Emmy's Inktober 4

 

"General Conference"

Emmy's Inktober 3

 

Emmy's Inktober 2

"Dancing (my mom and dad are on this)"
(the figures on the left are dad and mom)

Emmy's Inktober: 1

 

Youngest sister Emmy has decided to participate in the Inktober drawing challenge this year. Look at those adorable owls.

An Empty Room Thus Far....

A full year later, I bring you a piece of fan art from Undertale 2, the demo of which dropped on October 31st of last year. (Anda did an exceptional job of keeping quiet about it while we were trick-or-treating with John's family--no sense taking away from family time, right?~)

This is meant to be a classroom (no spoiler there, it's at the beginning of the game), but the desks, seats, chalkboard, etc. have not been modeled yet. The room does feature a ceiling, though, a really nice acoustic tiled ceiling with a grid and everything. I've spent a good long while working on the ceiling's parts, enough so that this is actually my third revision so far. The revisions aren't strictly too different, I don't think (the first one uses an unconventional measuring system built on the games' pixel art), but the way I add them into the scene has evolved gradually.

Outside backdrop is from HDRI Haven; floor texture is from Texture Haven. The combined effect of realistic floorboards with realistic exterior lighting...ooohh, yeah. I know exactly what standing in that sunlight would feel like, and how my footsteps would sound on the wood in this empty room.

The door texture is alright, I guess. I made it myself; it's based off of the doors in our church building, and takes some fine detail from a wooden dresser found in some local friends' basement. The end result is a bit chaotic, but heck, I'm super glad that I managed to get it looking this great! (Note to self: study actual wooden door construction. You may find yourself surprised.)

Fun thing about the newest release of Blender (2.81): there's a new AI-based Denoiser. It's pretty much a game-changer. I rendered this picture at 128 samples, which is not very many when the scene is indoors, and although the signs of AI influence are clear when you look too closely, I almost found the results too smooth for me. (I actually went and mixed a little bit of the denoiser-less image in to try and add a smidgen of grain back in...the sparkly bits were the brightest, so they showed first, so I didn't crank it too far back to noisy.)

In all, this scene, and the building it's part of (since I've got a decent bit of that), represent a bit of a turning point in my artistic development. Blender 2.8's scene arrangement is super powerful compared to old Blender's, and I've gotten better at making things reusable since I took classes on programming for college; couple this all with several decently good years gaining experience and past resources on which I can draw, and I'm suddenly able to make better, prettier things with much less effort.

That said, this building has been in progress since November of last year. Just because I had really productive days, doesn't mean the project is manageable in scope. I don't even know what's behind all the doors.

A Bit Of Music, A Change Of Pace

We don't just make pictures, not in this family. Since music can be considered art, why not upload it as well? I have been doing a lot of music and sound design work for computer games--specifically, the ones I'm planning out or actively building. I haven't finished any game, or much of any part thereof (and let me tell you, there are a freaking lot of parts--too many for just me, almost certainly), but I have finished this song. It's meant to play under a certain fantasy RPG scene, but I won't tell you what it is. I want to hear your thoughts about the song, and what it makes you think about or feel....

Archimedes Screw Reservoir

Was thinking, a while back, about the way a preindustrial, archaic city, in a cave, built vertically, would be irrigated. This scene was a sort of proof-of-concept for the design I had in mind--not a technical proof, an artistic proof, to get the space out of my head and into a pseudo-solid form, including the bridge. The scene kind of ballooned from there as I started to add lights, until--here it is.

Looking at it now, I see all kinds of things to fix: the water is supposed to go down when it's not in use, and the canal isn't oriented for that; the trough the screw dips into isn't quite deep enough (not that you can see that); literally everything needs reshaping--can you see a sluice being made as an octagon, or even half an octagon?

In reality, this setup should not exist. In a preindustrial society, no situation would likely occur where it would be easiest to build upwards and transport water to the top--with any low down water source, it would be cleaner and simpler to leave and find somewhere else to settle, to spread out around the water source, or to dig a well and let people walk to it. With a high up water source, just build canals and let gravity do its thing.

Nonetheless, it's fun to think about societal implications of this arrangement. Turning the screws would be hard, and to coordinate every level so that each screw got turned in sequence would be harder--so you'd come to see the lower levels as more desirable, less work to get water.

• Farmers would work on the bottom, where direct access to the water is available; rich people would be above them, just as close as it's possible to be without stealing farmers' access. The rich class may make life hard for the people above; whether the screws have water to lift is determined by their whims, whether they're willing to work their screws or not. To secure their water, the people above may become craftsmen and work to earn trust from the noblemen somehow. Literal social strata.~
• Or maybe there is no rich class, and the craftsmen separate the farmers from the beggars?
• Or perhaps the farmers are the rich class?
• If the city is rich in the barbaric way, they could have slaves to run the screws. Whoever controls the slaveowners, controls the slaves, controls the water--boom, city-sized Roman Empire.

That all said, I invented this system in a specific context where it just might be the most practical option. A group of people move into a ruined, ancient city--but for general fear of harming the ancient, historical buildings, statues, and artworks, they build new homes on the side of the city's ancient, massive wall and pump up water from the old rivers using a setup like this. Scrounged from scrap, in location and livelihood, would almost certainly be the only way a system like this would form.

Incidentally, the sluice is designed for these people, who can control small objects telekinetically. An object is telekinetically inserted into each of the boxes (quick and dirty representations of pouches), and then pulled down to open the sluice and pour out the extra, unneeded water; I don't know how you'd then close it again, when you want reservoir water to stay in for using.
(THOUGHT 9/30/2018: Just have pouches on the top edge also, and be careful that they not fall into the water when they flop down after you're done--or make those ones actual metal boxes as shown here, unlike the other ones.)