Terminal-inspired renders

[baudrillardboy]

I've been learning Blender and Gimp (RIP my photoshop subscription), and over the past week or two I've made some stuff y'all might enjoy. These are loosely inspired by terminals, terminal aesthetics, or general Marathon cyberpunk vibes.








This one is based on an infamous map. Any guesses which one?




Another one based on an exported Marathon map:




And another (although this one is pretty hard to guess):







"When Durandal returned to Sol it was not with the captured Khfiva but in a Jjaro dreadnought he called Manus Celer Dei."





This is less direct, but loosely inspired by an M2 chapter screen:





And some messing around in Gimp:









Edit: made this tonight and I'm pretty proud of it.

[baudrillardboy]

And some other sci-fi stuff for good measure. I may or may not be planning to use some of these as terminal pics in a project I've been working on since forever (assuming it ever gets released).








Experimenting with ways to show objectives/map environments in terminals without just screenshotting the overhead map:





This was the first thing I made in Blender (before I had any idea how to texture or render anything well), but I still like how it looks:





Who knows, maybe I'll still find something to do with it...

[Todd]

Lovely.

I'm curious about the point cloud style level renders in particular – is this a particle based solution, a shader trick, or something else?

[baudrillardboy]

Lovely.

I'm curious about the point cloud style level renders in particular – is this a particle based solution, a shader trick, or something else?

Thanks! It's a procedural effect using geometry nodes. I based it on this tutorial and tweaked it until I got what I was looking for. There's a point caster sphere, and you generate a smaller sphere in the middle of each face. Then you cast a ray outward along the face normal until it intersects other geometry. Finally, you set the small sphere's position to the intersection point. To make it feel more jittery and noisy, I added a random number from a very small range to the x and y of each final position. This iterates for each face, and because it starts on a sphere you get higher "resolution" closer to the source. The "scanned" geometry is set to not render, and the smaller spheres are set to an emissive shader that changes color with distance from the point caster. In my mind, it was how the player's automap works (or possibly how Durandal "sees" environments when he can't hook into visual systems).

[ukimalefu]

I love all those images, great work

[Todd]

Lovely.

I'm curious about the point cloud style level renders in particular – is this a particle based solution, a shader trick, or something else?

Thanks! It's a procedural effect using geometry nodes. I based it on this tutorial and tweaked it until I got what I was looking for. There's a point caster sphere, and you generate a smaller sphere in the middle of each face. Then you cast a ray outward along the face normal until it intersects other geometry. Finally, you set the small sphere's position to the intersection point. To make it feel more jittery and noisy, I added a random number from a very small range to the x and y of each final position. This iterates for each face, and because it starts on a sphere you get higher "resolution" closer to the source. The "scanned" geometry is set to not render, and the smaller spheres are set to an emissive shader that changes color with distance from the point caster. In my mind, it was how the player's automap works (or possibly how Durandal "sees" environments when he can't hook into visual systems).

That's a really cool solution, and perfect art direction for map pics, love it.