Category: Art

Internal Reflection (Preview)

It’s been a while since my last post! I’ve been busy with music and second-guessing myself (more on that later,) but I’m happy to announce the upcoming release of a new album, “Internal Reflection.”

In some ways I feel like it’s an iteration or refinement of many of the themes I began on “Metamorph,” trying to keep things fresh, unique and loose by intentionally choosing different techniques in the ideation process. Overall, it’s been an effective method for me. But I also found it leads to new decisions about where to draw the line in letting the natural strengths of the tools guide the music itself; at what point does my voice get lost in the endeavor to keep things creatively fresh? When it comes to creativity, I’m generally of the opinion that the artist should guide the tools, not the other way around. So in that regard I did try to find a balance, and I hope it comes across for my long-time listeners.

Despite my confidence in technique, I ran into a lot of hesitation and second-guessing myself with this album. Listening to tracks over and over, looking for improvements to make or trying with futility to reevaluate them with an objective ear, which ultimately only serves to entrench them further into my mind as immutable blocks.

For some time, I considered releasing two separate albums to deal with the disparity between the frustration-fueled high energy noise of tracks like “Crystallovore” and “Disinformation Filter,” and the calmer, equanimous tracks like “Decoherence” or “Chromatic Dispersion,” inspired both by the geometric and physical interactions of light and my explorations in mindfulness meditation. In between those extremes are tracks like “Five Constellations” or “Faceted Multidimensional,” which I feel ride the line between the two and are clear candidates for inclusion, but perhaps not enough on their own, or would come off as tiresome and homogenous with a similar energy level for an hour+ listening experience.

When I finished “Metamorph” I had a loose goal of forming a tighter sound for my next release – something more conceptual and unified, centered around a predefined theme. While “Internal Reflection” eventually coalesced into something vaguely representing that, it still feels more like a collage of thoughts, ideas, dreams and emotions I’ve made attempts to express musically over the last couple of years. While in a sense my personal metric for evaluating my own work is centered upon my enjoyment of it, I sincerely hope there are aspects that are effectively communicated through such an ephemeral medium and resonate with you as well.

“Internal Reflection” will release on Bandcamp, Spotify, Soundcloud and other streaming services on 6/7/22.

In the meantime, I’ll also share some other iterations of the album art I put together before arriving at the final. These were created using 3ds max, Arnold Render, TyFlow, Photoshop and Processing. I tried to find a balance between busy detailed chaos and negative space, emphasizing colorful reflections in synthetic structures, while also being mindful of the overall composition and the fact that most listeners will only see it as a tiny, compressed thumbnail.

Generative Art Dump

Sometime late last spring I got completely hooked on Factorio and ended up pouring some hundreds of hours into it across several playthroughs. After launching my first rocket (i.e., beating the game,) I found myself left with a lingering desire to create complex systems that work harmoniously with one another. I ended up channeling that desire into getting reacquainted with Processing and diving back into generative art for the first time since a certain controversial entrepreneur single-handedly marked the death knell for Flash on the web.

As I continued experimenting I found a manifesto for this series loosely forming in my subconscious mind, and ultimately crystallized those thoughts into a series of guidelines:

  • Harness the power of the medium to automate that which would be tedious to create by hand or using traditional techniques
  • Celebrate the beauty of geometry
  • Strike a balance between sterile accuracy and natural chaos
  • Strike a balance between pleasant minimalism and fractal complexity
  • Take inspiration from nature
  • Playfully balance composition and repetition
  • Avoid simply recreating well-established looks and techniques typical of the medium

So here is a sizable dump of images from this journey:

And, as I used to do so many years ago, I ended up creating a series of desktop wallpapers as well. These are in 4k (3840×2160) and are intentionally dark and low contrast so as to be easy on the eyes during night hours.

Recently I’ve lost some steam on this project as I’ve been working on some new music, but I’m sure I’ll return to it someday.

Gatts & Schierke

berserk

Decided to learn ZBrush after learning about some fancy features it’s got over mudbox like dynamesh and insert multi mesh. I’d been reading the berserk manga so thought it’d be a good first test project to make Gatts’ berserker armor. I liked the scene where Schierke’s trying to get him back under control so thought it’d be fun to sort of recreate. I actually had it in mind to do some effects animation to go with it, so here’s a little gif of it (and by little i mean like 3mb) .

I spent a little too much time trying to make a perfect loop and ended up getting lazy about some of the particles so it’s kind of the worst of both worlds; oh well. Guess I’ll count it in as a little scene for my next demo reel update where I won’t need to worry about it looping.

Rei

rei2

So I had this head I sculpted in mudbox some months back. The project I’d planned for it never reached fruition but I still wanted to use it and somehow got it in my head to do an evangelion fanart, even though I last watched it many years ago. Guess I figured it’d be easy – short hairstyle, form fitting outfit, no cloth, glossy, etc… well, I learned some lessons the hard way about topology and UV layout while trying to get my mudbox mojo on and it ended up taking me maybe a week longer than I’d planned. Basically ended up sculpting and texturing the plug suit twice. But overall it was a good experience, learned a lot of new things and tried a bunch of new techniques out. Initially I was thinking of playing more with lighting and adding more background stuff but Diablo III is out in three days so I figured I’d better wrap it up before it gathers dust in my project folder for another half a year.

Forest, Legion

Testing out some leaf materials again here. I read Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou over the past few weeks, which I thought was a beautifully done manga. It took me a few volumes to get into it, but eventually I realized how much of it is about negative space, both in the dialogue and story as well as the art. I guess I was a little inspired by Ashinano’s sparse and effortless landscape drawings, through which much of the emotion of the story is conveyed. At the same time I’m also testing out plant and tree stuff for a bigger rendering I’m gearing up for (ie, recharging spent creative juice by gaming, relaxing, doing other things besides commercial work)

And now for something completely different. A few years ago I had it in my mind to do a fan-art of the creepy “legion” monster from Castlevania. Though in most of the games it’s a boss, in Circle of the Moon it was a normal, albeit tough and scary, enemy. If I recall correctly, when it touches you you’re cursed and can’t attack until you have something uncurse yourself. I thought Circle of the Moon was one of the harder games in the series, at least among the ones I’ve played.

legion2

Here’s the original art for reference:

Arch Fluff, Call On Me

Been playing with tree meshes and materials, partly to ramp up for a project idea I had and partly just because I’ve seen so many damned impressive archviz renders lately. There’s some really inspiring stuff out there. I used to have this opinion that architectural rendering was more about accuracy than realism and found them generally flat and boring compared to, say, game cinematics. But from what I’ve seen lately their level of detail and photorealism trumps even the most expensive game intros (see Ronen Bekerman, Bertrand Benoit and Peter Guthrie, for example). On the other hand, there’s been quite a shift over the past ten years from pre-rendered to in-game sequences, which could play a part in it also.

Technical acumen aside I’ve also started to appreciate the beauty of a meticulously detailed architectural rendering. Not unlike a well-done landscape, I think archviz too can be inspiring and bring out emotion, capturing the stillness of a moment, the contrast between the natural beauty of trees, land and organic textures with the orderly man-made objects, the way light and shadow play across both. I find it a bit hard to describe, but there’s certainly much more feeling and art in it than a simple presentation of a blueprint to a client in 3D.

Anyway, I’m no architect and only have a vague inspiration here, so I just wanted to play with materials and light and capture that sort of minimalism and stillness.

Switching gears, a couple weeks ago I busted out another Janet remix, this time sort of a quickie. I think it’s actually closer to the original, using mostly 808s. I had an idea to do a soft minimal drum&bass version of it with a little more play on the drums, some LPF chords and a decaying arpeggiated 1/8th note synth. Kind of has a lullaby feel to it, or it would if it weren’t for the pace of the beat.

Ist das nicht mein kraft?

So Sporkii and I started playing Minecraft last weekend. Of course I’d seen a ton of videos, screen caps and rave reviews, but I never really understood what drew people to it until I actually gave it a shot. Even still, I find it hard to sum up what exactly makes it so appealing. But clearly, part of the appeal is the blocky visual style. So after playing for a few days I got to thinking, I wonder if I could take an openGL “3d screenshot” and do a render with mental ray. Unfortunately, since it actually runs in Java the openGL capturing software I found couldn’t inject itself into the exe, and the global system monitoring workaround is only available on 32-bit operating systems. C’est la vie.

So after more searching I found this beta Minecraft world to OBJ converter. It’s slow and buggy and crashes with big worlds and has no progress bar to let you know how it’s doing so the only thing you can do is periodically reload the debug.log it poops out, but it got the job done, sort of. Although it came into max with multi/sub-object materials assigned to each axis, there were no bitmaps associated with them, so I had to manually crop and tile the bitmaps and assign UVs. Also, each plane of polygons comes in with its own set of material IDs arranged alphabetically, but if a certain rare material (say, diamond) isn’t on there then it won’t appear in the list, thus there’s practically no correlation between the material IDs on each of the six planes.

In short, it was a huge pain in the ass to connect all the materials and I did an exceptionally sloppy job with it, but I got my damned renders!

Sporkii also drew these two skins for our characters =) So I did a render using my blurry apartment environment map, which looks kinda like paper-craft with the lens blur applied. Also tested out max 2012’s new substance materials a bit, pretty cool stuff.

Wabi and Sabi

The majority of my spare visual creative juice has gone into freelance work lately, so I’ve been working on music for fun to keep myself from getting burnt out. This current freelance gig is actually kind of a fun and challenging project and I’ll probably have a fair amount to post when it’s finished, but I think I should refrain in the meantime until the client is satisfied.

So on the music side, I did a quick remix of Busta Rhymes/Janet Jackson’s “What’s it Gonna Be”, just for fun and something I knew Sporkii would like. I think it’s pretty much done.

 

Since I haven’t had any new artwork to show recently, I thought post something a bit different. Once in awhile Sporkii and I go out for a walk and I bring my 7D along and take dark, blurry macro pictures of nature and decay and apply them to my desktop wallpaper, so here’s a collection of some from the past year.

Most available in 1920×1280, a few cropped to 1920×1200.