design I envision the bays as unpressurized, with an elevator running down the central spine for access. pilots and crew would ride in the pressure hull at the bow, but pilots could also ride in their cockpits for short trips.

I'm using a decal for the bay doors to save geometry, I modeled it in a separate blend file, then rendered some passes with an orthographic camera to get the normal map, ect. normally I make everything in one maga-file and then bake/optimize, but thinking ahead is faster and crashes my computer significantly less.

Macross explosion!

My attempt at the classic mass battle/missile attack explosion effect from Macross (and many other 80s mecha anime)

I built this while thing in blender geonodes and shaders. this method worked really well, I was able to use timing graphs to quickly tune the fade away animation exactly how I wanted it, while still giving a unique lifetime to each 'blast'. I was also able to tie the lifetime to the size, so the larger blasts fade away more slowly, which would have been really hard to do with sprite animation.

the geometry is super simple too, (which means that this explosion doesn't crash my gpu). each blast is a 2d circle, all the fade out animation happens in the shader, and then the circles get deleted.

A mermaid for Mer-May