Author Archives: ALKHEMY : AFROFUTURISM
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isopoly: “pillar“ Support my work on patreon :)
talesfromweirdland: Spanish sci-fi artist, Horacio Salinas…
acidholic: follow us here for a constant trip
midnight-charm:Maison Margiela Fall / Winter 2018
boudhabar:vintage birds illustration
theamazingdigitalart: The amazing concept art of Black Panther…
pretty-period:#PrettyPeriod (please tag model/photographer)…
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70sscifiart:Colin Hay
theblvckcool:The Motherland
theflyingpimphat:Picklesaurus rex.
chunkyheels: https://www.instagram.com/p/BcoCqPzBfin/
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fyblackwomenart: GARNET by SOZOMAIKA
spacecamp1: Wojciech Fangor, M-39, 1969
iamdasidy: Lagos Futurism |• on @afropunk Styled be me. Shot…
Lagos Futurism |• on @afropunk
Styled be me.
Shot by @willyverse
Model @eniolaabolarin
Make up @lauretta_orji (@visage_de_couleur)Orange shirt - @orangecultureng
Asoke jacket @iamisigo
Scarf - stylist ownLeft earrings - @orangecultureng
Right earring - @raya.jewelleryProduced by @ginaamama and @awhitespacelagos
http://afropunk.com/2018/03/lagos-futurism-forefront-fashion-forward-editorial/
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#danielobasi #lagos #afrofuturism #blackhistorymonth (at Lagos, Nigeria)
narcissan: Wolfgang Tillmans, Veuns, transit (2004) and Urgency…
hattiestewart: Garden Of Eden.
6lacksoul: “Launched in 2018 by designer Obi Anazodo, OBI’S…
“Launched in 2018 by designer Obi Anazodo, OBI’S NEW YORK aims to simplify design and style to its most essential components. With an emphasis on the wearer, the brand hopes to inspire conversation about how we tell our stories through the clothes we wear.”
Designer — Obi Anazodo
Photo by — Anthony Drayton
Model — Benro Sule
shoomlah: camposantoblog: Zora is one of the two main…
Trailer Zora
Zora is one of the two main characters in our second game, In the Valley of Gods. Quite a few people remarked on Zora’s character design, in particular her hair, when they saw our announcement trailer. Indeed, creating Zora’s hair is a challenging problem for intertwined technical and cultural reasons. I would like to talk about our explorations and aspirations so far, and why it’s important to us we get it right by the time we ship.
In 2015, Evan Narcisse wrote an important essay on natural hair and blackness in video games. You should read it. It was the first time I’ve really thought critically about hair and representation in video games, and the yearning in the piece struck me.
Hair is very personal. As an immigrant woman of Chinese descent with atypically frizzy wavy hair, my hair is, to an extent, an outward expression of my struggle with who I am and where I belong (or don’t). I want to love my hair the way it naturally is, but it’s never quite simple as that.
So when I first saw the character design for Zora, I had an understanding of what task lays before us as a team. None of us has Type 4 hair, characterized by tight coils and common among black women. In fact, none of us have even made video game hair before, but we are committed to giving Zora the hair she loves, the way she chooses to wear it, with all the care and effort we can.
Building Zora’s hair will be a continual effort that lasts the whole project. Our first milestone for the hair was getting it in shape for our announcement trailer, when Zora was first introduced to the public.
As a small team without a dedicated character modeler, we hired a couple of specialists to do Zora’s character sculpt. Their task included sculpting a static version of her asymmetric bob so we could evaluate the scale and silhouette of her whole body. We knew the static sculpt would serve only as a placeholder and reference while we figured out a longer term hair solution.
Hair is a complicated combination of geometry, shader work, and texturing, and it requires a very tight and frequent iteration loop to get right. It made sense for us to do it in house even if we haven’t created hair before. The task of modeling “good enough, first pass” real-time hair for the trailer fell to me; the shading and rendering work to our graphics programmer Pete; and the copious texture and oversight work to our art director Claire. We started by investigating what other developers have done.
Real-time hair geometry, as far as I can tell, falls into two broad categories: “hair helmets” and “hair cards.” A hair helmet is what I call completely opaque geometry, as one would see on a plastic action figure or Lego figurine—think Princess Zelda’s hair in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Hair cards, on the other hand, use many sheets of hair strands to portray more free-flowing hair —think many characters in Uncharted 4. That approach is well suited to hair types that can be abstracted into sheets, which works well for any length of straight hair. There are also hybrid approaches, such as this wonderful tutorial of a game-ready afro by Baj Singh.
Claire designed Zora’s Type 4 coily hair to have a lot of texture and volume, but it also has a “big-chunky-tubes” structure allowing fluid “floppy” movement. Neither of the two previous approaches is ideal for Zora’s hair.
The closest in-game hair reference I found is Nadine Ross from Uncharted 4, but on closer inspection Nadine has Type 3 hair with very defined curls, quite different from Zora’s tighter Type 4.
Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is… just by making something, even if it sucks in the beginning. So I started off with a variant of the hair cards approach by making “big tubes” of three cross-cards to follow the shape and flow of Zora’s hair helmet sculpted by Ted Lockwood. It was important to have some geometry that remotely resembles what we will ultimately create, to test the shader Pete has been writing.
I would work on the hair for a few days at a time whenever I wanted a break from creating the trailer’s environments. After two months of wrangling various placements of polygon tubes, flat cards, and cross-cards, as well as bending all their normals as if her hair were a shrub, we had the following result as of October 2017.
Part of the challenge of all this is that not only are we making Type 4 hair, we are making stylized Type 4 hair that evokes Claire’s distinct style. It became clear very early that the way Zora’s hair interacts with light would be a key part of the shader work.
I’m not able to go into the technical details of the shader in this post, but we ended up adding individual controls for each type of lighting we wanted the hair to respond to, based on Claire’s specific concept art: for instance, light striking from the back, from the side, ambiently, and so on. This got finicky, but taught us a lot and provided enough variation to create the trailer. It will take much more experimentation and iteration for the hair to behave according to the style guide under all necessary lighting conditions, but making the trailer gave us a lot of direction for our next steps.
Right now, we have an intensely stylized back-scatter effect in the hair when backlit, but we still lack the ability to do high-quality rim lighting without relying heavily on post-processing.
We are currently only using alpha-cutouts for the hair cards (alpha sorting is a whole different topic outside the scope of this post) and I’ve been advised by character artists that some number of alpha blend cards for flyaway hairs usually works well.
For the trailer, James rigged Zora’s hair and hand animated the movement, but we plan on applying physics simulation to the hair rig for the shipping game.
There is a long way to go before we’re truly happy with Zora’s hair, but this is a good first step. As the rest of the game’s visuals become more solidified, it will become more clear what we need to tackle next.
some of our early work on Zora’s hair! That painting at the top is still one of my faves that I’ve done/
hipinuff:Claude Tousignant (Canadian, b.1932), Blue + Green =…
artist-magritte:The voice of space, 1928, Rene Magritte
gameraboy1:Forbidden Planet (1956)
akuicnhialic: this is my fave shoot she’s done
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“Ascension” Prints For SalePhotography prints available for your…
“Ascension”
Prints For Sale
Photography prints available for your collection purchase at - §🌴 www.georgespaceship.com
astronomy-is-awesome: Nebula Images: http://nebulaimages.com…
Nebula Images: http://nebulaimages.com
Astronomy articles: http://astronomyisawesome.com#astronomy #apod #space #nasa
naturalhairqueens: She is hands down one of the most beautiful…
She is hands down one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. This is proof that melanin is a blessing.
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fuckyeahcostumedramas:Gina Torres in ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’…
retroscifiart: Artist: Victor Atkins
ange-ra: Artist: Madvillain Track: Great Day
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distantvoices:https://www.instagram.com/p/BfrOShvn0Jj/
praial:Egypt: The White Desert, Farafra
fragments-of-a-hologram-dystopia:(source)
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marveladdicts: “This corset is really uncomfortable, so can we…
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nicecollection: Derek Hirst – Summer, 1975
Emojis Vs. Punctuation Marks: Battle Of The Keyboard The…
Emojis Vs. Punctuation Marks: Battle Of The Keyboard
The Punctuation Marks are trying to stave off extinction in a digital world controlled by the powerful Emojis. They feel neglected and abandoned by humanity in the Internet Age. The Punctuation Marks want to relive the pre-digital glory days and try enlisting the services of The Alphabets and Numbers. An African American girl, Danna and her family are caught in the midst of the conflict.
quarkmaster: NeoVenice NeoVenice personal artwork…
NeoVenice
NeoVenice
personal artwork 2018yellow fort
personal artwork. 2018
Ipad pro.
app: sketchclubTrireme
personal work. 2018
The center
personal artwork. 2018
postapo war scene
postapo war scene. ipad pro procreate sketch. 2018
poolsofchrome:Found the missing biodrone. The heat must’ve…
dvdp: °C37.5
nubiamancy: “Qem” Imagery by >>>> Andy Lee …
Nudibranch collection 1.
Nudibranch collection 1.
vjeranski: Dadamaino Disegno ottico dinamico, 1964, China su…
nubiamancy: “Koroke” Imagery by >>>> Pierre…
“Koroke”
Imagery by >>>> Pierre Droal
Want to know more about our film production campaign? Click HERE
gameraboy1:Forbidden Planet (1956)
nubiamancy: “The Falken Chronicles” Imagery by…
“The Falken Chronicles”
Imagery by >>>> Geoffroy Thoorens
Want to know more about our film production campaign? Click HERE
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leah-cultice: Milena Mira by Rafael Pavarotti for Vogue Brazil…
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georgia-okeeffee:Red Hills, Lake George, Georgia O’Keeffe
istolemeatfromthepot: No highlight, just the sun doing its…
homesteadseattle:Restock day at both plant shops!
fruitskies: this is the cutest kewpie doll i have ever seen in…
georgia-okeeffee:Jack-in-the-Pulpit III, 1930, Georgia O’Keeffe
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rhubarbes: ArtStation – Tree Worlds, Raphael LacosteMore on…
est-nord:Tvísöngur sound sculpture in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland
fuckyeahwomenfilmdirectors: Brown Girl Begins dir. Sharon Lewis…
Brown Girl Begins dir. Sharon Lewis (2017)
It’s 2049 on a forsaken island off the coast of Toronto where the survival of the islanders depends on young Ti-Jeanne to risk death by a spirit so she can take her place as a caribbean priestess and save her people.
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crystallizations: Photographs by Rotimi Fani-Kayode printed in…
artist-magritte: Pink Belles, Tattered Skies, 1930, Rene…
‘LAGOS FUTURISM’ IS AT THE FOREFRONT OF THIS FASHION-FORWARD…
newartz: N E W A R T Z Native Visualization
oneofthewildwoosters: Damn… great show… terrible costumes, but…
Damn… great show… terrible costumes, but so great in message and story and drama.
danismm: Mr. Atomic
5oil: https://instagram.com/p/BXqrImGDA7t/
fyblackwomenart:‘The Birth of Oshun’ by @honeiee
fyblackwomenart:‘The Birth of Oshun’ by @honeiee
heaveninawildflower: Datura stramonium ( Devil’s…
Datura stramonium ( Devil’s Snare ).
Illustration taken from ‘Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen’ by Wilhelm Brandt, Max Gurke, F. E. Kohler, G. Pabst, G. Schellenberg, Max Vogtherr.
Published 1883.
Missouri Botanical Garden.
archive.org
heaveninawildflower: Datura stramonium ( Devil’s…
Datura stramonium ( Devil’s Snare ).
Illustration taken from ‘Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen’ by Wilhelm Brandt, Max Gurke, F. E. Kohler, G. Pabst, G. Schellenberg, Max Vogtherr.
Published 1883.
Missouri Botanical Garden.
archive.org
opiumcrone: Leonora Carrington __ The Tree of Life, 1960
opiumcrone: Leonora Carrington __ The Tree of Life, 1960
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spacetoday:Jupiter, a wonder.
distantvoices:https://www.instagram.com/p/BfYDuEYje3y/
magictransistor:Bété masque (‘N’gré mask), Côte d’Ivoire, West…
apimeleki: kelela – frontline
indigenouswisdom: Bobo people during ceremony Burkina Faso/Mali
indigenouswisdom:Mossi Zéguédéguin Burkina Faso
frenchcurious: The Oriental Theater, Lion Staircase, Milwaukee,…
70sscifiart:TIm White
midnight-charm: Adut Akech photographed by Mario Sorrenti for…
Adut Akech photographed by Mario Sorrenti for i-D Magazine Spring 2018
Fashion Editor: Alastair McKimm
Hair: Bob Recine
Makeup: Kanako Takase