Watermelon Babies

This is a thing i doodled today since we are close to 4000 children dead in Gaza today.
Tried to avoid gory imagery… and try something… a little unusual.


Heres the 3d model, made with Blender and Krita.

Watermelon babies by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

As of 3 November, according to Ministry of Health data, 2326 women and 3760 children have been killed in the Gaza strip, representing 67% of all casualties, while thousands more have been injured. This means that 420 children are killed or injured every day, some of them only a few months old.
- Unicef https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/joint-statement-unicef-who-unfpa-and-unrwa-women-and-newborns-bearing-brunt-conflict

The use of watermelon as a symbol of resistance in Palestine dates back to the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel seized control of the West Bank and Gaza and annexed East Jerusalem. The Israeli government made public displays of the Palestinian flag a criminal offense in Gaza and the West Bank.

Upskilling in Metaverse Tech

In the past year I have explored various platforms and identified skillsets necessary for an artist/creator working with the metaverse. Have conducted experiments to evaluate various platforms and begun learning platforms that are going to be central to this ever evolving landscape.

This includes:
Mainstream game engines – Unreal and Unity
Upcoming platforms such as – Spaces.io and many more.

Progress so far:
Have successfully adapted a 3d scene to work across 3platforms – Unity, Unreal and Spatial

The original scene was born from this sketch.


It was refined and eventually finished piece of 2d concept art.


This was later translated to 3d in Blender using a stylized hand painted texture workflow.



https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/antler-treehouse-green-8ff31b7491634956bbeb22479e6d4a1c
(click to view the 3d model)

The transfer to metaverse platforms and game engines can be seen below:

Unity 3d

 

Unreal Engine



 Spatial can be viewed in 3d at
https://www.spatial.io/s/Antler-Tree-House-6418cbd943e17c7d39f12d3d?share=4018731400729634205

Project Spark

It is a fresh morning on Mars. In his lair, Spark begins his morning routine - oiling his rusty joints and reading last prints of the books he salvaged. His friend Bibi awaits with a little prank! Explore the Martian landfill together with the robot protagonists. First episode of the adventures of Spark & Bibi.

Spark & Bibi by Conrad Justin on Sketchfab

On computer, middle click and drag to pan, or use the annotation arrows to hop around
On touch screen, 2 fingers
(its real-time, so you can zoom in, rotate etc..)


This movie took over a year to create and was a collaboration project between Sketchfab artists:

Lead artist, storyboarding, modelling, rough animating: Conrad Justin https://sketchfab.com/ConradJustin

Modelling, animating: Igor Puškarić https://sketchfab.com/iggy-design
Observatory concept: Chaitanya Krishnan (me) https://sketchfab.com/chaitanyak
Bones and gears: Terrie Simmons https://sketchfab.com/terrielsimmons
Several pipes: dark-minaz https://sketchfab.com/dark-minaz
Ideas, support: Tycho https://sketchfab.com/Tycho_Magnetic_Anomaly

Was fortunate to be part of the team that worked on this fantastic realtime animation short.


My addition was this floating observatory .. sort of in a shattered reality kind of stasis.. like if the base of the tower was a lab where a wierd experiment went wrong and wiped out the lab and froze time in that area

For a detailed breakdown of the whole project check out 
https://sketchfab.com/blogs/community/art-spotlight-spark-bibi/

The team presented this project at Blender Conference here

 - https://conference.blender.org/2023/presentations/1902/

Under Strange Suns

Was working on these creatures with this year's Atomhawk contest theme in mind.. wasn't sure if I would be able to get it to a "finished" stage.. but here it is. 

A lone centaur scout arrives on a strange world.

Started with a couple of VR sculpts in Masterpiece VR that started to make sense coming together with a similar color palette as I started painting them in Blender. 

This is the Centaur character:

Centaur ver2 by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

And this is one of the flying creatures

Flyer - NPR by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

These are the final images I submitted:

And finally here is  step by step breakdown of my process:

Owl Spirit

 

Owl Spirit by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

  Did this one in Open brush. heres the original technicolor mess !


And heres the process video
 

and then modified in blender.. some minor posing and material groups.

Re-did the lighting and colors in Sketchfab to make it more presentable..

then went back to blender, did a basic rig and animated it.

GunMech

Tried a different coloring method this time… Working with a predominant dark base.. added high contrast colored elements.

GunMech by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

Centaur

 

Had an odd issue with this sculpt.. ran out of canvas space.. and couldn't figure out how to scale it and reposition in VR. Managed it eventually.

Then took it to Blender for some texture painting

Heres the final piece

Centaur by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

VR Sculpt after a long break…

 Finally got my VR rig up and running after a really long time.

One of the first things I created is this flying creature..

Flyer by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

Loaded that VR Sculpt into Blender and did some non photoreal style painting..

Heres the final model:

Flyer - NPR by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

Ai tool - Leonardo Ai

Decided to give Ai tools a shot. Hear me out.
After months of denouncing ai generated art.. I am not giving up the fight. Just realigning realistically as someone who has to teach the next generation of artists how to deal with this new paradigm. So this will definitely be a work in progress.

I don't support copyright infringement, so I have been looking into ai tools that let you train your own model. This means an ai model that is not trained on questionable sources like the dataset used by stable diffusion ..

That said I haven't trained this model with my own data yet, am using the default texturing model that is in Alpha.. hopefully eventually it will be trainable. At which point I will proceed to train it to texture paint in my style. These experiments are an exploration of the possibilities of me working with ai the way I would collaborate with a human texture artist. Am not sure this is something i will include in my professional practice. Likely not. However with out exploring it myself I dont think I should take a stand for/against it.

So here are the results.

I used LeonardoAi's texture generator 

It works with a 3d model you provide(with UVs alreadycreated), and generates texture maps -albedo, normals, displacement, roughness and HDRP

The two models I tested are some sculpts I did during sculptjanuary 2023 and 2020 .. these sculpts are typical for this kind of use case scenario: 

I created a sculpt, but dont have the time or patience to retopologise and then uv. So, I do a quick and dirty decimate process to reduce the polycount and then do automatic uvs.. I didnt even assign seams.

Handed these models to Leonardo.ai along with prompts and this is what it did..

The Nine Tail Fox I made in 2020
Heres the original sculpt

and heres the version textured by ai 
using the prompt - "japanese water color and ink painting of nine tail fox"

You can view the 3d models below

Sculpt January 2020 Jan 13 - Folklore by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

Texturing Experiment with AI - Nine Tail Fox by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

The other model I worked with was a sculpt of a fish from Sculptjanuary 2023 as seen below

007 Fish by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

Here are the ai generated texture art variants

Partly made with Artificial Intelligence tools by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

I find that as a tool for quickly exploring an idea before sinking hours of manual labor into it, and then going in on the final artwork manually or painting over.. is a workflow many will be adopting .. immediately.. theres no avoiding it. especially when you can train the model on your own style.

So why havnt I trained it with my own data yet? 
Short answer: There are risks to that.. that need to be considered.

Stay tuned. 

3d scans and NeRF from Bangkok

Sometime in 2019 I travelled to Bangkok with my team for a documentary project. While there we went on a boat ride through a river canal and passed a lot of old and new river front houses.. each had a nice jetty or balcony like structure over the water. At first I was shooting stills, then realised that if I shot slow motion video footage.. I might be able to generate photogrammetry data from them. Later that day at the hotel room I stayed up late trying to get it to work. It did'nt not on any of the apps or software I had been using for my other photogrammetry projects. 

Then last night I discovered Luma labs ai NeRF solution that runs in the browser. 
Here are the results.
Original footage:

NeRF:

This is the panorama you get from Lumalabs

And here's the model


Heres an mp4 of the NeRF (until I find a better way of sharing these)


Heres a low poly(they have a higher poly version as well) 3d model:

Bangkok Riverside House 003 by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

Heres a point cloud

Bangkok Riverside House 001 Point Cloud by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

International womens day

Imagine a gender equal world

A world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination
A world that's diverse, equitable, and inclusive
A world where difference is valued and celebrated
Lets #EmbraceEquity this International Women's Day

#iwd2023 #womensday #interweaveconsulting

Comissioned by Interweave
Story by Prashant Sankaran
Artwork by Sanjana Unni
Art directed by Chaitanya Krishnan(myself)

Metamorphosis

Worked with artist Archit Vaze and 20 students on this project over the last few weeks. Essentially a 10day crash course in Blender that led to a finished 3min short. We will be screening it on 2 days at physical locations this month and then will do an online launch eventually. More updates including screening dates will be here and on the project's instagram page .

The Process:

Archit had been working on this for a while, and had done a colossal amount of the preproduction by the time he showed it to me.

So by the time we were discussing it, it was clear that we just needed to get into production mode. Srishti has what is called an interim semester, which as the name suggests is a semester that is between two others. The others are the teaching semesters and this is the one where practice is given a focus. So Srishti invites designers, artists and practitioners to come and conduct a project on campus that students can be a part of, thus learn by doing. 

Metamorphosis was thus pitched as an Interim semester project that students could sign up for. We got 20 sign ups.

Most of the students were using Blender for the first time. It took them a few days to get good at what they needed to do.
We started them off with the modelling, this was a unique and somewhat alien experience for some, though eventually they all got the hang of it. 

Next came a crash course in texture painting and shaders. This was a fairly abstract concept, that took some time and a lot of patience from everybody. As you may have guessed we were going for a very stylised #npr (non photo real) look, this required some amount of thought and planning to figure out what colors work, what kind of lighting would work etc.

Last was the animation and grease-pencil work. Here I took the students through basic motion tweening, shape keys and simple rigs. Our characters did not need complex rigs, in most cases even IK chains were not required. It was the perfect recipe for a beginner's introduction to 3d animation.

By now most of them were comfortable with Blender and were starting to see things coming together for the final film.

Various methods of tracking progress and wrangling shots were employed, but finally it came down to a whiteboard.

The sound design was handled by animator Ranjitha Rajeevan and Sound designer Sonal S. We went through an iterative process with them, and reworked the timing on some shots based on what was working with the sound track.
Essentially the final edit was executed by Ranjitha over a few sleepless nights.

Heres the team that worked on it:

UPDATE 27th Jan:
For the final screening we installed a led screen in a faculty's front porch so that the film could be seen by the local residents.


UPDATE February 10, 2023:

You can now view a trailer for the film on Instagram or below

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Metamorphosis Srishti Manipal Interim ’23 (@metamorphosis.blend)

UPDATE June 27, 2023:

The film was awarded the Quarterfinalist position for Best Super Short Film the SWIFF2023 festival.

Heres the mail we received today - 

Hello Metamorphosis,

Congratulations! On behalf of the SWIFF team, I am thrilled to share with you that you received an award for your film, Metamorphosis, at SWIFF 2023: Quarter-Finalist Award in the Best Super short film category. Among the films from 120 countries competing in this year's showcase, we are excited to award your film, Metamorphosis, with the Quarter-Finalist Award.

Metamorphosis was well received by all of our judges at

SWIFF, and we were highly impressed with your work.

Heres a neat announcement poster by Archit along with one that has some cool stats about the project and the team that was working on it.