Capatin Moral: Emblems & Sheild Dev
Really enjoyed this project and remain inspired by that halftime performance!
The Reference
Stunning, stage worthy PgLang Varsity Jacket designed by Martine Rose shout-out to Cxmmunity.co on Instagram for the post! These images provided excellent reference for materials, colour codes and colour behaviour in room lighting verse stage lighting. I don’t know if i could quiet pull it off myself but the biker leather, emblems, hand writting and white accents really do it for me.
The Badges
Building the badges involved modelling a base and varying each emblem, custom materials and a bit of fun with Grease Pencil for typography. Deciding on a paper based style early on allowed me to pick the right tools for my purpose. I was thinking if I drew this as kid at the back of class what would it look like? So scrappy, spills, crosses out, line breaks etc.
The badges are a combo of systems based primarily on the convex hull workflow. This involves flipping targeted parts of the mesh inside out, which helps the compositor identify and process different elements of the scene. Sending them either down the 2D or 3D pipeline at a later stage. Here we can see how sorting and dividing geo can present different options for effects down the line.
The Ink Spill
The background ink spill effect uses a procedural shader controlled by an object hidden at render, giving me more direction over the effect. This combination of procedural geo, shaders and traditional techniques which really interests me. Think Spider-verse R&D… Anyway.
The Shield
The shield at its base is simple mesh, subdivided at modifier level. A Geo Nodes system inflates the mesh and flips the newly inflated geometry inside out, convex hull doing the heavy lifting regarding the outline. The shading works using the direction of the “sun” which gives even more randomness at different angles. Shading is a combo of BSDF (3D) and Shader to RGB (2D) styling to get a reflective metallic punch from the silver colours metal. Then a second branch which creates a blotchy, graffiti-painterly look from the red and blue masked by the pgLang logo.
This project started as a Captain America shield animation by making a simulation node system that bounced a projectile of a surface using reflection vectors:
Falcon: “Would you like to tell me about her?”
Steve: “… No, No I don’t think I will”
