Terminal Phase's Thread of Things He Made That He Likes Looking At.

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Hi, this is my thread. I make things I like looking at. I don't have any formal schooling or training other than some online courses via domestika or other similar services, so if you guys see anything I'm goofing up or could improve on, please let me know! I'm also always interested in hearing recommendations for courses or tutorials to check out, and am looking forward to learning from everyone.

Currently I'm working on learning PSX/Dreamcast/PS2 stylized renderings, environment design, and Blender's Geometry nodes. I'd like to get into character modelling at some point as well but I'm still looking for a decent course on how to do that while staying pretty low poly.

Brawler's World has been a very big point of inspiration for me, since I really love the more subtle use of psx/ps2 stylizing while creating scenes that feel like you're getting a glimpse into an entire cohesive world. I've also really liked what I've seen from .45 Parabellum Bloodhound's trailers since it captures a really unique feeling and look without relying solely on nostalgia to achieve it. It's not my intention at all to be making stuff that's derivative or ripping off either inspiration, so if you guys think I'm drifting too far towards that, please call me out!

The first render using this PSX type stylization that I've been pretty happy with is this small cityscape. It took a while to get city textures I was happy with, as well as figure out a layout that looked decent for the camera, but I think those things will speed up with experience. I made it two months ago and I'm looking forward to giving another scene a shot soon. I also can't wait till I can get around to learning proper animation/rigging to really make scenes come to life.
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Life's been busy but most recently I've been working through a beginner geometry nodes for the last month and the animation below is a variation on one of the lessons, just using a noise texture for animation and a larger grid rather than a wave texture and a smaller grid. I'm pretty happy with how the lighting and look turned out. The intersection between motion graphics like these and PSX/Y2K stylizing is something I'm excited to keep messing around with, especially with making things that could feel like background/loading screen animations from games of that era.

I'm unsure how much Twitter's compression will mess with the quality so here's an Instagram link in case that works better.

I've really enjoyed looking around this forum so far and seeing what everyone's been making, and I'll do my best to update this thread as I make new stuff!
 
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Small-ish Update.

I've hit a small energy related roadblock with modeling assets for now. I'm not at the level of experience where I can knock out an asset with the same energy used as messing around in AfterEffects or Photoshop. Work and life has also been busy enough that I haven't had the isolated 3-4 hours I'd really like to finish modeling/textuing the dock scene I have concepted out. Hopefully we'll get some progress there this weekend.

On the bright side in the free time that I have had, I've made some more progress with the beginner Geometry node course. I took one of the lessons and tweaked some stuff to make an abstract ring animation, then ported the footage into AfterEffects and built a small animated poster/cyberpunk feeling ad for a fake PMC out of it. I'm pretty happy with the result considering the effort expended.


To try and push it the extra mile I went ahead and threw together a quick LED Screen/simple billboard scene in Blender and rendered the animation with it.


Looking back at this I think the resulting shape is just on the edge of flirting with metalheart stuff. Namely feeling like the stuff Kimi Takemura did for Nuphory's Hypertrance 2. When I first saw those visuals a year ago I reached out to Kimi to ask if she had any tips for learning how to do similar stuff. She was extremely nice and gave me some pointers. The use of Houdini stalled my attempts to learn how to make similar stuff, since I can really only afford Blender for now, but I think Geometry nodes might be the answer. Once again its not my intention to rip anyone off or plagiarize them so if you guys think I'm straying a bit too close to that please feel free to call me out.

Back to metalheart I think that would be an area I'd really like to learn properly once I get this dock scene finished. One of my goals is to get to a point where I can compile collections of visuals to upload alongside mixes I make, and Metalheart stuff would help with adding to that collections. Please feel free to leave any tips, pointers, links, or whatever regarding Metalheart stuff if any come to mind!
 
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