Title
“Today Is Not Unlike The Future”
Artist (Student Name)
Malachiyah Armstrong
Instructor
Benjamin Anderson
School
College of Fine Arts – Animation Program
Stephen F. Austin State University
Nacogdoches TX, United States
Artist’s Statement
I wanted to capture a familiar feeling in my artwork, the sense of wonder and excitement that comes with the arrival of new technologies. Innovations like VR, the blending of 2D and 3D animation, foldable screens, major Blender updates, and beautifully crafted video games all continue to spark that same feeling, revealing possibilities and futures I hadn’t imagined. In my poster, the ship’s crew has traveled vast, unknown distances not just to witness the split planets, literal broken halves, but to expand their reality through both technological advancement and new perspectives. I’m inspired by ACM SIGGRAPH’s mission, so I designed the planet halves to visually echo the shape of their logo. Space is a realm we’ve barely glimpsed. You can only imagine standing before such a sight with an easel, painting it plein air, like capturing the view from a mountaintop never seen before. No matter how far humanity travels, technology keeps immersing us in futures once thought to be pure fantasy.
Technical Statement
For this project, I used Blender, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Photoshop. I began with hand-drawn sketches to develop the concept and moved into Blender for asset creation, modeling the spaceship interior, props, planets, and individual asteroids. All shaders were created procedurally and customized for each object. I painted a mask to differentiate between the planet’s exterior and interior surfaces.
To assemble the scene, I created asteroid fields using geometry nodes combined with weight-painted masks for controlled placement, supplemented by manually positioned asteroids and select lighting. Procedural bushes were generated using a separate geometry nodes setup. Atmospheric effects were driven by an HDRI and a procedural shader linked to both an empty and a sun lamp. Camera-invisible planes were placed strategically to block specific light paths from the sun and ship interior, refining the mood and composition.
In Photoshop, I digitally painted images that were applied to ten different in-scene canvases. Illustrator was used to add text elements. Throughout the process, I utilized AI text tools through Chat GPT for troubleshooting and creative problem-solving, allowing for more efficient iteration and refinement.