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