I ran across this beautiful laser-cut light box design a while ago, maybe from Colossal? These first two images are not mine, they come from this cool Light Box on Amazon (Not an affiliate link, I just think it is cool). Anyway, I found it really inspirational, and since I have a fast path-tracer to play with, I decided to try to make a digital one of these as a sketch.

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.

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.

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.