colortwist

Retiring

I figured I should probably post something about this before the end of the month rolls over.

Unfortunately, things in 3D land haven't been working out very well for me recently. This year had gotten off to a rather rough start that only managed to get worse, and while said events have long since past I've had a lot of time to reflect on various aspects of my life and what I want to do with it. Combined with some other impending obligations, I won't be able to continue producing content...

Jessica and Vanessa - Light as a feather

So this is a *really* old WIP that was actually done for a friend years ago (posted with permission, of course). Pretty sure the context here was that the feather caused additional ticklish expansion, though I can't quite remember since it's been a fairly long time.

Anyways, life's been a bit hectic over here (more on that in another post), and I really didn't want to leave this account go for another month without something. Unfortunately I don't have many older WIPs kicking around (mo...

January updates and stuff

Since I hate leaving people in the dark, I figured I should probably post something.

Long story short, we had a bit of a family episode over christmas this year (and that's putting it lightly, to say the least). Everyone is still kinda reeling from what happened, and the aftermath is proving to be quite the spicy family drama. The immediate situation has mostly been resolved (so basically anything that involves me), but echos of the past events are still ricocheting around and it's way ...

Christmas chaos and forgotten prototypes

So I guess it's Christmas again...

All the decorations are going up, there's hot chocolate in the pantry again, and everyone is busy losing their minds over a whole bunch of trivial stuff that probably won't even get done before the 25th. I don't know what it is about December, but I always kinda feel like I'm just holding my breath and waiting for it all to pass over... I mean, I guess the festivities are nice, but I usually can't tell you what day of the week it is between now and Jan...

Deterministic cloth sliding algorithm via 2D UV space transformations

Before I start rambling about technical stuff here, I should probably note that this really shouldn't be taken as a sign that I'm working on swimsuit stuff again... This idea has been on my mind for ages now, and it's applicable to a wide variety of different situations- so while swimsuit stuff is still my backup plan if I can't come up with anything better, I'm still exploring some other subjects for the near future instead.

Anyways...

This has always kinda been one of those weir...

Celeste - Character Concept

Whelp, I dunno where to even begin with this one...

A long time ago (in a galaxy far away?), I found myself daydreaming about a particular artistic thought experiment. I wanted to create a character where the mechanics of the design "hid" some of the character's true form, instead relying on multiple angles and silhouettes to convey the full extent of her (extremely curvy) physique.

The only way I could figure out how to do this was by eliminating depth from the character entirely...

Houdini - Genetic Conduit

Some more (potentially boring) abstract stuff.

I don't really know what this one is supposed to be- a lot of these are just me fumbling around with Houdini's procedural toolkit while trying to figure out how to do various things, which may or may not result in something that can be rendered afterwards.

This one actually started out life as some helium hose tests, which landed up being rather straightforward and extremely uneventful. That later turned into some twisted rope and fra...

Automatic convex straps in Houdini

Just a little something I was working on earlier today- partly because I thought it might be useful in the future, but also partly because I wanted to know if it could be done.

This is basically just a simple convex strap solver. It works by intersecting a group of arbitrary input geometry against a plane (though I suppose it could be any shape so long as the intersections resolve cleanly) and essentially calculating an output curve (or band) that is guaranteed to loop around the exteri...

Amber - Character WIP (1/???)

This probably doesn't seem like much ATM, probably because it isn't...

Still, "first steps" and all that stuff.

This is basically just a simple IK + twist rig for a character limb. I was kinda curious to poke some of Houdini's IK tools, which... thus far have been a rather interesting experience. At first I was rather annoyed at how differently Houdini does things compared to C4D, but then I started to realize there's absolutely nothing stopping me from recreating a lot of that st...

Automatic morph mirroring in Houdini

This probably looks like the most trivial thing ever, but it's kinda not.

I've been working on this for the past day or so, mostly to try and cut my work in half when dealing with complicated character rigs that inevitably land up requiring dozens (or hundreds) of corrective morphs everywhere (this is pretty much unavoidable if you want a decent looking character when posed).

Normally you have to deal with the left side and right side of a character separately when it comes to 3D....

New character project - Amber

I guess I might as well post something about this since it's what I'm going to be working on for the next little while.

Long story short, I've been going around in circles a bit trying to figure out what I want to do next (I see you there rolling your eyes, you know who you are). Part of it has to do with still being burned out on older stuff (though I think I've gotten past that enough to consider some older subjects as a backup plan if this doesn't work out), part of it has to do with...

Update on things and stuff

Just a quick update since I said I'd post something when I knew more.

I think I'm back for now (and the foreseeable future).

Life stuff still hasn't been solved, but I'm pretty confident nothing is going to happen since everyone at least seems to agree on what the problem was, even though nobody wants to take responsibility for it and actually fix things (basically, my account/details with our government somehow got smashed together with someone else's on the other side of the cou...

Appologies for the lack of updates

I really hate typing up these sorts of posts, but at the same time I also hate leaving people in the dark.

Long story short, I've been dealing with some unexpected life stuff recently. My current living situation is a bit tenuous when it comes to my artwork; others around me do not know what I do and unfortunately it needs to stay that way. My schedule is such that I'm generally able to avoid any potential issues, so I usually just land up partitioning my time carefully so that I'm not ...

New directions and other misc character stuff

This is probably one of the world's most boring image posts, but I figured that maybe it'd be slightly more interesting than a text-only post... so if anyone was ever wondering what the primary interface definition for an IK/FK hybrid character in Houdini looks like, then the above screenshots pretty much represent all the buttons and knobs required to make that happen (technically I had the same thing in C4D, but C4D lets you split that stuff up across a dozen or so different objects- wherea...

Houdini - Infinite Flux Engine

Before anyone goes "oh god, is he turning into an NFT crypto artist???"- this was just the result of some recent experiments in Houdini, nothing more, nothing less. I know this account is predominantly focused around inflatable assets of the spherical kind (and this doesn't quite fall into that category), but I swear I'm not planning on making this a regular thing. These are just some abstract results that I came up with while trying to learn Houdini and figured they looked neat enough to pos...

Self colliding body meshes in Houdini

Just an extension to yesterday's post- this is the same system, but implemented with a simple body mesh and a barebones skeleton.

As the legs move around, both the thighs (once inflated) will automatically avoid each other and instead create a sort of rubbing effect where one surface slides across the other.

The usual way to achieve something similar in C4D was to use two invisible cubes in the scene, both parented to the upper leg joints, then constrained to look at each other an...

Bi-directional thigh collider in Houdini

Still here, still working on stuff. Figured I might as well post this because it's been a while since I've posted anything on the technical front.

Aaaanyways...

Been playing around with some VEX stuff in Houdini recently. One of the things that's always bothered me about collisions in C4D was that the collision deformer didn't support any kind of multi-object collision- that is to say, you could only collide one object against some other impenetrable mesh, and never two objects to...

Things and stuff + future plans

I'm going to try and keep this as short as possible since I'm not really a fan of writing massive walls of text, so... here goes nothing:

1) Unfortunately my monitor of 8 years is on the fritz (I've lost about a third of the backlight on the right side- seems to sometimes come back after 20-30 minutes of warmup time, but I'm guessing this unit is on the way out). I have a replacement on order, but it won't be here until early April.

Apologies in advance if it gets a bit quiet arou...

Stuck in a tight spot

This is why you only take the inflation serum *after* you've entered a wide open area, otherwise hallways and corridors might start to get a bit unexpectedly tight >,>

Vanessa - Balloon Wonderland Set

So this was kind of a half-commission, half something else that landed up turning into a little sequence instead.

The general request involved red hair, a red metallic one piece, and balloons... lots and lots of balloons. There landed up being 1234 of them in the scene alone, plus another 12 on strings, and two more if you count the latex wrapped ones front and center >,>

Anyways, yeah. Since this was a commission, I'm posting the full set here (with permission, of course). ...

Vanessa - Redhead Sequin Test

This is a bit of an obscure one-off.

It was done as a render test for a Jessica Rabbit-inspired "cosplay", though the project it's for (which I'll be posting more details about in the future) landed up taking another direction.

Likewise, this was also a bit of an experiment to see if I could clone actual sequin geometry across a surface inside C4D, since shader-based methods don't really work that well with distorted geometry like this (with a texture based method, the sequins wou...

Character rebuild (2/???)

Here's some very early weighting tests in Houdini.

The rigging system is... slightly weird, to say the least. I think most of it makes sense, but I can't quite say I've ever seen anything else like it before. The screenshot above is almost entirely procedurally generated; that is to say, I haven't actually gotten around to tweaking any of the weights or adding any sort of corrective morphs. It took most of the day to get used to a few things in the viewport and setup an initial skeleton...

Character rebuild (1/???)

Sorry for the lack of updates, the past couple of weeks have been a bit weird for me. I kinda ran into 2021 thinking that I wanted to do something completely different for a change, but after much time and consideration I decided that probably wouldn't be the best way to go. I couldn't quite get past the idea of abandoning everything I'd already done (especially when there's so much more to do), and it didn't sit well with me that I couldn't come up with any sort of sane backstory for the new...

Jessica & Vanessa - Turntable Animation

I kinda wanted to try and do something a little bit different for this month and I hadn't yet done a turntable animation with these two, so I figured... hey, why not. I don't normally do animations since they tend to take forever to render (this particular one was upwards of 21 minutes/frame * 600 frames), but hopefully the end result is good enough to justify the amount of time and effort invested.

Anyways, the 1920x1080 version (without watermarks) is attached to this post- you'll hav...

More random Houdini stuff

More random Houdini stuff, this time with particles.

Unfortunately the render is a bit noisy since Arnold seems to have some issues with... uh... "millions of particles", in that it tends to crash pretty hard- I suspect I'm just doing something wrong or I don't yet know how to create the overall effect I'm looking for without having that many particles in the scene.

Nevertheless, particles (and pyro stuff) is pretty fun to play around with (so are liquid physics for that fact). I ...

First render in Houdini

Just pokin' Houdini.

Figured I'd try to recreate my glass swirl logo, since that's something I'm rather familiar with. It's mostly there, though there's still a few minor differences with the color blending since the original was rendered out on a 15 year old rendering engine in sRGB mode (no LWF at all), and this one was rendered out on something a bit more modern in linear space instead.

So far Houdini is... weird. It's kind of a toss up between "where have you been my whole lif...

Change of plans

So I've been doing a lot of thinking recently. I'd be lying if I said a lot of this wasn't sparked by technical issues trying to work on "Pump Up the Volume", but a good chunk of it also has to do with how I feel about 3D in general right now.

My previous plan was to try and complete another image pack before I switched full time to Houdini. Unfortunately, I don't think this is going to happen at the moment. I've been encountering a lot of problems in C4D that have been dragging me down...

One Last Thread - 3/3

I present to you, a haiku:

• Snip snip snip snip snip
• Hair blows back against the wind
• Lost in the blue sky

One Last Thread - 2/3

Second angle.

I could probably pretend that there's more to this image than a pair of giant overinflated boobs, but who would I be kidding...

One Last Thread - 1/3

I have no idea what led to this situation- maybe it was some sort of truth or dare? I'm also not sure if Vanessa is right on the edge of winning or losing, because it sure seems like she's enjoying the anticipation of what comes next.