Robot Repair bay 2d to 3d

I am dusting off a few more of my old robot drawings, in this case a few from when I was using SketchbookPro on an iPad mini, and showing my digital art fairly frequently. I brought the image into Vizcom with a simple prompt and a color refernce to re-imagine the scene. Once I was happy with the 2d model, I tried a few version of 3d conversions and exported and then pulled the main robot into Blender. 

Robot repair pad by Matt Connors on Sketchfab

Adriana - 3d sculpt from Vizcom render

Recent work in Blender led me back to testing my ability to sculpt 3d objects through Blender, and this is still very much a work in progress, though every mistake teaches me a little more.

Adriana_sculpt_VC_MC by Matt Connors on Sketchfab

Sketches with reference to Claude Lorrain

My habit of drawing in a sketchbook is always somewhat improved after Inktober, though it always feels like I need a bit of a break in November after making nearly a drawing every day. The conscious effort to draw and complete on ideas is great practice, though I often find that looking at other artists afterwards helps me to relax a bit, and focus on other's approach to artistic challenges. I came across a book on Claude Lorrain, whome I have always appreciated as a painter, but often the individual paintings I don't really relate to. Claude Lorrain paintings But this book featured many drawings that I was unaware of, and the pen and wash handling is really extraordinary, inspiring some of my own drawings.

Silo to Vizcom: Reaktor

This scene had a bit of an odd start; I was reading a book about failed architecture projects, and came across images for a failed Crimean nuclear power facility back in the 1980s, that was abandoned in favor of Chernobyl by the Soviets. Their was a shot of a well, I am not even sure what it was for...but it got me thinking and then modeling.

I liked the way it was coming along, then I used Kaiber to animate.

Inktober 2025 Artefacts Volume 1: Starfish Suit

The last few years, even while I am churning out drawings for Inktober, I always have a few that I wonder what I could with if I had just a little bit more time to spend on them. I started experimenting with AI tools for manipulation for the drawings, though I always feel like they need some further editing. This image started as a simple sketch of a starfish, but I felt like the starfish needed to transcend the limited mobility of its existence...so I made it more mobile. 

After Inktober ended, I felt like I could use Vizcom and a bit of digital 'overpainting' with Sketchbook Pro and my XP-Pen tablet monitor to flesh out the character further. The combination of SketchbookPro and the XP-Pen screen allows for a fairly simple interface that I can draw right onto.

The final version of the render from Vizcom with the edits looked like this:

Vizcom does an excellent job of preserving the overal shape and detail of a simple sketch, the text prompts are auto-generated and editable, and you have many render options. Maybe my favorite feature, though, is the ability to convert your render to a 3d object and then export it as an .fbx, .gltf, or .usd file that can be modified through 3d tools. I usually take it these exports into Blender, to check the scale and whether the texture map and overall geometry look ok; for this model, I repainted the faceplate in SketchbookPro for a new 3d output, as the starfish, though pretty detailed, was on the outside of the helmet, which was not what I wanted. With the newly exported .gltf, I decided to use Adobe Substance to just generate a .PNG file with the background knocked out so that I could make a composite in Photoshop using a Firefly-generated background with a prompt. It's not perfect, by any means, but it's interesting to see how AI tools can augment the conceptual process.