Tales of Tindalos — Treasure Items
Initial coin, roughly the size of an American half dollar (30.6 mm diameter, 2.15 mm thickness)
My second attempt at checking the geometry with anaglyphics. (See the original problem in the page description...) It ended up being a bit flatter, so...
I corrected for the bump mapping flattening with a driver, hooked to the scale factor of the coin. It's twenty times its actual size here, so I could get a good look at it.
Azathoth coin, 1080p. I think I can reduce the LOD down to about 50 faces if I need to, without killing the shape; it's currently just short of 400. (Modern GPUs let us get away with murder...)
The same coin in anaglyphic 20x scale. I almost added EUrion but it's complicated enough, I think. I added some scuffing to the outer edge, which may also work with the Elder Sign coin... I'll have to check.
"Deep Gold", first render, the material the Deep Ones trade with Innsmouth canonically. It's not made by hand, but generated with geometry nodes; I didn't want the nugget to feel too intentional.
My vision of it was its strange, almost platinum-laced color, along with its source beneath an ocean of salt water. That gave it a mottled, rolled look (at least in my head). I began with a simple sphere.
A less glitzy look at the deep gold. By distributing points at random within the shape of the sphere, I could instance a volume of spherical voxels around them, then merge into a mesh.
A screen shot of the deep gold's material. It's a sequence of Musgraves combined with color mixers and hue rotations, piped into a high-metallicity principled shader.
Geometry nodes used to generate the deep gold mesh. (Last thing I need is it accidentally looking like someone made it... namely, me!) I like the result, and I can tweak it quickly if I end up needing another sample.
A glittery pan of our oily, unnatural deep gold. Note that it's only 480p; I'm in my home studio and I want to keep the time spent on something that isn't hand-modeled to a minimum.
My initial attempt at rendering a stereoscopic turntable. I admit I was a little nervous about this one, given that I had only systemic control of its formation. Unfortunately, once again, I was a little too close with this one...
The second stereoscopic turntable scan, at 20x scale (with a minor correction to camera position). I'm satisfied with the generated geometry. In the game engine, it's going to need to be a lot less rough, though.
Your basic pearl. These fish men wouldn't likely trade in cut gems; I don't know what all that salt and pressure would do, but likely nothing good. It's intentionally imperfect, because I take personal insult from the "Boring == Expensive" conspiracy...
I was hoping to detect some of the normal imperfections this way, but no such luck. The swirl is from gradient noise feeding its intensity into a vector rotation, feeding into another gradient that controls color. Note that it's scaled to x60 for this.
Alternate material, gloss turned down by a factor of one hundred to let that green shine through. Because screw De Beers.
So, time I start working on the arbitrary stuff, like coins and treasure. By "arbitrary", of course, I mean without special function beyond value... though I'm considering popping in a vending machine with all kinds of fake brands in it. I started with a basic coin, and will add more to this collection as I move on.
Of course, the first collection was what to put on the coin. I've always felt that the best horror games, while legitimately scary, also break for humor from time to time. Not the obvious and stupid stuff, like false jump scares, that just annoys people... but in my vision of Tindalos, who or what would actually manage a mint? How does the currency have value?
I'm still working through that puzzle, but I finally settled on the Elder Sign as an insignia. (Yes, that's also the EURion Constellation behind it... mostly because I think it's intrinsically funny.) I doubt that I'm finished with it yet, but I need it to stand out on something as commonplace as a coin, and therefore can't make it too complicated.
The coin is roughly the size of an American half dollar. In fact, in the initial image, the camera ended up being only a third of an inch—eight and a half millimeters—away from the subject! So when I attempted my initial stereoscopic render, I only got the left channel... I though there was a rendering setting wrong for the longest time before I considered the size of it. Scaling it up twenty times, with an adjustment to the bump mapping to account for that, got me a proper anaglyphic rendering.
I think it might be cool to have a number of different sigils of elder gods on some of the coins. More stuff and a few animations to come.