CGAN July 2022 - AI - WIPs

I think the AI is possessed...

And for some more human created rubbish here's what I've been messing with over recent days.
Instead of doing another future robot thing (and I've done at least two for various challenges over the years) I thought I'd try and do something that mixes old and new stuff and had the idea of doing an old wooden puppet being controlled by some sci-fi circuitry with strings of light, and a couple of weeks back I spent a Saturday night sketching this...

 

I then quickly realised that the idea would probably need some crisper lines and edges, which I'm famously bad at, so I did a switcheroo to 3D.
And many problems began.
I initially tried to do that "falling code" Matrix effect but all the tutorials use Geometry Nodes which I don't understand and they seem to be different depending on your version of Blender.
Then I tried something with Voronoi textures... which also vary depending on your version of Blender.
Eventually I solved the problem with that tutorial but it was still just a 2D effect and I wanted the circuit to spread through a 3D space.
I've now got to this point...

 

...but it's taken a ridiculous amount of messing about with transparency nonsense to get it to work and it's still not quite what I had in mind.
But... there's still 10 days to go.

Compared to those horrible creations on the previous page, this is positively cute 

Nice start. I did start messing about with something in ZBrush the other day but didn't get far enough with it for me to want to post anything yet.

I'd better start thinking about rendering.

Come on, Cycles, a bit more quickly this time.

I'd better think about starting as I had a new idea and haven't done anything with the previous one.

Come on brain, work a bit fasterer this time 

go for it!

...cycles...

EDIT: Ew, I forgot about emissive lighting. This is looking rubbish.
Maybe something good will happen to it in twenty minutes time. Maybe.

The Cycles render was waaay too bright. That was a waste of 30+ minutes.
I'll have to find a way of disabling emission/bounce light if that's gonna work. Looks like I'll stick with Eevee but that Depth Of Field effect still isn't rendering correctly either. I wonder if it just needs more samples?

Less than 3 and a half hours 

WIP 1...