I found an old art book while I was looking in my shelves for some ideas for my daily art. It’s a Japanese collection of Ralph McQuarrie’s concept for Star Wars. Towards the end of the book, there’s this amazing painting, simple and striking, amongs ideas for Coruscant and the Emperor’s Throne Room. Flattened out, but with glare, here’s that incredible, minimal vision. I built a really simple model in Blender, which took a few hours.

NVidia OmniVerse is a joy to play around in. Being able to use a real-time pathtracer, with real-time depth of field, it completely changes the way you experiment and explore. I didn’t clean up the scans at all from Meshroom, this is just a straight import into OmniVerse. I used a wood shop HDR dome light, but I found that it was distracting even when defocused. I tried to think physically, how a theater set designer might.

Every day does mean every day, even when sometimes that’s hard to find time for. One of the things I’ve learned with this process so far is that you have to explicitly set aside time to do the work, you can’t just hope to find time after the day’s insanity. This one is terrible, and I know it. But… it made me laugh, and it made my friends laugh. Also, I painted this while satching the Snyder Cut of The Justice League.

I briefly worked, as part of Google Robotics, at a wonderful place called Bot + Dolly that made artwork with giant robots. Everything they did was inventive and playful. They had this ancient Kuka 6-DOF robot that they had acquired from parts unknown. They never got it to work, and eventually sold it for scrap. On the day before it left, I took a few hundred photographs of it, and used them to do photogrammetry inside the open-source software Meshroom.

OmniVerse is so much fun to goof around in, particularly with the path-traced volumetric fog. I’m a huge fan of just tying out simple shapes and setups, to just see how the fog affects a scene. This is just a bunch of solid glass cylinders with a large purple area light on the left, and several smaller area lights on the right. It has a fog volume that tapers off as it gets towards camera.

After goofing around with Blender and Cycles, I wanted to compare how the experience of doing path-traced fog in NVidia OmniVerse. This is what I’m working on at work, so using this daily artwork as a way to learn my way around the software is killing two birds with one stone. One of the things that OmniVerse lets you do is have multiple artists collaborating in the same scene at the same time, like collaboratively editing a Google Doc.

I’m dipping my toe into Blender and Cycles. I’ve been snobby in the past about Blender, as it didn’t always measure up to more expensive professional tools like Maya. However, as Maya has become bloated and unwieldy and poorly serviced by Autodesk, the passion of the Blender community and the surprising polish of 2.9 makes it pretty fun to get into. For this one, I’m just exploring with path-traced participating media.

I had a teacher in art school a long time ago who was really enamoured with painting the light you observed, rather than the objects you perceieved - a single layer of light, rather than outlines and shapes and boundaries. He was particularly interested in semi-transparent surfaces like windshields, with their partial reflections, painted as a single layer. I tried that approach here. One thing that I’m struggling with is that my eyesight has degraded pretty significantly - just age-related presbyopia.