After my last project, the Guust Flater/Gaston Lagaffe taxi, I decided to keep the ball rolling. I found this single image of an impromptu coffee machine (André Franquin - cartoon nr. 722). It’s an impossible contraption of hotplates, flasks, wires and tubes.
(Video quality on desktop is very bad, but on smartphones it’s HD. I don’t why, but it’s a YT thing.)
First sketched out the basic shapes and gradually adding more details. The tubes and wiring all done with curves. Most of the materials are node based, with a few added bitmap images.
The boiling water/coffee is an animated Voronoi texture combined with a glass shader. Same for the coffee in the tubes. At first I tried creating the bubbles with geo-nodes, but realized that a shader would be much simpler and less taxing in rendering(?) The water surface is animated with a displacement modifier using a vertex group of the top polygons.
The steam-effects were done with videos (from Pixabay), with the black knocked out and made semi-transparent. Color correction and sounds added in DaVinci Resolve.
My Dad was a chemist, so at one time we took him to a hotel where they had a most-unusual coffeemaking contraption that basically consisted of a couple of pieces of laboratory glassware stacked on top of each other. It would suck boiling water from the bottom compartment through a tube, then the finished coffee would flow back into the same compartment. It was quite the sight to behold – and, it worked.
After dinner, I said to him: “No, Dad … we need to order coffee!”
.. Just the mention of the name – “Gaston Lagaffe” – transported me back to my childhood imagination… In the same vein of wacky, comical names, there was “Inspecteur la Bavure”… The 80s.
.. Rien qu’à l’évocation du nom - “Gaston Lagaffe” - je me suis retrouvé projetté dans l’imaginaire de l’enfance…
Dans le même ordre de nom loufoque, comique, il y avait “L’inspecteur la Bavure”… Les années 80.
Same here. In the Netherlands it was called ‘Guust Flater’, a pretty good translation of the name Gaston Lagaffe. Franquin is one of my all time heroes, I love the universe he created.
