JUSTIN SADO is me
We are what hasn't happened yet; we are the engine and
the engineer of everything immanent.
-Quixitl Mexer
Slay The Stars
Fig 1: SLAY THE STARS
This piece depicts what can only be described as a cosmic drag queen, commissioned by Orchid Eight as a shirt, hoodie, and poster design for their 2024 Pride Month Event. Animating her wasn't exactly mandatory, as the shirt, poster, and hoodie all depict a static image -- but I had tons of fun making it. :)
Breakdown
The workflow behind this piece involved sculpting and re-topologizing the base-mesh by hand, and likewise modeling clothes around her; after transferring the high-poly mesh's normals to the low-poly mesh, the low-poly mesh could be rigged, weight-painted, and posed to slay.
Unlike much of my other work, only a handful of elements were herein procedural: her spiral were produced by projecting a straight line onto the base-mesh in spiraling directions, and her horn-like hair, as well as the fluffy bits in her outfit, were all done with clever manipulation of Bezier curves.
ERRATUS
Fig 1: An assortment of panels from ERRATUS (dialogue removed)
Lonny is one such patient; his mind half-wiped, he arrives at Neuropticon in search of a redacted past -- and finds much more awaiting him there.
ERRATUS was created at USC in the Spring of 2024 for ART312: Comics Project; notably, not a single panel of the piece was drawn by hand, instead generated entirely within 3D graphics software -- leveraging a plethora of NPR render techniques to craft an efficient and effective workflow for comic-style rendering.
With madness closing in on America's collective psyche, techno-capitalism reacts in kind: Unsound minds find themselves at the mercy of Neuropticon, a neurotech company whose business model revolves around erasing their patients' corrupted memories.
Fig 2: Full PDF of ERRATUS
(apologies for the file-size)
Breakdown
Coming first in the semester-long process of rendering ERRATUS was to sculpt, re-topologize, and rig/weight-paint its cast of main characters; this was, admittedly, the least interesting bit, though it does offer a chance to showcase some creative character designs, and formidable 3D-modeling skills.
Fig 3: Hollis(past), Hollis(present), and Lonny, from left to right.
After likewise modeling an assortment of environments and props for our characters to play with, the real work could begin: that of assembling several node-trees to make Blender's EEVEE engine look semi-convincingly like a comic.
While much of the line-art relied on simple, inverted-hull techniques, the main characters were treated to a custom node-group for procedurally generating scratchy, hatched outlines. Parameters like the line thickness, hatch density, or outline offset were exposed such that they could be tweaked to fit each panel's particular needs.
Fig. 4: Custom node-group demo
In alleviating the characteristic smoothness of 3D models, another node-group was produced to sample said models' normals over a Voronoi map; then, by distorting the Voronoi with a savvy choice of noise textures, the distribution of light over a given model's surface was made to appear painterly, chaotic, or otherwise hand-drawn. After layering on a number of shadows, accents, or highlights, the final shader effectively conveyed a comic-style aesthetic.
In combination with a few more technical work-arounds, such as splitting each scene's lighting into red, green, or blue channels, the remaining work involved posing each character, and fine-tuning each node-group's parameters, for every panel of the ensuing comic. In practice, it felt much like playing with and photographing action figures, which made for an absolute blast.
The end-result falls just short of my highest hopes -- especially where the actual story's concerned -- and so I do intend to re-use this workflow for making comics in the future.
Fig. 5: Yes, it's actually 3D
Fig. 6: Shader layers from the bottom-up
Fig 1: Dreadmonger exposé
The Blood Cretins
Fig 1: The Blood Cretin in its adult and infantile form, respectively
This unfinished series explores the biology, life-cycle, and ideology behind Blood Cretins, a fictional species whose grotesque, many-armed appearance belies their friendly mannerisms. Really -- just give them a chance, and, for better or worse, they can be quite charming.
Breakdown is still in the oven; for now, worth noting is that the first video showcases fully-procedural floorboards, and the second leverages procedural grass. Both iterations of the Cretin were sculpted, re-topologized, rigged, and animated by hand.
Barbie Baphomet
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Fig 1: Le Baphomet but Barbie
Barbie Baphomet began as a fleeting mental image, inspired by the contemporary hype around Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie, but with Barbie's signature pretty, pink, and/or pastel aesthetics worn by an icon of occult mysticism.
In light of Le Baphomet's symbolic meaning, this thematic contradiction fits like a glove; as an emblem of nonbinary syntheses, opposites resonating, the oxymoron incarnate -- who's to say Le Baphomet shouldn't be in pink? Why not do away with the esoteric facade, and give it all a pretty manicure?
The end-result's at once visually stunning, conceptually commanding, and unfathomably queer.
Breakdown
Made entirely in Blender, Barbie Baphomet's design includes a combination of hand-sculpted assets and procedural elements; the coat was simulated using Blender's built-in cloth physics, with its fluffy bits and connective chains generated via custom-made geometry node groups (Fig 3).
Barbie Baphomet's horns were also generated procedurally, largely consisting of a Bezier curve with a square profile whose scale tapers to a point with the curve's length; random variations in scale and along the curve's tangent then produced a wavy texture (Fig 4).
Fig 2: Workflow compilation (music by Ada Toydemir, IG @simulacrum_._)
Fig 3: Procedural hair system demo
By prioritizing procedural approaches wherever possible, much of Barbie Baphomet's design remained open to adjustment throughout the entire workflow; if I decided the horns were a bit too wavy, for example, a tweak to their parameters sufficed -- rather than re-sculpting the geometry from scratch, which would've been immensely tedious.
What's more, the custom-made node group for Barbie Baphomet's fluffier bits enabled greater control than reliance on Blender's built-in hair system would've, and, to the relief of my midrange laptop, yielded much more performant results.
It was also very fun.
Fig 4: Procedural horn system demo
the Dreadmonger
Witnessed thrice in the months from January to April of 2023, these squamous little creatures were met with some confusion and much fanfare as they flowered across America's concrete jungles.
Termed an "emergent form of post-urban flora," the Dreadmonger doesn't do much of anything but sit there and wriggle. Some have speculated that they represent a rupture in the psychosphere, with public unrest manifesting physically for us to then gawk at and, of course, record; others wonder whether they're the harbingers of an impending pan-organic calamity, when what thin skin separates us from the world of our making might finally tear asunder.
Most everyone agrees, however, that they're downright adorable.
Fig 2: The Dreadmonger sightings
Breakdown
The Dreadmonger was a fun foray into VFX compositing for me and my friends from home; after fiddling around in Blender's sculpting suite, a reasonably grotesque model was produced, then procedurally outfitted with its exoskeleton, maggots, and the titular tentacles.
Fig 2: Black and white depiction of a Dreadmonger
The fun part involved convincing my hometown friends to gesticulate and exclaim at empty parking-lots, then motion tracking the clips and compositing in their respective Dreadmongers via DaVinci Resolve (Fig 3).
Fig 3: Compositing visual
Blender Visualizer
Fig 1: Blender Visualizer (please wait for the beat to drop)
This vaporwave visualization of an unnamed and unreleased song by my pal, Ada Toydemir (Instagram @simulacrum_._), was made entirely in Blender; the bust was sculpted in another friend's likeness, with it and the sound levels beside it animated via geometry nodes.
Breakdown
Turning Blender into a visualizer first required writing a custom addon in Python, which: retrieves sound levels from Blender's built-in sequencer, filters the data into four, user-specified frequency bins, and stores the filtered data as keyframes tied to the scale of labeled objects in the scene -- one for each frequency bin, and a fifth for the unfiltered volume (Fig 2).
This process renders the sound data useable, as animations can be procedurally synced with the music by referencing the keyframed objects' respective scale values.
Fig 2: Visualizer script demo
Rotten Future
Fig 1: Rotten Future
The distance between us and our digital media soon diminishes to a pinpoint. It's a notion less readily known than consumed, spiraling into increasingly cynical content whose message can scarcely be teased apart from their medium: that our future is rotten, and we wouldn't have it any other way.
In this grim, dystopian, cyberpunk scene, an array of looming LCD-screens each depict stills from grim, dystopian, cyberpunk films or TV, cementing the piece's irony. Cluttering its composition are countless cables and cords, converging on a subject whose biology has twisted around the very act of a consumption. By now, it's unclear even where he ends and the screens begin; consuming and becoming thus happen simultaneously, here, in the future we so love to look at.
Breakdown
Sculpting and materials took center-stage in the making of this render; once the subject's body began to take shape, it was quickly torn apart and melted onto the CRT beneath him, with his legs, right arm, and jaw all removed.
The scene's props were each, likewise, modeled by hand, with the exception of its myriad cables. The cables consisted of Bezier curves passed through a geometry node-group whose parameters dictated the number of wires, their radii, and the cable-ties around them.
Fig 2: Rotten Future white render
Once the scene was constructed, its surfaces were outfitted with photo-realistic PBR materials. The subject's skin was textured from scratch, with its albedo, roughness, and subsurface-scattering maps all generated with Substance Painter.
Fig 3: Shader node graph for the subject's skin
The Pile
Everything shown below was produced between the years from 2017 to 2022, ordered from newest to oldest, and is either too poor or too poorly documented for its own breakdown; tread carefully.
