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ctions in the game but to start off i ll be digging into a faction from the complementary game hordes warmachine and hordes are designed to work together and indeed are rolled together under one banner for mark iv warmachine is more about the tech side hordes is about monsters i m taking the hordes circle orboros faction and changing them up a bit instead of the standard forest monsters theme i m taking their wold stone monsters and reimagining them as a squad of beasties that protect their world s equivalent of goblin valley this means some custom units i ll be sculpting and painting and taking some of their units and painting them in a style that evokes that weird but beautiful red sandstone feeling so famous in the utah deserts tangentially i have a bunch of my own photos of goblin valley that may be of interest over on pinterest to get started then i m sculpting my own sentry stone themed around arches national park and the iconic delicate arch and double arch it s a cousin of sorts to goblin valley so it fits the theme well here then are some of my process photos for my unit meant to be a stone arch trio on a 40mm round base i started with a wooden base lasercut by a friend of mine i drilled some small holes and added some artfully mangled paper clips and a bit of superglue then came the sculpey polymer clay carefully molded and detailed by finger and toothpick after the first baking pass some sand and a burnt sienna wash i decided that i didn t like part of the interior of the large arch and sculpted in an addition after the second bake and another thin coat of burnt sienna it was time for some other light glazes in bands to get that sandstone layered look a bit more detailing and i m ready to call this done the circle blackclad druids do tend to sculpt runes into their work so i might revisit this with some runes at some point but i m undecided on the colors for that i mostly want this to stand on its own visually but the runes would help it look more consistent with the official models when i get to those this was a project i tried mostly to see if i could sculpt well enough to test the sculpey itself the paints and the paint scheme and the overall look and feel it s a bit more banded than the proper goblin valley bits will be as i proceed through the project but overall i m very happy with how it turned out i ll put together some of the mannikins with toothpicks string superglue and some sort of thing for the leaves of the original i m using juniper and bristlecone pine trees for inspiration instead of deep forest oaks and such so i may just do some pine needle sculpting or go scrounge up some actual tree bits for use on those i do have some proper models from privateer press for this project later on but i m using these homebrew experiments to nail down my process before i go all in on the painting for those models i m looking forward to doing more of this and i hope that you enjoy the trip as well thanks for stopping by posted in uncategorized tagged art hordes painting sculpting steampunk tabletop warmachine leave a comment authenticity and artifice november 30 2022 by tesh ai art was all the buzz a couple of weeks ago that chatter has died off somewhat perhaps as people got tired of the shiny new toys like midjourney and dall e 2 but it s a thing that will only get more technically impressive and practically useful as time goes on the pros and cons of that can certainly be debated but i don t think that we re going to see that genie go back into the bottle like machine learning which improves things that the money men care about in production like schedule and headcount using ai in art is a tool and a toy that is too useful to go away at least until the inevitable meltdown of society and technology and we re back to drawing on stone cave walls with charcoal tipped sticks but that s tangential steampunk floating island apocalypse via nightcafe this particular bit of buzz is of interest to me both in the abstract and professionally i worked in video game development for a decade and i m working in film at the moment i haven t had occasion to use these particular tools for anything more intense than helping my kids with homework but i do use houdini which is built on proceduralism which is more or less the engine that drives ai art i m already using a tool that takes inputs runs simulations and variations then spits out something that i can sort of art direct the computer does the heavy lifting of calculating all the bits and bobs bouncing about and if i ve set up the parameters for the procedure correctly that calculation comes up with something usable my job is then mostly about setting up the system for success and inevitably wrangling things when the computer mangles them somehow i m not drawing and painting frames like i grew up wanting to do watching the nine old men work their magic no i m a desk jockey cowboy mage desperately trying to harness eldritch powers in a digital wilderness hoping to produce something that the art director will be happy with i m using a tool to produce effects it s not the same as using a ballpoint pen on paper which i can do as seen here with my dwarven tinkerer but it s still a tool it s a tool with a bit of a mind of its own and a black box heart that i hope i can channel to great effect sometimes it does as predicted but sometimes it gets a bit flipped somewhere or an assumption inverted and things go awry this to me is the most irksome part of using such tools from a production standpoint yes the simulations get faster and faster every year the results cleaner and more useful but sometimes i just don t have the control that i have with much less ambitious and much more time consuming tools maybe i can have the spiffy ai system generate 200 different trees all variations on a theme based on growth rules and parameters but none of them are what i actually want to use for a hero tree they can be good for fillers to back up the potemkin villages that games and films build as part of their magical facades but for things that get the spotlight that uncanny valley effect where computers still don t quite get reality is still a hurdle we ve known this for a long time in film that s part of why filmmakers can get away with matte painted backgrounds and greenscreen tricks even as they spend an inordinate amount of time on actors and their makeup and lighting backgrounds can be simpler counting on viewer assumptions and interpolations to gloss over imperfections we also see a similar audience interpretation filling in the gaps when we look at concept art even masters like daniel dociu for all their incredible skill and intricate detailing still don t work out and carefully render every little detail when they produce concept art zoom in on something like his tectonic dystopia piece and note that even as he bombards the viewer with detail it doesn t always bear heavy scrutiny he s put in a lot of work but a detail like a single road is largely a suggestion a brushstroke or two maybe a few blobs or smudges and the viewer s assumptions of what a city looks like at scale fills in the mental gaps it s a fine dance between just enough detail to be plausible without having so much detail that it triggers our sense of wrongness if something s not perfect leveraging the viewer s imagination and interpretation is indeed part of dociu s mastery of his craft and while i may sound disparaging i recognize and am impressed by his genuine skill in performing such feats sometimes we want to be fooled art movements and forms of entertainment have been built on this sort of shenanigan tricking the viewer s eye like pointillism impressionism or the mental assault of cubism and lesser imitators in more modern art bluffing with balderdash to give the impression of depth the principles at play then those of dazzling with detail or overloading with obfuscation well those are age old fine art traditions when it comes to ai though it s still learning it s only as good as the material it s trained with and the assumptions built into the generation systems those assumptions aren t always built with fine art principles in mind or are built to function first rather than consider fripperies like composition emotional appeal or verisimilitude much less photoreality perhaps such considerations will continue to be folded into the frameworks of these tools but for now there is a lot of room to grow deep fake videos are one branch of the technology that is getting particularly interesting and potentially troublesome sure being able to fake tom cruise or harrison ford is a humoresque parlor trick but more nefarious uses abound in an era of political disarray and general lack of fidelity to truth there s a moral dimension to art and there always has been so it s wise to be aware of how technology can engender trust when it is not warranted again sometimes people want to be fooled though for better and worse similarly there are revolutions in animation brewing motion is especially tricky and much more likely to faceplant into the uncanny valley the technology keeps improving however as noted over here and here this will definitely make some production faster especially for midground and background crowds and such it will be interesting to see how well it fares in the foreground i m not convinced yet that it will work as well as some would like but there are already real consequences for production pipelines in the meantime however i ve found that i increasingly value authenticity from ok go s oddball music videos that bank on their intense efforts in production to wintergatan s fascinating machine from anachronistically authentic youtube gamers the older gentleman known as tinfoilchef just played minecraft the way he wanted to and built an audience that loved his affable curmudgeonly ways to hand carved woodworking i find value in things that appear to me to be genuine and honest i still carry pens and a sketchbook most places i go after all and i m almost always drawing something even if it s just odd designs to keep myself focused there is value in things that have been made by hand though whether that value can translate into a career is certainly always a question the sky isn t falling new tools mean more ways to fool people with all its attendant implications for an increasingly dysfunctional humanity all is vanity though and we must always consider truth and our own decisions it was ever thus my profession is definitely impacted and my personal interests in creative endeavors will be perturbed somewhat so i m not neutral on this i simply see yet another set of shenanigans artists have always borne responsibility to be uplifting and useful since their tools are inherently not honest as mere representations of reality far too many fail miserably at this and new tools will not compensate for moral failures those of us in the audience will always have to be wary or at least we ll have to choose which artifice we want to accept as authentic posted in art tagged ai animation art artificial intelligence authenticity author concept deep fake houdini truth 3 comments ocd mondrian cube february 16 2022 by tesh the rubik s cube was a big deal for a while when i was young nobody i knew understood how to solve it but we liked trying at least until we got tired of failing i think i managed to get the top layer solved but never made much more progress so i shelved the thing and moved on to more solvable puzzles like calculus now that i m older with children of my own i figured i ought to learn how to solve the cube i m not talking about speed solving here either learning those skills are far beyond what i want to spend time on i settled for learning the simpler algorithms that other people have devised and memorized how to solve the basic 3x3x3 standard cube as well as the 2x2x2 the megaminx dodecahedron variant and a pesky little version called the ghost cube i ve since collected a couple dozen of different iterations of the cube as well as some other oddments like a barrel and flower collectively called twisty puzzles in some corners of the internet they are a fascinating fusion of function and fun experiments with spatial and tactile troubleshooting with strong visual appeal the mechanical engineering on display is almost as fascinating as the puzzles themselves speaking of engineering take a look at oskar van deventer s work some of his puzzles look amazing and more impressively function in weird and boggling ways there s a whole world of puzzles out there and i m slowly collecting some here and there to keep my brain and fingers nimble i ve also recently taken a simple shape shifter version of the cube and inflicted a bit of graffiti on it i call it the ocd mondrian cube for now though it s more colorful than a proper mondrian painting almost more like a stained glass sort of thing as my eldest noted proper product name pending and so on etc it has two solve states but it s more precise to say that those two solved states are each half solved you can either make it into a nice smooth cube scrambling the colors or you can group the colors in the six cardinal directions scrambling the shape you cannot solve for the shape and the colors at the same time it will either drive your ocd mad or overload it and help you relax maybe even allowing you to just play with the thing and find a completely unsolved state that you can find beauty in i m not sure how it would actually work with someone vexed with such a psychological condition so it may be more trouble than it s worth for some people to be sure even so i m fond of the thing and i ve half a mind to see about getting it made more officially than this permanent marker version i ve prototyped puzzles are good for the brain i think there s value in learning methodical approaches to problem solving and i see some extra value in this half solvable mutant i ve cobbled together sometimes life simply doesn t have simple solutions you can optimize for one thing but you have to let something else go i believe it s a valuable life lesson to learn that sometimes solving things doesn t mean they are then perfect sometimes good enough truly is enough and while we re commanded to be perfect in holy writ that s only something we can do with divine help sometimes all we can do is make life a little bit better or simply find joy in the journey posted in art tagged art cube design philosophy puzzle rubik s leave a comment inktober 2021 the scarbots week one october 8 2021 by tesh i introduced the scarbots a bit last time and have since produced a couple more of them i ll save today s for next time but these two get to join their brethren to finish up week one of inktober 2021 i had a little more time on these so i managed to finish up the inkwork i do clean them up a bit before coloring them so that ll wait but for now that s 7 new scarbots in the sketchbook for the year posted in art gam...