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First made in 2022 and revamped in 2024, my most personal project to date.

I wanted to take a break from realtime engine stuff and just focus on rendering for a change.

Seeds to sow

🌱 Practice visual storytelling and attention to detail
🌱 Fortify Blender Sub-D modeling and Cycles rendering
🌱 Learn Fluent Materializer, procedural materials only
🌱 Experiment with Blender's hair and particle systems
🌱 Learn Affinity Photo and DaVinci Resolve workflows

Scope

🟢 1 diorama, 1 vehicle, 1 character.
🟢 One set of static shots
🟠 Turntables secondary
🟠 Tech breakdown nice-to-have

Timeline

📅 Couple of months, spare time.

Constraints

🚧 Procedural texturing only,
Blender shaders and tricks only
🚧 No exports out of Blender
🚧 No kitbashing

matcap previs

Shaders and Materials

I used Fluent Materializer's nodes and textures to make the procedural materials.
No UVs, just some triplanar projections and rotated texture maps, noise and edges.

Reference

I based the cold blue grainy look on old Kodachrome photography.
The tractor itself is a Frankenstein of mixed-and-matched from 1950s vehicles.

Notes

Whenever I learn new things I always anchor the information to paper.
My old scribbles give me a snapshot of how my mind worked and what I was focused on at the time.

Growth.

Between 2022 and 2024 I've amassed a ton of information about color spaces, gobos, shaders, rendering and photography.
I've since given up the remake/ refactor tail-chasing, but it served me well to do one of these level-up projects.

Halftracktor.

Initially there was no story attached to this here scene.
Between 2022 and 2024 I've internalized a crucial lesson: art is in service of a story, it's relevance is greatly diminished without one.
It wasn't until I watched an insightful video about Cannon Fodder that I got a kernel of an idea for a more poignant story, that of a farmer sent off to war, now returning to his prized mechanical workhorse. But not in body.

The poppy gave me a symbol of rememberance that I could anchor the scene to; a focal point that clashed with the situation and implied a whole backstory to the ghost. Along it, I've scattered other items to give symbolic hints. The shovel for burial. The oil can for maintenance. Moths for death.

Sanity.

One of my early influences in terms of impressive pre-rendered graphics was the old game Sanitarium. I found that warped world so fascinating, so I managed to slip in a slight homage to it in here.