Wildsided

I used to love Databanks and PDAs! I miss that whole era of technology. In the UK, we had these catalogue stores called Argos and Index, and I'd sit for way longer than a small child should going over their features and visual design. My mum's cousin, who seemed to get a lot of them as free gifts, gave me a few databanks. My first proper PDA was also a phone. It was an HTC Himalaya rebranded as the O2 XDA 2 in the UK.

Way back in 2000, Casio released the first MP3 player that you could wear on your wrist. It had a staggering 32 MB of storage and could hold about 1 hour of 60kbps audio or half an hour of 120kbps. It looked like this I got one in about 2001 and it eventually died, but I loved that watch. Fast-forward to 2021 and out of nostalgia I bought another one. I still love it, but 32MB of storage is a bit useless for modern sensibilities. Sadly, even though the internal card reader will read and format a larger card, for unknown software/hardware reasons the watch refuses to allow anything more than 32MB of data to be sent to it. 😔 In 2022 I bought a Kospet Optimus 2 Full Android 10 smartwatch that could use custom watch faces and I'm sure you can see where this is going. I used a combination of A:M, Photoshop and a program called Clockskin to make a digital version of the watch that had all the same functionality as the original watch. pressing play for instance opened the watch's media player etc. But it also had a step and heart rate tracker and battery display that the original didn't have. Here's a shaded wireframe of the A:M model and a pic of the finished watch face. I renamed it the WPH for "Watch Phone" because the Optimus 2 is a full android phone in watch format and it's now an ACE.CO product instead of Casio.

Oh, sorry, she goes by Geminitay. Minecraft/video game content as far as I know.

Robert asked me to post a shaded wireframe of the rig in action. It's not a brilliant rigging attempt, and it required a lot of muscle mode tweaking to get it to where it is. It's not really rigged to be animated so much as to get it into the smile position and render it. Sequence 01_2.mp4

Cheers David. Honestly probably not gonna work on it any further. The point was to get it featured on that stream thing and that's not gonna happen. So not gonna spend more time on it.

I think I have SSS turned on. I'm just grateful for someone saying something positive about it. I posted it on the discord fan-art submissions thread and the only comments it garnered were "that's cool but the teeth are giving me the creeps" and "That's not horrifying at all" obviously implying that it is in fact horrifying. It also seems to have the dubious honour of being the only submission on there to get a frowny face reaction emoji.

Cheers Robert, I'll check that out for my next hair experiments.

I did try Muhair at one point but it didn't look to make any difference when I rendered it and it was taking so long to render each pass that I didn't bother to faff with the settings. To be totally honest, this whole endeavour has probably been a massive waste of time and effort and most certainly won't yield any measurable results. But I will make a note to look into muhair settings and the kajiya-kay shaders for the next time I try doing hair. Cheers.

No, nobody I know. It's another Minecraft YouTuber with a lot more of a following than I have. She streams on Twitch.tv and has a fanart showcase at the beginning of her streams. Submitted the pic to see if I can get it on there. Hopefully, a few of her over 1 million followers look up Voxel Tales and find the channel.

The Model is done. Took about 30 hours to render (I assume because I set the hair to be human hair width) Unless I have a very good reason or get a more powerful PC I doubt I'll ever render it again.

From 0:00 -1:20, anything that's the character Minecraft Dan (the backgrounds are Minecraft), 1:20 to 1:40 is entirely Minecraft and everything after 1:40 is made in A:M (except the speech bubbles)

Thanks Gerald, I appreciate it.

Hi everyone. Dunno if anyone is interested but the latest episode of Voxel Tales contains quite a lot of A:M generated stuff. If you fancy checking it out.

Pretty sure that's one of mine.

I added the inside of the mouth and did some rigging on the lower half of the face. She can smile now.