2023

Art

Mardini 2023

SideFX Mardini Winners Page

I participated in Mardini for the first time in 2023. I placed 2nd and 3rd for Best Images at the end! It was an excellent opportunity to create art after more than a year of only building tools.

The Prompts

Round, linear, obtuse, rough, smooth for shapes. Rock, mud, sand, river, wave, grass, trees for nature. Bounce, grow, leap, crash, flow, tumble, run for motion. Bulb, stage, reflect, shadow, fog, beam, halo for light. Finally, ancient, urban, rural, fantasy, sci-fi for worlds.

Day 1: Round. A crystal ball for the beginning of what I hoped would be a story for the prompts, but that turned out to be too difficult to pull off.
Day 2: Linear. A linear composition! Continuing the theme I started in the first couple days, going for a fortune teller feel.
Day 3: Obtuse. The last day that I tried to follow the theme, it just got to be too much. Really like the mystic sign model and might try doing something with it later.
Day 4: Rough. I figured a statue would work really well for this so I took one off sketchfab (credit can be found below) and cleaned it up + integrated it into a larger environment (if you can call it that when you're not doing comp..)
Day 5: Smooth. Does anyone else ever look at the cream on top of a cupcake and think "mmm yes, smooth" but then upon closer inspection realize that it's not particularly smooth? I took this chance to buy a cupcake from a local cafe and use it for experimenting with photogrammetry. I tried using Alicevision for processing but wasn't satisfied with the result. Got something okay out of Substance Sampler, but ultimately used Reality Capture with 70 photos to get it made up.
Day 6: Rocks. "Jesus Christ Marie! They're minerals! Not rocks!"⁣ Wait, wrong Breaking Bad reference... all the same, the blue meth looks like rocks when it's all broken up (and that's how I made it too). It was also made from sugar for the props and it apparently tasted horrible.
Day 7: Mud. "While time traveling was the intended goal, it seems the DeLorean managed to hop dimensions as well... to its end." I've had this idea for years at this point which I was finally able to create through this prompt.
Day 8: Sand. This wasn't a particularly inspired image, but creating sand dunes was a fun exercise all the same.
Day 9: River. I'm up in Canada and a friend posted an image that had this sort of feel from somewhere around Banff. Frozen river counts right? I think it captures a good mood anyhow.
Day 10: Wave. I wanted to design something that could feasibly be laser cut out of acrylic or handmade with layered glass. Really pleasantly surprised by the result! Trying to cut down on the time it takes to make these, but ran into weird issues because of rendering transmission.
Day 11: Grass. There is a park in my city that I love to go to in the summer. It's quite overgrown, quite wild, and I wanted to make something that reminded me of it. This was my first time making VDB clouds in Houdini, and first time trying to make a cloud shader. Weird process, took a lot of tweaking but fun to know how to do!
Day 12: Trees. I really thoroughly enjoyed making this one! Landmarks like the Tunnel of Love in Ukraine inspired this.
Day 13: Bounce. Possibly one of the worst kinds of bounces to experience... Two things inspired this: Swiss countryside and more locally, a story about the town of Franks Slide in southern Alberta. 100~ years ago, the side of a mountain more or less broke away and destroyed the town. It's a bit of a morbid tourist attraction now, you can go to jump on the rocks (dare I say it's fun? lol)
Day 14: Grow. Now for something a bit different. And wrong. Don't wanna have this kind of growth going on... Used a digital double I made a while back as the base and grew stuff out of it, much fun.
Day 15: Leap. "Wildlife photography is hard. Sometimes you can line up the shot and the subject has other plans..." Leap is so similar to bounce that I found it to be quite challenging. Happy with the result though!
Day 16: Crash. Eric didn't land this one...
Day 17: Flow. Modelled a whole darn snake! Was experimenting with a cosine gradient algorithm that can be found here: https://iquilezles.org/articles/palettes/ Wanted to play a lot with jittering color, vop noise and other techniques to get as much variation for as little effort as possible.
Day 18: Tumble. This was mostly an exercise to learn some new techniques with Vellum. Really tempted to render an animation of this one, because it's quite fun.
Day 19: Run. Honey running over succulents?
Day 20: Bulb. Reversed the idea of a lightbulb symbolizing having an idea... or something. Really liked how this turned out.

Credits:

- The frog 3D model in the image for "Rough" came from here.
- The DeLorean 3D model in the image for "Mud" came from here.
- The frog 3D model in the image for "Leap" came from here.
- The bike 3D model in the image for "Crash" came from here.
- "The Thinker" by Rodin seen in the image "Bulb" came from here.