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I do stuff in Blender,

If you're an artist and are having trouble building followers, especially if you're new on tumblr or back after leaving, reblog this with some of your art. It will be visible to everyone checking the notes. Everyone keep checking the notes and follow whoever puts their cool art in them. People keep telling me I'm Tumblr famous so maybe this helps!

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Genuinely love how the new Blender "Metallic" material node looks. Gonna get a lot of use out of the edge-tint thing!

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PLUS - I post DIFFERENT tutorials, tips and references that I DON'T post here EVERY DAY on OUR INSTAGRAM HERE and OUR GIANT TWITTER HERE! and on TIKTOK HERE

 PLUS! HERE'S 300 EXTRA FREE TUTORIALS!

Lorenzo!

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Well now~

Edit: Ok I looked up Gabor noise, and it's like. Really cool but also kinda gross? Like it kinda reminds me of maggots.

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Idk if anyone else is noticing this, but I've been seeing a big uptick in artists emerging or changing their work/style to be more imperfect and unrealistic in the last few years, as a response to the kind of art that AI is capable of generating.

Like yeah it's kind of awful to be dealing with the tech, I think it's really wonderful to see the birth of a new art movement. I'm almost certain that in the next 10 years or so we'll see a clear division between pre- and post- AI digital art, and that's really cool!

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Portraits for various Bionicle characters in the style of the Toa Disks from 2004! Most of them were traced from Studio screenshots (credits for any custom masks used are below)

Made in Xara Designer Pro X9.

More information below.

Image 1

Apart from Vakama's (which is a recreation of the print from the set, based on a picture from Bricklink), all the Metru disks are traced from on their respective Gold Canister designs from Bionicle Heroes, hence their shoulders connecting to the corner circles at different heights and some having sloped shoulders. Their background colours are based on their Turaga designs' primary colour.

@nattarthetimedragon suggested I do the Metrutoran disks, so I did. I decided to give Ehrye's mask a scope and remove Orkahm's.

The Mata were actually the second ones I did; I moved them down to accommodate the Metrutoran. The scratches around their icons are all the same ones, just rotated slightly. I couldn't be bothered to draw new ones, and I didn't put the scratches on any of the other ones.

I was going to do the Inika and the Mahri, but I couldn't get the set-accurate Inika masks to look good in this style, so I scrapped them. Remember this for later.

And by later, I mean now; instead of doing 1:1 adaptations of the Kadin and Suletu, I messed with the layout and design of their features to create my own personal "inorganic" designs for them; the Kadin's "mouth" is replaced with a pair of horizontal lines next to a mouth-hole, and the Suletu is symmetrical and has several Matatu-style mouth-lines angled to resemble the original mask's teeth. Their eyes have also been moved slightly. Originally, Varian's Calix was the same, but it didn't look good so I replaced it with Galva's Inorganic Calix Redux.

Image 2

The masks used as references for Gaaki, Bomonga, Pouks and Kualus are Rothanak's most recent interpretation of Gaaki's mask (which isn't actually meant to be what a Mask of Clairvoyance looks like, like it's canon that it's a Mask of Clairvoyance, but one in the shape of a different, unspecified mask), Galva's non-aquatic Faxon and champion Kakama, and Bigphan's Mask of Sensory Aptitude, respectively.

I wanted to do Nidhiki's mutated form, but I couldn't figure out how it would work in this style so instead I did an alternate version based on Rothanak's Kualsi/Volitak hybrid. Also Tuyet's designs are based on both of Galva's Mask of Intangibility designs (normal Tuyet is the original one, while Empress!Tuyet is the updated version).

I don't really have any notes for the third row. Moving on,

I worked on the fourth row simultaneously with the one below it. Also trying to differentiate Icarax from Teridax was pretty hard to figure out.

I'm not massively proud with how Gorast turned out, but otherwise. Yeah this is fine.

Image 3

For the Chronicler's Company, I went with their MNOG II masks and colour schemes.

@nattarthetimedragon also suggested that I do Turaga versions of the Metru Disks, so I did that. The boxy parts next to the "shoulders" are meant to evoke the way the Turaga robes look in the Miramax movies, as well as the Turaga's rectangular bodies in their sets.

Artakha's mask is based on Galva's canon Mask of Creation, and Karzahni's Olisi is based on Godfyr's Olisi (with elements of the original illustration). Tren Krom's icon is inspired by his description on Biosector, along with how I personally imagine him looking; also, unlike all the other icons, his colours aren't sampled from Studio. At this point I ran out of ideas, hence why the third image only has like two and a half rows instead of five.

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the author's barely disguised longing for a kinder world

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Cool Paint.NET tip: go to Effects -> Colour -> Quantise and then set Algorithm to "Median Cut", Colours to 16, Dithering Level to 1 and Transparency Threshold to 0.

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workshopping an issue nobody is having (making gradient maps look nicer)

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Recreating Wii-style compression sure is painful, huh?

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It's so wild thinkin about how I was so caught up in the idea of 'finding my style' as a kid. I just drew the same things over and over hoping eventually it would look exactly how I wanted and I'd finally have my style, then I could draw the things I really wanted to. Everything you draw is in your style. Style isn't a thing that you find that stays static forever, it's always evolving as you improve and figure out how you like to draw things. It finds you, and it'll keep finding you as long as you keep drawing

anyway everyone should draw whatever they want forever and ever until the sun explodes <3

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Anthro Mecha Universe in a nutshell because I am very far from having the first arc plotted out but I want to talk about it.

At some point Kaiju happen for some reason, probably science related. The first one to arrive is an eldritch abomination that creates portals, and a few of that flavour still occur, but most are either pollution-mutants, demons, angels, science-mutants or rogue AIs.

Everyone is anthropomorphic animals, except invertebrates, which fill the roles taken by regular non-anthropomorphic animals (with one exception that I'll get into later).

There's also a fascist government who are slowly invading and taking over independent regions, kinda like a more evil version of the NCR from New Vegas. They're called the New Argent Federation, and their president is Luther Blake (he/him, 65, saltwater crocodile). He has an underling who is basically a cross between Darth Vader, the Auditor from Brigador, and Pyro from TF2, piloting a mech that looks a bit like Necrozma.

Mech pilots are usually sorted into teams, kinda inspired by Sonic. Each team has a minimum of three pilots, though the number of mechs can be lower since some require multiple pilots (which is taken to extremes by Ironclad, a gigantic warship-themed mech piloted by 50 people). Mechs have different classes, but I won't be talking about them in this post because I can't be bothered.

The main team is Burst Team, composed of people who lack formal training, but still know how to do mech stuff mostly. The members are Stella Fawkes (she/her, 24, goblin shark), pilot of the Stygia, which is made partially out of old boats, submarines and diving mechs; Jim Autumn (he/him, 22, potoo), pilot of the Crimson Star, which he inherited from his mother after she retired; and Sue Simons (she/they, 23, moray eel), pilot of a mech I haven't named yet, which is designed for kaiju research but has had a giant rifle haphazardly bolted to the front.

Their rivals are Rage Team, who are all nepo-babies who pilot advanced mechs equipped with powerful but impractical weapons. The members are Harry Valero (he/him, 23, ocelot), pilot of the Valero Veloce MKIII Concept, an experimental high-speed mech; Miranda Jensen (she/her, 26, fox), pilot of the Starlet, a more humanoid mech with giant wings; and Brad Octavius (he/him, 25, rhinoceros), pilot of a mech I haven't named yet, which is a combat mech using parts from sports mechs.

Survivor Team are like. Pilots who were injured in the course of being a pilot, but kept doing it regardless. While I won't list all their members (because it would take too long and also the roster is far from complete), I do want to highlight Greg Phoenix (he/him, 53, kiwi), whose wife died during battle with a particularly powerful kaiju; he used parts of her mech to upgrade his own one, and named the result "Barbara" in memory of her. Also one of the characters is a Frogfish called Cora Reeve.

Terror Team are the big scary elite dudes, who are also big celebrities, with merch and sponsorships and stuff.

Advance Team are a bunch of giant neeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrds! Their mechs are more experimental (e.g a perfectly-spherical design with stretchy limbs so it can travel far distances quicker, and the body of a dead kaiju that's piloted by an electric eel who uses his natural electricity to puppet it).

Unity Team are just like a vague concept I have at the moment, but basically they have seven members in colour-coded mechs that can fuse together into a larger robot because Power Rangers (and also like. Sentai and Voltron and stuff) pastiche.

Outlier Team are the most interesting, as their members are all from species who aren't standard anthropomorphic animals, including a dimensionally-displaced human, a genetically-modified crab with full sapience and an inexplicable New York accent, an alien from a eusocial species with hundreds of genders, and an ancient robot that resembles an opabinia.

The Kaiju incident is called "The Intrusion", and started with an interdimensional worm monster emerging through a portal, which caused pollutive chemicals to become a powerful mutagen, alerted the setting's equivalents of Heaven and Hell, caused bioengineered creatures to mutate and escape from a lab that's still producing them, and made all the AIs in charge of various facilities go rogue. The results are Pollution (mutated invertebrates mostly, though sapient beings can also become Pollution Kaiju with prolonged exposure to the mutagen or if they eat the flesh of one), Dimensional (Kaiju from other dimensions or even between dimensions, with impossibly alien appearances and, if this ends up being a webcomic or whatever, different artstyles/mediums), Demonic (self-explanatory; in my document about all the characters, I describe them as having "Lots of flames, magma, mouths, leathery wings, pieces of brutalist architecture, masses of flesh, insect limbs, dangling chains, horns"), Angelic (again, self-explanatory; in my document about all the characters, I describe them as having "Lots of clouds, crystals, eyes, feathery wings, pieces of gothic architecture, intricate stained-glass panels, sea slug tentacles, flowing cloth, halos"), Biotech (biomechanical, in a similar way to the Combine Synths from Half-Life 2), and AI (literally just artificial intelligences that were originally in charge of facilities and stuff, but went rogue during The Intrusion and have built themselves bodies) Kaiju.

There's an ancient civilisation of prehistoric vertebrates who had robots based on prehistoric invertebrates (which also filled the roles of animals), as well as "walking buildings" that are essentially early mechs, consisting of Greco-Roman buildings held up by large, articulated statues.

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One thing I didn’t expect from my new worldbuilding book is the author, roughly my dad’s age, including his opinions on furries

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My brain is so silly sometimes, like for some reason I sometimes try using Xara's keyboard shortcuts in Blender (I guess because vector art is basically the 2D equivalent of 3D art?) leading to me trying to use CTRL+2 to subtract objects when in Blender that subdivides instead, or pressing CTRL+K, which in Xara creates a duplicate of the selected object but which I don't think actually does anything in Blender (feel free to correct me on that).

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i dont consider myself a 'fashion guru' by any means but one thing i will say is guys you dont need to know the specific brand an item you like is - you need to know what the item is called. very rarely does a brand matter, but knowing that pair of pants is called 'cargo' vs 'boot cut' or the names of dress styles is going to help you find clothes you like WAAAYYYY faster than brand shopping

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Cool new thing I know how to do in Blender; normally if you get a Camera Data material node and plug the View Vector output into a texture's Vector input, it just kinda looks like the object that the texture's applied to is "cut out" of the image, with the texture showing as a flat image that stays static when panning, rotating etc.

But if you then put the View Distance output into the Scale input, the texture still stays static relative to panning, rotating etc., but it also distorts to match the contours of the object, which looks really cool in motion and is probably very useful for animators (I can't show it because you can't export video from Blender, and I don't want to have to render and then edit together like 50 pngs just to showcase a cool material).

Nodes are below for anyone who wants to try this for themselves.

Also if you want to mess with the size of the pattern, I recommend putting a Math node (set to Multiply) between the View Distance and Scale:

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Cool new thing I know how to do in Blender; normally if you get a Camera Data material node and plug the View Vector output into a texture's Vector input, it just kinda looks like the object that the texture's applied to is "cut out" of the image, with the texture showing as a flat image that stays static when panning, rotating etc.

But if you then put the View Distance output into the Scale input, the texture still stays static relative to panning, rotating etc., but it also distorts to match the contours of the object, which looks really cool in motion and is probably very useful for animators (I can't show it because you can't export video from Blender, and I don't want to have to render and then edit together like 50 pngs just to showcase a cool material).

Nodes are below for anyone who wants to try this for themselves.

Also if you want to mess with the size of the pattern, I recommend putting a Math node (set to Multiply) between the View Distance and Scale: