This is a crosspost from my newsletter.

I ended up baking a lot more than usual since the last newsletter. You’ll see that and more tonight (or today, I’m not really sure what time you’re reading this) on The Hydromecha Monthly.

Monster Progress

I finished another monster for Antarctica Must Fall and made some decent progress on one more.

Chaos Elemental

This is the Chaos Elemental, which is a new member in whatever family of creatures the Cacodemon and Pain Elemental are part of (also the Surprise Elemental, another monster I made). It spits out a large projectile that explodes in midair, unleashing four smaller fireballs that bounce on the ground.

The strange limb placement was inspired by the Night Stalkers from After Man, a speculative evolution book. Much like that speculative creature, what used to be the Chaos Elemental’s arms are now its legs and vice versa as a result of it being upside-down. The limbs are also sorta backwards from what you might normally expect.

Here’s a higher-res view of the Chaos Elemental in Blender so you can get a better look at some of its materials. There aren’t any reptilian monsters in the base Doom II roster so I thought it’d be cool to give this one scaly skin. It was made using a voronoi texture, a couple color ramps, and a bump node.

Deep One

The next monster I’m working on is called the Deep One. It’s loosely based on a type of fish that can be found near Antarctica. Expect limbs and some other things to be added to the model by the time the next newsletter rolls around.

Website Updates

Hydromecha.Website (that’s my personal website, which isn’t very mobile friendly at the moment) saw a few changes.

Neocities Thumbnail

My website is hosted on Neocities, which shows a thumbnail of your /index.html on your profile. You can customize this using some JavaScript magicks to point Neocities’ screenshot bot to another page (or an image, etc.) so I did just that. I might create an image specifically to serve as a thumbnail later, but for now the closeup of the landing page monitor is good enough.

Featured Creation Revamp

I also redid the Featured Creation section on the homepage to look more like an art museum exhibit instead of the storefront sorta thing it used to be.

And lastly I added a couple more website buttons to my About page.

At some point later I’m planning on continuing the museum theme into a revamp of the Projects page. More on that later as progress is made.

The Eponymous Part

Things That Aren’t Baked Goods

Here we have a steak (that I sliced up and had with some bibim-naengmyeon) and some kimchi fried rice.

Pizza Time

These should be fairly self-explanatory.

Pastry Time

And in this gallery we have a slab of chocolate chip oatmeal cookie (I made three of these things total since the last time), a maple syrup meringue, a slab of butter cookie (with a bit too much egg wash in a few spots), a chiffon cake, a smaller chiffon cake with a sugary glaze, and an apple cake with frosting. The glaze on the smaller chiffon cake was brushed onto the cake, which was then put in to broil for a bit. I then applied another layer of glaze and broiled it again. This process was repeated several times. I have no idea if that whole process was really necessary but I did it anyway. :^)

Photo Time

I’m gonna start sharing some miscellaneous photos in this newsletter and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.

And that’s all there is for this edition! I’ll see you next time with another Hydromonthly.

Have a good one,

-Hydro