all purpose creative

artist-musician-technician https://matthewarthur.bandcamp.com/ https://cara.app/technician

[technician-the]

My short film is done!!

I was trying for less then 2 weeks, but the final time was 17 days from initial concept to completion, which is close enough lol

[technician-the]

transport carrier V-271 maneuvers over a gas giant!

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.

the background is a photo from Cassini/ NASA which I have edited/colorized to match the scene

[technician-the]

[technician-the]

All the methods I used to make smear animation for my recent video.

these aren’t mutually exclusive, here's a pretty good example of several types of smear applied over only a few frames (slowed way down to see individual frames)

Detailed explanations below;

Motion Blur. its just blender's default motion blur. Worked fine (mostly). sometimes it made more of an "after image" look then a true motion blur, which can be useful in it's own way.

Hand drawn. for several very fast shots the motion blur made objects disappear completely, so I drew in some pseudo "drybrushing" in CSP. A good approach, but I need to improve my "drybrush" brushes, and possible pick stronger colors next time. Also, In retrospect, given that this was a discrete overlay applied to a single digit number of frames I could have printed them and done the dry-brush traditionally.

Rigging. The skeletons have kinda a "gummy" rig, with less armature bones then the full skeleton, and in my early tests it made them deform dramatically when pulled apart. I liked the effect, but ended up having to build new, much more complex rigs to keep it. in the end the skeletons got a new rig for every major shot. >_< (still this was imo, the best result of all the techniques I used)

Custom Physics Sim, right at the end of the process I was playing with a new physics based smear, produced by delaying the motion of a random selection of vertexes on the trailing side of an object, and adding a simple momentum effect. it's potentially a very cool, and easy to use, effect, but needs more work.

[technician-the]

The Dragon!

The dragon was one of the last shots added, not part of the original plan, and I modeled it after large parts of the rest were finished. The dragon itself is modeled as three separate parts, a head, tail, and one coil (which i copied to make all the coils). this simplified the rigging significantly.

The shape/body plan of the dragon is inspired by a worm or serpent like dragon, and particularly an etching/illustration I saw as a kid of a dragon wrapped around a tower and blocking the door. I was originally planning small/vestigial arms, but cut them for time reasons when I realized they would barely be visible in the final shot. I really wanted an old fashioned design, which I interpreted as biologically implausible, rubbery, and kinda lumpy

I ended up rigging it to be very rubbery, with lots of extra physics bones for the lips and jowls ect. I slowly added more and more physics bones as I worked on the animation, so the final placement is a bit janky, but it worked.

the background has lots of texture painting (in blender), using brushes I made with various ink and paint texture sheets. these arn't quite stamp brushes, and are more like rubbed transfer decal sheets

[technician-the]

I updated the pilot's face half way though making my short film, and one of the things the new face has is animated irises.

These are irises are image sequences controlled with a driver in blender, the reflection is a separate layer which is overlaid, giving me the option to animate them separately, by any means I want (including simple motions w/ tweening in blender, or full frame by frame 2d animation)

(I didn’t actually need either feature tho >_<)

I also added some hand-painted shadows, which had to be updated for each new lighting, but that was okay because she only appears in two lightings. and there is an "eye shadow" which is actually a modeled 3d object, so it can be animated quickly. (because the iris and white of the eye are separate objects, which move independently, the shadow (which crosses both) had to be 3d)

(the original test is below)

and this is the final version,

video link youtu.be/piwt1amXNdU

[technician-the]

Lg Cosmo (lg-vn250). modeled in blender and textured using photos i took of mine.

[technician-the]

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.

the location is controlled with an on screen control, (the little square in the last screen shot) so I can "Paint" the effect across a screen, and new blasts are created every frame while the control moves.

[technician-the]

A mermaid for Mer-May

[technician-the]

My short film is done!!

I was trying for less then 2 weeks, but the final time was 17 days from initial concept to completion, which is close enough lol

[technician-the]

My wooden recorders!

I have a full modern consort, (from smallest) Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass (also called the bassett). The smallest, the Soprano, is the one most people play in school. (or at least, it's the one I played in middle school)

the larger ones are kinda my babies, they were all in very poor condition when I got them, and even so it took me a long time to find wooden recorders of larger sizes that I could afford.

The bass was in horrible condition, it had a giant dust bunnies in it and disintegrating cork, and it's still missing it's breath tube, so I play it with the cap off, which is not the most comfortable.

I had to replace the keywork on both the Tenor and Bass, and remove damaged finish from the Tenor and Alto. the Tenor had lipstick stains that didn’t come off until I stripped the varnish. the Alto was just a very cheep varnish, not instrument grade, and an ugly flat brown which completely hid the beautiful dark wood the instrument was made from.

I also installed comfort extensions on the first keys of the Bass and Tenor, because I have very short pinkies

In my latest video ( youtu.be/piwt1amXNdU ) I am playing the three largest, (Alto, Tenor, and Bass, but mostly the Bass), and then filling harmony with the (free!) BBC symphony plugin from spitfire www.spitfireaudio.com/en-us/product... ) (I think I used an oboe and some horns). I'm playing all the trills and tremolo parts, because the plugin can't do those, and the very first lines heard in the piece are the bass recorder

(and Im not using the soprano because I agree with Michael Praetorius (wiki en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_... ) that it should be avoided "because of how it screams" lol)

[technician-the]

this mermaids size is matched only by her curiosity

alternative caption/title; a sailor's second encounter with the great pacific mermaid

this is 7 passes in blender, combined with lots of paintover and hand editing in csp. I couldnt really decided on a look for the ocean surface and ended up doing lots of editing, then I realized that the mermaid was hard to see and painted in highlights/shadows to separate her from the background, and repainted many details while I was doing that  

I tried one of my new hair tools for this; each color is a single hair object, making between 20 and 50 strands/locks for one control curve. I liked it, but still ended up repainting most of it

[technician-the]

March of Robots, day 3; Biomemetic

For the biomemetic prompt I made an Anomolocaris type robot! (and a trilobite for it to chase).

All those little flaps are rigged, but it was too much to animate for a one day project (I still dream of working out an easy to use anomolocaroid rig)

[technician-the]

I had a shower though last night about a possible way to drive this rig, put together this little proof of concept animation. its pretty rough, but it shows that the controls work. 

 basically the idea was to duplicate the spine and it's IK's and point the flaps to the new spine bones. because the spine is already well setup (only 2 control bones) I got the smooth rippling/rowing motions I wanted much faster. the final set up has only 7 control bones, for about 60 total bones (plus 4 bones for the "tail fins", which are controlled directly).

[technician-the]

fake retro style visual novel screen shot I made. I really like the old skeuomorphic interfaces. this one is pretty over the top, but not more so then some of the references I found

[technician-the]

tried a game play mock up!

feel the thrill of the turn based, number heavy, isometric space combat!

[technician-the]

Some "promo" art and a fake magazine ad ^^

[gramophoneturtle]

ArtFight - terminal-5 Expression Roulette

Revenge attack!! This robot friend, terminal-5, belongs to @technician-the. When I saw this cutie and the double thumbs up image I had to draw him! And give him a mini expression roulette :]

terminal-5 | The Technician | Attack

[technician-the]

we both love this! ^^

[technician-the]

Playing around with shapes, inspired by the mysterious artifacts called "roman dodecahedra"

The are modeled, textured, and rendered in blender

[bimstown]