Michael Macha / Frontier Medicine Entertainment
The books move slower than I would like; but they’re not the only thing I do. Here’s a number of videos I’ve been building for YouTube for some time now. Stay tuned for updates.
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Here’s a recent composite I did showing the behavior of a hypothetical cosmic string—a one dimensional crack in spacetime, formed during the first 10-30 seconds of the universe. They’re like the black hole’s crazy uncle. The interesting thing about them is that if you were to draw a circle around one, it would require less than 360° to complete it. For negative mass cosmic strings, which are typically unstable but hypothetically possible, it would require more to complete the circle.
Space time around them is conical, not flat; and in a classical sense there is no “behind” the string. Marinate on that for a moment. In any case, it sounded like a creative challenge for compositing, and it’s worked its way into Strings as a central concept.
The five heroes of Strings, not counting Argos. Really, none of them are perfect, no real person is; but they have fantastic back stories and the physical, intellectual, and in Hansel’s case, economic fitness to pull the game’s stunt off.
Strings is unlikely to be the final name for the game; apparently it’s been taken by a VR game that doesn’t actually look all that bad. The name, like a book’s, will clarify as I approach the end of it.
Everyone coming out of their cryopod! The pod took a good morning of time to design; but it’s based on a butterfly chrysalis. According to the story, all five are frozen in them for about a thousand years, on their way to a distant star. Meanwhile, Argos is tasked with protecting the ship, and upgrading himself in any way necessary to deal with the challenges faced by the likes of, say, galactic cosmic rays or resource shortfalls.
That would probably make for a great game in itself! But, technically, our story begins once they reach their destination and see just what’s wrong with it…
An earlier impression of the cosmic string, both wrapped around a star and without the star. I may end up going with a cross between the two— I’ll need it to reach to the edges of its solar system, and fold on itself several times; but I do like the idea of a little bit of the Hubble shifting happening; probably just not as much of it.
This was for a project that isn’t quite on hold, but is moving slowly. I had to pipe one Blender render into another to get this to work.
Another asset produced for the same project as the top-rocking dog. I may touch it up a little.
This was a design for an active, but currently kind of furloughed, story about the Babylonian Enuma Elish. I need bugs. Lots and lots of bugs. Absu demands it.
This is an animation I put together for the… world… premiere… of the… uh… amazing… um… OK. I’ll level. I was just screwing around with this one.
This is another screw-around animation I made, but with the intent to test my new graphics card, a GTX 1660. (RTX isn’t going to change the industry until it’s more affordable, unfortunately; which is likely to happen in Q3 2022 by the most optimistic estimates. We can hope, though, and the 1660 is fine.) I’d clearly already completed DOOM Eternal with it, with no complaints; but I started the animation of the Cyber-Moose early in the week and rendered it for maybe a day, before upgrading the card in the middle. It seemed like a wise idea, as it would give me an immediate comparison for a busy scene.
For an actual show, I would likely be using a render farm; but this was fun.
Michael Macha 