Interplexa Bike Boys (Patreon)

Hey okay! So- I'm trying to see if I can get all these ground assets uploaded today (I've been going wild scanning everything in my neighborhood, and they're really fun to work with, but I'm mostly stuck on which ones too include (I've snagged a ton))- but in the meantime just wanted to show some renders from the last few days! 

Both of these images started out in my cleaning/assembly file, where I optimize my scans, but I inevitably start playing with them, and once stuff starts to click like that I usually try to ride that momentum till the end-

Which is actually how this whole sequence is working out; it was supposed to be a 10 second shot in a random world to set up an event, but after spending a month building all the assets (and thinking through the logistics of how the world would work), I'm finding myself super drawn into the world, so I'm just going with it for a bit. 

Thanks to Nathan Vegdahl for pointing out that water's way more realistic when it's not just a glossy plane :P Also a very good tip to combine it with volumetrics!! I'd totally written off volumetrics in blender, but I've been using them for everything with zero trouble (both of the renders below were about a minute and a half render time, and yeah I'm running a 3090, but even still it's resolving way faster than I'm used to). Did they optimize something on the render side of things, or was I always trying to do stuff with spotlights and other stuff that leads to fireflies? I gotta look into that.*

The fonts on the wall below are a rad custom alien font my friend Teague made for Dynamo (for anywhere it wouldn't make sense to use English)- we'll be sharing the font here pretty quick!

This feels a lot better- there really was no justifiable reason for the ship names to be in English before. 

The bikes below were just a quick bike model I made, but then covered with pieces from old projects (most of which I've uploaded here in the past)- I might still go in and add some final details, but honestly we'll never see them close-up. 

Also ooo- I'll probably upload this too- made a little bone library by scanning part of Kaitlin's bone collection; it's useful for making nonsense skeletons! 

This one's in progress- I think I want the steam vent to be blowing a fan that has some wacky IK solution for waving the skeleton's stick-arms up and down. 

From a worldbuilding perspective, in the context of the story, the gods only tend to occupy one world at any given time, and that tends to be the happenin' place (lots of development/wars/shenanigans). When the gods move on, like with Interplexa, everything slows down and gradually falls apart, but things also chill out, too. Time stops meaning as much- I kinda want that eternal-late-summer vibe.

On the technical side of things, I've been using the PolycamAI app on my phone (still only iPhone for now, but that's changing)- I've been loving the experience- it's the first phone-based scanning app that's actually given me good results- but I also don't totally understand it. I think someone said it uses Apple's Object Capture? Is that some module Apple came up with that other apps can take advantage of? Or- I dunno. Gotta google it. It's not doing anything that RealityCapture or any other scanning solution doesn't do, it's just a bit more handy. 

Regardless, I've enjoyed the workflow of having this Interplexa place in my head, then just walking around in parks and scanning whatever little odds and ends feel like that location (the cement blocks, sidewalks, cement retaining walls, rocks), then putting them all together out of the scavenged bits to create the place.

I've always lived in the Pacific Northwest, which is a gorgeous place, but you can very rarely see the horizon, and I think that's affected the way I tend to design environments. It feels great to open stuff up a bit. 

And actually- at the risk of going on a bit too long here- almost all my dreams are location based- I mean, there are people there**, but we're always exploring something (Catacombs? Under my house?). The fact that I can sit up late at night assembling decontextualized bits from my real life into whole new places that don't really exist seems fantastically on-the-nose from a dream perspective.

Anyways yeah! Hopefully getting these assets up in a couple hours here. Talk soon! 

*I will say that plugging anything into the density slot seems to slow things WAY down- keeping a uniform density appears to be the best way to keep volumetrics practical right now? At least from what I've seen.

**Most of my dreams have a half dozen or so friends milling about- it's always that nice feeling of effortless belonging. Waking life's so full of scheduling/transportational logistics and we always have to friggin' figure out what we're going to eat what do you want to eat what are you feeling right now I'm not sure I should do more dairy today.