Marble Blast Blender

During the past decade I was working on realistic Marble Blast renders in Blender. I set up, and then updated, the interior materials for MBG and Frightfest, a bunch of MBG objects, and a few level scenes. Finally I've polished them up and posted them online. I don't plan to do anything else with them, but I am willing to share the assets, or make renders of other levels that use these assets, if someone wants them enough.

All images

The scene pictures are also on DeviantArt (as PNGs).

These are awesome! The fourth one would make such a sick cover photo for MBU.

Wow, these are stunning. I also like the fourth one the most; the Super Jump looks so metallic.

Are you still on Discord?

Yeah. Username is weatherwonders.

May as well embed everything here. Again, some of these have been crunched by Imgur.
I added two more: an overdone render of the Frightfest materials, and the MBU marbles I did. I am addicted to refining assets and details I don't plan to ever use WHY AM I DOING THIS

These are absolutely gorgeous! I like the second and sixth images the best. You have brought new life to those items that I have spent thousands of hours of my life collecting and textures that I've rolled through. Imagine if Marble Blast really looked like this... I would lose my mind.

I understand spending a lot of time on little details that seemingly don't matter. They matter to you, and that's what's important. I do similar things when I work on projects like that. I just can't stress enough how beautiful these are—I've always loved the visuals of PQ more than anything else, and these take that to a whole new level. Will you ever make more?

Seriously impressive work.

Thank you.

Will I make more? Not sure. I think it would be fun to make an animation showing gameplay with these graphics (and maybe more-realistic audio). Most of what you see here also works in Blender's near-real-time renderer, and I even set up the animations for the shapes. If someone got a recording of the marble into Blender (which can't be that hard)—or more impressively, a multiplayer match with a bunch of players and item visibility data—I would probably be willing to do the rest. There are some interesting ways one might animate obtaining items. I actually did get a marble recording into Blender, but the speed and rotation were completely wrong.

As for the Frightfest stuff specifically, I fell in love with the aesthetic—even the more corny stuff, perhaps—and intended to make fancy renders of a few levels. I lost interest but I still want to use that aesthetic in some unrelated 3D scenes.
I figured I might even be able to use some of the textures. No idea what the Platinum Team would say about that, but reverse-searching for them with TinEye showed that some of them are mildly edited stock images. I was also reminded that several of them are from Constructor. That leaves the two simplistic noise textures (I did a quick and dirty AI image-to-image on the grass, for the record), and the tree bark which I can't find the origin of but isn't of much value anyway.

Most of this stuff goes way over my head, but an animation sounds really nice! Even if it's something as simple as that second image with the items rotating and the finish pad flashing, and maybe the light source subtly moving around, I think that would be really charming. A less crowded version of that would make a nice desktop background.

Man that's a very good work you did there.