Art

Haunted House

Oct 9, 2022
Weekly Art Challenge, Art
Stable Diffusion, Img2img

I decided to dive into the image to image feature of stable diffusion, which allows you to start with a simple input image, and then use a text description to have stable diffusion hallucinate your image into one that more closely matches the text description.

The theme this week was an appropriately Halloween theme of a haunted house on a hill with some jack-o-lanterns. For this exercise I took the final picture that my wife painted and then fed that as the input into stable diffusion to see what we could get as a result.

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Pink Clouds

Oct 2, 2022
Weekly Art Challenge, Art
Threejs, Volumetric, Shader

Decided to see if I couldn't embed a threejs example into my Hugo site with this weeks challenge. The challenge this week being a pink cloud, to which I figured I would see what I could accomplish in short notice with threejs and some butchered shader example code.

I have a basic understanding of what's going on with the shader, but it's going to take a lot longer than a week to get it completely unraveled. I would say that my work with Blender helped with the little understanding I have managed to glean and I'm overall happy that I was able to get this example embedded into the page in a decent manner.

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Glowing Mushrooms

Sep 25, 2022
Weekly Art Challenge, Art, AI
Stable Diffusion, AI Art

I’ve decided to give Stable Diffusion a dive for this week’s challenge. Took the week to learn how to get everything set up and then used it to generate the following images based on this weeks prompt of pink mushrooms at night in a field of ferns.

The whole thing was surprisingly easy to get set up. The hardest part has been finding the decent prompts. It’s turned into an interesting problem and require thinking quite differently about how I would describe a particular scene. Overall it’s pretty amazing what you can produce with the tool. I’m quite excited about the potential for prototyping ideas or just idea hunting in general.

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Avocado Toast

Sep 4, 2022
Weekly Art Challenge, Art
Blender, Gif

Scheduling had us both in a bit of a rush this week so we decided to to something simple. I wanted to try expressing an idea that I’ve had about looping animations for a while now, see if it would actually work as I figured it should. Aside from rendering some low-poly food to use as assets, and what I did was set up a procedural background, and then tied that background to the position in space, of an empty object. Then I animated that object through a circular looping animation, meaning that when the animation had finished, it would have smoothly looped completely around in a non-obvious way. Worked out exactly as I’d hoped and produced these trippy animations.

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Moon Moth

Aug 28, 2022
Weekly Art Challenge, Art
Blender, Gif

The subject this week was a moth with a moon in the background. My wife finished her painting quickly this week and I wanted to mess around with animation, so I came up with this idea. I took a picture of her moth in fact, and then cut that out and used it as a texture for my piece. I then spiced it up by having the animation rotate through hue, saturation, etc.

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Beach and a Drink

Aug 21, 2022
Weekly Art Challenge, Art
Blender, Transparency

The subject was a drink and a beach, a lot like the old Corona commercials. I figured it would be a good opportunity to try out some transparency and then I threw in some procedural texturing to get the sand and wood textures. I tried going with an NPR look but I just couldn’t get it to look the way I wanted it so I went with Cycles.

If I were to do this one again I would try for a Porco Rosso look as I think it would be suited here. If you look close enough, you’ll notice the glass if floating.

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Desert Boat

Aug 14, 2022
Weekly Art Challenge, Art
Blender, Projection Mapping

I’m a big fan of paintings and pictures of a boat with “Point Reyes” on the bow for some reason. I must have seen the picture come up on the Chromecast idle rotation and there are some pretty great pictures and drawings/paintings of it out there. And then I’m also a fan of some photos of the Namibian desert that I’ve seen, likely also on the Chromecast. So I took some liberties with my wife’s subject of a boat at sea this week and decided to model the boat and then projection map the texture to it. Was interesting and I’m okay with the result aside from not having a ton of time to work on the lighting again.

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Flamingos

Aug 7, 2022
Weekly Art Challenge, Art
Blender, Rigging, Projection Mapping

This week was Flamingos. This was our first weekly challenge, and I have some experience with Blender so I picked rigging and cloth sim as specific things I wanted to work on this week. I bit off way more than I should have and had no time to work on lighting so that’s a bit of a rush job. But I was able to get a decent generic Flamingo model done with an inverse kinematics rigged neck to make it easier to pose. And then I was able to drape a canvas cloth sim over a stack of boxes and over some wagon train style struts. Managed to get the cloth to sew to pinned vertices to create the effect of looking tied down.

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