'It starts with one thing, I don't know why,' as Linking Park used to sing ππ.
And it didn't 'even matter how hard I tried' to export these fine weapons as OBJ or USD and upload them to sketchfab β I even got a free account there for that β it just didn't work out: there was no way I could individually UV-unwrap every piece of techno greble I distributed with geo nodes and bake a separate set of PBR textures for it; and even if I did, the resulting upload size would've probably exceeded the sensible limits, not to mention the free account's limits.
I wonder if I should talk to Blender developers about it: offer a feature suggestion for Blender 5.0, or 6.0, or whatever, an export wizard that lets one handle these things (exporting a sophisticated Blender model including geo nodes trees and procedural materials) interactively and visually, step-by-step, saving each exporting project as a separate file to pick up where you left off... Never mind: it's my software development background talking.
As for this project, the stills are rendered in Cycles and the animation, naturally, in EEVEE. While I haven't completed the Animation Bootcamp course, I have watched some of its videos and in the animation part, tried to make use of them: the weapon hits, twitches forward, and finally settles into the hole it's made. It's probably too quick to notice, but it's there nonetheless.
And here is the link to the related BlenderArtists post where anyone interested can find, among other things, the little creative write-up of the story behind it and another thing I'm considering raising with Blender developers.
Dude I love the detail in the weapons, dangs those look fine fine. The background looks so realistic, I was trying to find parallax to see if it was a picture. The animation is also great, the one thing that took me out of the whole thing was the sounds when they hit the rock, feels like it wouldn't sound like that, I wouldn't know though.
1. The background on the animation and the second render *is* a photo of my surroundings that I took with my iPhone: I only had to airbrush out a couple of obvious signs of civilisation (so is the sky on the first render, BTW: the waterfront hotels, hidden by the 3D elements π).
2. The sound of the weaponsβ hits could be *anything*, assuming that they use some kind of force field (and how else could a blade split a rock?)ππ