Here's a visualization of global winds and precipitations on September 1st, 2019 (when [Hurricane Dorian](https://tinyurl.com/y3jewqqt) was hovering over the Bahamas, off the coast of Florida).

* Created in Python (using Matplotlib, NetCDF4, Scipy and Numpy modules)
* Public wind and precipitation data from the [NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis](https://tinyurl.com/y6mfqr6f)
* Wind particles colored according to speed (using Matplotlib "inferno" colormap)
* Rain particles scattered according to the precipitation rate

The seamless-loop effect was achieved by periodically spawning the particles at their initial location on a time range greater than the animation, and subsampling this time range before export. This effect was further enhanced by fading each particle's color to black at their birth and death, and using the "Additive" opacity in Sketchfab material settings to hide black points.

*PS: for Python enthusiasts, I've uploaded a [script to preview point cloud animations locally](https://tinyurl.com/yhyuuqev) !*

A Windy Day

![Imgur](https://i.imgur.com/pt9vSUA.jpg)
*Sample render in blender cycles: 10k particles - 2880x750 - 256 samples - ~7min on i7, 16gb RAM and GTX1060*

&nbsp;

A collection of 282 (A.K.A more than you'll ever need) lowpoly people. Allright. Who cares. **Where is waldo?!**, that's the real question!

Automagically remeshing body scans to lowpoly assets (check out my growing collection of [free assets](https://skfb.ly/6yQSW)!), which can be used for archviz placeholders.

Each model has its origin located at its feet, so that placement in a scene is made easy. However, some refined scaling is probably needed as some children have become giants in the process...

Original scans from @FrancescoPusterla @fablabbudapestitseez3d @jc @my3dworld @justin.levitz @peel-3d.com @deathlessvr @myminimate @3DCap @onepoint @fwild @marpi @conjurer @thor3D @vitronic @3dhubs @codame @benhaim - all licensed under CC-attribution.

Lowpoly People + Waldo

Yunnan Province, China, ~518 million years old.

<i>Vetulicola</i> had a large **body** with triangular **pouches** on either side and a segmented **tail** for swimming. The pouches may be gill slits opening into an internal body chamber, as found in modern tunicates, such as sea squirts and salps. It is thought that <i>Vetulicola</i> fed by drawing water in through the wide frontal opening to internally filter microscopic food particles suspended in water, with waste water expelled through the side pouches.

Created for the First Animals exhibition at Oxford University Museum of Natural History: www.oum.ox.ac.uk/firstanimals

Model by Mighty Fossils: www.mightyfossils.com

Vetulicola cuneata

Yunnan Province, China, ~518 million years old.

*Cotyledion* lived on the sea floor, using **tentacles** to feed on particles suspended in the water. Some individuals have been found attached to small fragment of trilobites. The overall body shape, presence of tentacles surrounding the mouth and U-shaped gut, are characters that unite *Cotyledion* with entoprocts – a modern group of animals that measure less than a centimetre across.

Created for the First Animals exhibition at Oxford University Museum of Natural History: www.oum.ox.ac.uk/firstanimals

Model by Mighty Fossils: www.mightyfossils.com

Cotyledion tylodes

A collection of reprocessed scanned animal skulls ([other free assets here](https://skfb.ly/6yQSW)), initally designed to be used as as game props, particles or for optimized renderings. 

**BUT**:  the method I used for remeshing and texture baking was not adapted in this case, and many normal inversions for instance have happened. Moreover, as these assets were batch-processed, I neglected some parts of the material, hence some black zones on the scans... 

You can of course still use them for your projects, but know that the quality on those baked models is not that good! Plus 1024px is too few for those complex objects...

Each model is made of 2500 triangles, and 1024 pixels albedo and normal maps.

The original scans were first remeshed with [mmgs](http://mmgtools.org), and decimated, UV unwrapped and baked in blender. Normal maps are ready to use for Unreal Engine, don't forget to flip their green channel in Unity!

All the original scans come from the great collection of UVic Libraries - @uviclib .

Lowpoly Animal Skulls - 1

Cute plush teddy bear toys
Brown / white with a ribbon

Render example with hair particles using blender: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cbu5vf_NF8c/

rigged posed model
made with Blender

Teddy bears

Educational project

Main study areas:

* 3d modelling of middle-complexity hardsurface object (bycicle), 
* texturing process (substance painter) and texture baking, 
* particles distribution (blender), 
* creating trees of a custom shape with prcedural workflow (built-in sappling addon) and creating planar foliage for tree (branches with leafs) 
* and overall environment setup for a small scene.

Main assets:

* Bycicle (4k x 4)- may be used as a background asset (a bit clunky geometry. Was reusing geometry from my old beginner's project)
* Bench, lantern, bin, package, tree (varies 4k-2k) - quality varies, can be used as a backround assets.
* Street elements, such as road, pavement and etc are hardly reusable..

Feedback is welcome :P

Sidewalk

> *"...I thought no one lived there. Sure looked abandoned way before the big plastic flood of '56. The last house on that sunken coast we can still see now... Some say it is haunted, someone trapped there back then, still sending distress signals..."*
 
**Turn on sound for more spooks and HD textures for the best look!**

Made with Blender 2.9 (process video here : twitter.com/DonzeMichel/status/1322180034833121280?s=20)

A few addons that helped a lot :

[Vertex Color Master](https://github.com/andyp123/blender_vertex_color_master) by Andrew Palmer

Bake Vertex Color by Daniel Bystedt

[Bake particles to mesh script](https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/167633) by Spiraloid

[Links to the licensed sounds used and processed in the mix](https://linkslist.app/MKOyiyc)

The house lost at sea

Wanted to make use of the long rendering time for commissioned work, so I decided to upload my recent castle build.

Minecraft 1.11 Map Download:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/l22h2a50ptt8yi9

*****

This build project was originally just a gradient palette test using the quartz, bone, mushroom stem, and diorite block. Then I decided to make a castle using that palette, with the angular roof style similar to the Minas Morgul of the LotR series. I've added animated gates with soundeffects using command blocks, and custom monsters that spawns randomly in the castle.

Unfortunately had to change the design before uploading because Mineways doesn't export armorstands, shulker boxes, and custom textured player heads.

*****

Built in Minecraft ver 1.11 using default texture. Map clean up with WorldEdit and MCEdit. Exported with Mineways (still getting misplaced blocks). Unwrapped uv in ZBrush. AO, light, and gradient map (for fake fog) baked in 3ds Max. Beacon light beam and snow particles added in 3ds Max.

Frostbone Keep

After The God Particle...

Going on with some tests for the animation of an underwater scene, this time playing with particle system and forces in blender (with which I am not very familiar). 

The particle system I used to create this shoal of fish is set with a simple fish model (same as [Abstract aquarium](https://skfb.ly/6ypzL)) as render object. 

The fish particle system was set to a "**Boids**" physics, and tweaking parameters gave the unique fish a smooth movement. A **vortex force field** was then added to the scene to create the swirling motion on the particles. I also added a collision domain (as a cube) to make sure that no fish went outside of a specified volume, but it proved unnecessary...

I still have to figure out how to properly export keyframed animations to a fbx file, as the only file I managed to obtain was a 120MB one (for a < 100 tris fish model). A python script which has helped me is [here](https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/7142), but it does not pass the export phase very well...

The Fish Particle

Yet another nice looking pointcloud ;)

Those latest models are just the results of me testing stuff to update and improve a small C++ particle simulations code I previously used to create [this model ("Need some space?")](https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/need-some-space-d6521362b37b48e3a82bce4911409303). 

I've made the code a bit more robust and easier to setup, tweak, and run... And I've just fixed some huge memory leaks and drastically improved its performance, Yipiii !

Particles Tests - 1

Making progress on underwater scenes ( but still more to come :) ) !

[Original scan](https://skfb.ly/6suDz) from @ariosgeo, and inspiration from [Il Cristo degli Abissi](https://goo.gl/RU5PtJ), a submerged statue of Jesus in Italy.

**Modeling**:

* The scan was remeshed with [mmgs](http://mmgtools.org) from 500k verts to 7k, keeping the face and hands at a higher resolution.
* The ocean surface and ground were created with blender's ocean modifier.
* Light shafts are simply a randomized array of elongated planes.
* The fish is a lowpoly model ( a 30s model ).
* A particle system was created for fish instances, with force fields applied (boids physics, vortex, attraction force and collision on the statue)

**Texturing/lighting**:

* Mix of concrete and coral on the statue
* Sand on the ground
* Nothing on the sea surface
* Radial opacity for ground and surface
* Voronoi textures baked as emission on the statue and the ground, to simulate the light deformation through water
* Lots of color processing

Christ of the Abyss

Particles Tests - 2

Free high-poly liquid splash mesh.
Had a recent project where I had to learn using X-Particles. these are the results of days of watching tutorials, simulations, & trial and error.
Enjoy.

Liquid Splash 2

A little scene tightly inspired (badly copied/recreated) from the animated video-clip of ["Bouche à lèvres"](https://youtu.be/OrvkJJc4yLc) (warning: contains nudity) by **Odezenne**, one of my favorite french bands.

The clip was directed by [Vladimir Mavounia-Kouka](https://www.vladimirmavouniakouka.com/), and gives a crude view of the fear and anticipation of fatherhood depicted in the song.

The woman in this model is from makehuman, and the assets were naively modeled in blender, then scattered with a simple particle system.

"Bouche à lèvres"

High poly liquid splash mesh 3.
Had a recent project where I had to learn using X-Particles. these are the results of days of watching tutorials, simulations, & trial and error.
Enjoy.

Liquid Splash 3

Given the recent scientific news and the fact that I'm on the "experimenting with volumetrics" path, I figured out that trying to reproduce space objects with simple force-driven particle simulation could be a fun exercise. Here are some first tests !

This object was made by moving 1000 particles around (rigid body rotation initial speed, one central repulsive force and two attractive ones), and "registering" their paths in an alpha voxels grid (225x225x225), which I finally mapped to textured planes for the volumetric effect.

A final central sphere was used with refraction parameters to create the center "black hole".

Might be resource intensive, sorry for that !

Not a Black Hole - 1

̶**A̶n̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶G̶u̶t̶s̶  Slave Knight Gael**'s second phase fan-art made with Blender. Gael is the last boss of Dark Souls III's second DLC and the most anime boss in the series, but now in 4k and with crappier smoke and particle effects.

Slave Knight Gael

Visualization of global oceanic currents, averaged on the month of September 2019.

* Created in Python (using Matplotlib, NetCDF4, Scipy and Numpy modules)
* Public ocean data from the [NCEP Global Ocean Data Assimilation System (GODAS)](https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.godas.html)
* Particles colored according to speed (using the “bone” colormap in Matplotlib)

If you are curious, [here](https://skfb.ly/6OGwB) is a similar model made by using similar tools and data, showing an animation of the winds and precipitation on September 1st, 2019.

Oceanic Currents

titanic ship used for the colonization of distant worlds, the main module is used to bend the space in front of the ship to reduce the distance dramaticly.

The reactor module uses an estabilized anomaly created from unobtanium particle colision in a cavorite gas cloud. enough to generate the huge amounts of energy requiered to move such structure through space.

The ship itself is capable of creating a gravitational singularity allowing it to hover without problems over any kind of terrain.

Colonization Ship - UEI OPPORTUNITY

As it appears to be a trend, a small WIP diorama ([Nice one here!](https://skfb.ly/6xvV6)) just to try out some lighting technique for an incoming model (not a WIP I hope).

The refractive "box" around the model is just eye-candy, what was really of interest to me was to get an idea about bubbles (spheres with an emissive material coupled with dithering transparency), sun rays (elongated planes with blending opacity and a light emission to them) and the ground lights (not done well here, but basically voronoi textures to simulate the effect of waves on the light, baked on the ground model).

The ground is a quick and ugly dyntopo sculpt done in blender, while the little fish are just a particle system set with a lowpoly mesh as render object.

A nice point to spend time on will be the ocean surface, to do with the appropriate modifier in blender, and a refractive/small-scale-roughness/foamy-at-the-edges material.

Plus, I should try to animate rays, bubbles and fish (as boids) to give it a living touch.

Abstract aquarium

Snow FX Test

Replica of old work
First of all, I wanted to practice working with the hair particle system in blender. Which was fun.

**Why cows?**

https://www.behance.net/gallery/56930927/Why-cows

Blender + Substance Painter

Thanks Josué Boisvert for Cow model - https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/cow-99d333e3b4e4470a8d7d38436489c001

UFO | Animated

This is just an experiment with exporting a particle animation to Alembic format (.abc) from Blender.  I created the effect using similar steps as those shown in this tutorial (except I used a cube as the particle so it's lower poly, and I added randomness to the velocity, which I don't like in retrospect): https://youtu.be/k5WH5WY1Osc?si=Y1sfy87AwmzhI96m only up to the point where you start adding a material and adjusting render settings, since that is not necessary for export.

Initially I just selected the emitter and particle and exported them as Alembic with default export settings, and overall it worked remarkably well.  Sketchfab had no issue importing the animation.  Unfortunately though, without any adjustments, the animation's two stages (rising up into the air, then bursting) came out overlapped.  So I went looking for a way to fix that, and found a great Blender addon for baking particle effects by searching Gumroad for scaryplasmon CakeParticles.

In future tests I will remap the texture.

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