Lost_Proxy[Orc]

gettin those arms moving right! these are some basic shape keys, nothin fancy happening yet

;]

yeah

Back from the hunt

orctober #2

If you're having a specific issue that vid tutorials aren't helping with, you can usually find helpful posts on places like stackexchange or blenderartists(.org) (or similar forums sites if you're using other 3d software).

Unfortunately I don't have much in the way of spare time these days, so I can't really teach ppl things one on one.

A lil extra for #orctober to go with a repost: a comparison I posted on FA a bit back between part of the final animation and the old SFM wip that inspired it:

X pt. is used to generate a distance map to use as x coordinates. Y pt. is used to generate a distance map to use as y coordinates. X pt. is only slightly offset from the location of Y pt.

Results when both distance maps are used as coordinates for a Gabor texture. In this example X and Y pts have also been assigned for all the other toes (with some blurring in geo-node to smooth the meeting points of each distance map).

So, I was trying out some random things and apparently if you take a point slightly offset from the one used to generate the y coordinates and use that to generate x coordinates it just sorta works?

I'll still need to paint in the whorls, but this is a massive time saver.

A Gabor texture correctly mapped with both x and y coordinates

A Gabor texture mapped with only y coordinates

All good, but without x coordinates I couldn't properly map a 2d texture (like this Gabor texture) on to this, which means I couldn't get the lines merging like in an actual footprint.

Vertex on the underside of the big toe which has been weighted to 1 and stored as its own vertex group

That vertex is used to generate a map of the distances from each vertex in the mesh to that stored point.

That distance map is then used as y coordinates for a y-aligned wave texture which produces concentric rings emanating out from the original point.

So quick breakdown with one toe: set a pt. in the centre of the underside as a vertex group. Use geo-nodes to get the distance from every vert to that centre pt. Then you can use those values as a y coordinates for a y-aligned wave texture to get a set of (fairly) equal concentric rings.

So, I think I've figured this out now :d

Will figure something out or just bare with it I guess, since I enjoy laying out the process for stuff like this, but will save that for later since it's time for 💤

Actual height values are 0-1 but I clamped 'em down for screenshots (+wireframe) just to be safe since it's such a harsh pattern to look at.

Want to do a breakdown of process so far, but the amount of visual interference the 'raw' procedural pattern causes in screenshots is so nasty :v

Having a go at making the height map semi-procedural to cut down on the amount of stencilling + hand-painting required (still going to require baking to image and some painting over I think).

Yep. Seems to be common practice now to juice 'engagement' with a new feature in anything; just turn it on by default and hope nobody notices. Super annoying.

If you're talking about 'autopilot' then yeh, I turned it off the day it got turned on for me back in August.

You should be able to do it too in your Promotion settings once they've turned it on (if the option to do it isn't there yet?).

I have all the auto-promo stuff turned off on mine.

Tiling an image texture would work fine for a distant object, but can also cause issues of visible repetition as well.

In the end, the procedural version wasn't complex enough to cause any performance issues (compared to all that hair), so I just stuck with it.

Procedural textures will always remain sharp regardless how close you zoom in, while image textures will eventually blur (regardless of how high-res they are).

So that was useful both for close-ups and for having a clean alpha/transmission masks.

The fabric pattern came from combining stuff from a few tutorials on making procedural fabric in Blender that I watched back then (I can look 'em up when I've got some time).

As for using a tiling image texture-

Uses a procedural texture which I could turn into a bump map and alpha + transmission masks (inner lines are removed). No displacement. All the fluff is from having thousands and thousands of semi-transparent hair particles layered up lol

Thanks, custom one I made for that animation, though unfortunately kind loses a lot of the detail when in motion:

The part of the geo-node setup that handles the car shaking while moving and coming to a stop. One node groups is highlight in red and is opened up to view in the next image.

Inside view of the previous node group.

The car shaking is handled by pulling a value from a scrolling noise texture and converting that into a rotation value. Its 'frequency' is changed by scaling the noise texture, its 'amplitude' by remapping the range of the output to new values:

Screenshot of part of the geometry node setup driving the cars in the above video, specifically the simulation node group (purple area) that calculates the distance the car has travelled and how far its wheels have turned each frame. Instances for the car's body and its wheels are fed into the simulation node group, transformed accordingly, and then fed back out to be displayed each frame.

Kept it simple; cars can only drive in a straight line but I can keyframe in the acceleration/deceleration for each and all the motion (body and wheel rotation) is handled.

The 'car' is just instances for the body and wheels being transformed, so meshes can be swapped in/out super easy.

Was hoping to get some more destruction stuff done this week but ended up rounding it out doing vehicle related things instead, including getting a basic geo-node setup for traffic working (each car is a separate mesh plane with instances controlled by geo-nodes):

Heaven and Earth

A traditional drawing of a muscular Symbiote-Xeno hybrid man. His body is glossy black with sharp highlights, exaggerated muscles, clawed hands, and very large genitals. He drips with black goo as he steps forward towards the viewer. His thick tail curling behind his leg. Various color pencils and pencil extenders lay scattered around the drawing.

Goopy stomp! 🖤🦶

#muscle #venomorph #goo

A bugbear wearing an ornamental loincloth, jewelry, and a devilish smile emerges from a black hole, perched on the tip of a cliff-face. Behind him, the black hole’s purple accretion disk swirls, and on its face, two echoes of the bugbear both grin(right), and taunt(left) the viewer, as he spreads his arms to channel powerful magic.

Gravitational Lensing

By @noswift.art 😸💫

quick comm for @rockheadkengo.bsky.social <3

You could probably do this with a driver directly on the camera, but... I find playing with nodes to be more fun than scripted expressions.