Another week, another work in progress slowly chugging along and doing some exploration for this shot recreation from Dr. Strange! I unfortunately wasn’t able to make a ton of progress this week due to a close friend of mine breaking her leg and being hospitalized over the weekend, which needless to say, threw off my work schedule a bit as I stayed at the hospital with her for a few days (she’s okay thankfully, just with a titanium rod now in her leg!). Once that whirlwind passed, I did still do my best to make some progress to move forward with this project and at least have a pretty good idea of what to do next, so let’s dive into it.

The main thing I wanted to make sure to get done this week was a new and improved version of my cobblestones, since the method I used to create them previously I wasn’t really happy with. With some recommendations from my supervising professor Nelson Lim, I remade the cobblestones utilizing copy to points instead of fracturing a plane essentially. This time, I created 3 different singular cobblestone bricks, beveling the edges and roughing up the shape of each of them to give me a decent looking unique stone. I then once again used a line geometry and scattered some points across it, feeding that into a copy node to create multiple instances of the line so I got rows of points. I also ended up using the group by range and split nodes to separate every other line so I could offset them to get that varied stacking brick pattern.

Just before feeding all the individual stones along with the lines into the copy to points node, I used a simple attribute wrangle node to define the ‘name’ attribute from the copy to points node, assigning a value of 0, 1, and 2 to each cobblestone. I then utilized an attribute randomize node on the line copies to assign each point on the lines a different name value. Then, after I finally plugged the lines and individual cobblestones into the copy to points node, I was able to vary which cobblestone was copied to which point based on the ‘name’ attribute!

This simple attribute manipulation was very helpful for me to brush up on, for both the copy to points node and also just attribute randomization and dealing with attributes in general. It also gave me a grid of cobblestones that I was much happier with and that I feel looks much less uniform and rigid.

Another small aspect I adjusted that I think made a difference in the way the cobblestones looked overall was fixing the scale of them. For my initial passes, the size of each cobblestone may or may not have been equivalent to that of a small child…

But all that matters is that it’s fixed now! The stones are now a much more realistic size proportionate to a regular human.

No fancy work in progress video for this week’s work unfortunately, but I do have this nice render of how the new cobblestones and beveled walls look and I think it’s not too shabby! Definitely an improvement from last week’s cobblestones, which look even more rigid and inorganic in comparison now.

I do, however, also have a little teaser for what I’m working on for the magic stream to share. It’s just a flipbook from an experimental setup I made using the find shortest path node and some attribute vops, following a YouTube tutorial by Far Out Studio to get a feel for a method I could potentially modify to get the effect I’m looking for to execute the magic stream. There’s still some kinks to work out