Half life fanart I made using SDF Modeler and Blender.
The state of Black Mesa Research Facility in Freeman's wake is something I find myself wondering about. Imagine you're an injured scientist who fell unconscious during the chaos which Gordon causes. If you're "lucky" enough to survive, you would find yourself in a crumbling concrete labrynth. The air is heavy with concrete dust, explosions and fire smoke. This scientist's final hours would be spent in this scene, before the complete destruction of Black Mesa with nuclear detonations.
This is an experimental piece to use some of my own models, shaders, and doing all my post-processing in Blender. As much as I enjoy using darktable, it adds a bunch of additional steps to my workflow for creating a finished image. When I'm making a render I want to keep all my work inside of Blender, nothing worse than needing to dance around between programs. A focus of this project was to heavily use the render passes to create non physically accurate shading for my renders. Sacrifing pure accuracy to reality in favor of a more focused vibe is extremely important to learn. I really love physically based rendering, and I love realism, but I also really love the exagerated realities in the sci-fi I like.
I made the HEV Charger with SDF Modeler SDF Modeler is a free program for creating models using SDF volumes. What this means for artists is that you're free to combine and subtract primitives smoothly from each other, without concern for mesh topology.
I find SDF modeling to be a very promising tool in my toolbox. It's useful for rapidly developing concepts with as little friction with topology as possible, and the barrier to entry is as simple as understanding how to merge a couple shapes. The output topology of this process is not immediately usable with the subdivision modifier, remeshing it using whatever method works best for you is often required. The dense mesh does make it very easy to sculpt detail into, which is what I did to smash up the base model.
I have experimented with SDF modeling in the past, you can check out my Friend Finder 300, where I used Blender's metaballs to create an organic shape.
additional thoughts on the ff-300 and the term "game-ready" in general
If I were to redo the friend finder, I would add a few more small realism details (battery door, status LEDs, ports, a label maybe) and also make more aggresive cuts to the triangle count. It is important to consider the object's intended scale and proximity to the viewer when making decisions about the low-poly mesh. For a proper "game ready" model, I think this is a shifting goal.
Something I'd like to comment on is my use of of "game ready" as a buzzword for certain things I modeled in the last 3 years.
My point here is to acknowledge the fact that I have misunderstood what "game-ready" really means until just within the last couple months. The friend finder 300 wasn't that long ago, but even since then my perspectives have expanded on the artistry and skill that dedicated video game artists demonstrate. I wanted to latch onto a term that represented the art that I feel inspired by. While what I made is cool and of good quality, it lacks the fascinating resource-saving tricks that game artists keep in their minds. This knowledge is built up over time and through experience, like anything.
Additionally, game-ready implies a sort of plug and playness with the targeted rendering engines. It would have packed PBR and mask textures, usable UV layouts, UDIMMs, LODs, maybe a rig. These parameters will all change depending on which game you've optimized this for, which engine it's rendering in, and maybe even the locations that this object was designed to be rendered in. If we look at the term from the bare minimum perspective, what game ready seems to imply is that the model will probably import into Unity fine. This is the flawed definition of game-ready that I had since the start of my learning 3D art. I admire video game artists, and part of me has wanted to be one since I was a teen, so maybe all of this was me coming to the realization that I have a lot of unfulfilled childhood dreams which are now actually within my reach to make happen.
All of this (my art, but also exsitence) took (and will take) a lot of work, but it's absolutely worth it to me. I cannot explain what drove me to actually pick up art for real in 2023-2024, but in a time where I truly felt at my lowest, my mind found respite in Blender somehow. Art is mandatory for our minds, love and expression is what it means to be alive.
a little bit of a 🍃-induced yapping post, but it's good to do that. Thanks for reading, if you have animals make sure to give them lots of pets and water.