Nvidia Canvas Doodle.

New version of Nvidia’s Canvas app has come out which adds some nice features and doubles the resolution of the output as well. It’s doing some interesting stuff with AI. Then, just to use even more AI, I rezzed it up with Topaz GigaPIxel AI. This tech is getting pretty surreal.

Oceanside Oregon

Here are some iPhone snaps from a recent trip to Oceanside Oregon we went on. All from the iPhone SE, but I am getting tempted to upgrade to the pro13 possibly.

CG vs Photography

Interesting discussion here between the fine folks at Entegma.

Unreal 5 still life doodle

Been doodling in Unreal 5 a bit and here is a quick little thing. I really need to get a better understanding of the cameras, post processing and sequencer….

Yachats Oregon

Just got back from a little trip to Yachats on the Oregon coast and here are a few snaps from our walks. Great place.

Houdini Doodle

Here is today’s Houdini doodle using some of the scatter tricks I used on the album artwork from the other week. My coffee sketch from this morning for the concept as well.

Outgrowth Podcast Soundtrack Artwork

Just finished the cover art for the soundtrack to the podcast Outgrowth. It’s a horror story set here in the PNW. You can check out the soundtrack by We Are Parasols on Bandcamp now.

EP Artwork. We Are Parasols

Just finished up the artwork for another We Are Parasols EP release and got the permission to post it here. All done in Houdini and Redshift. I am tinkering with the idea to give Karma / Solaris a try and see how those work. Would be nice to stay entirely native to Houdini for the renders. I’ll have to do some testing.

Cloth Sim study with Sub-D experiments.

The Chair study from the other day had a cloth sim on camera right that I made in DOPs, which is what made me want to mess a bit more with some cloth sims and this is the result of that study. This time though, I just made it directly in a vellum SOP with some pinned points. It’s a much simpler workflow for sure. Used good old JSplacement for the textures and displacement and subdivided the cloth mesh with a poly reduce to get the “webbing” stuff.

Lighting Studies

Worked up another lighting study today for practice. Quick cloth sim thrown in to keep that stuff fresh in my head as well.

Mike's Motels 1974

Pretty cool photo set here from Mike Mandel on Motels from the 70’s. Some fun stuff that could be interesting to recreate in CG… maybe…

Mike's Motels 1974

Some Digi Painting from the Oregon Coast.

Was messing around with Procreate on the iPad while at the coast and started to get some interesting results.

Vellum Doodle

Just messing around with some vellum cloth sims today. Going for that cloth landscape kinda look.

Doodle and notes and portfolio updates

I hate pinterest with the burning intensity of 10,000 suns. What a garbage site that spews out so much search engine spam on anything I search for. Good lord, try to google a CG technique and just see page after page of single linked junked with no info from pinterest. Anyways, just add this to your search to kill it.

-site:pinterest.*

The “*” is key as it kills EVERYTHING from that domain and they spew out so much crap just the “-site:pinterest” won’t clear it. Yeesh…

Two new portfolio pieces dropped on the home page as well. Some allbirds and some Nike both with CG elements.

And today’s doodle is a rehash of a older set for some EP cover art that got shot down.

Yesterday's doodles.

So I have been taking a bit of a creative hiatus / break for a bit to help with the COVID burnout and I opened Houdini for the first time since (checks blog posts) yikes, January. Was just messing around with some displacement and then the map box node to import the topo data on Mt Hood. These are the results of the stuff. I actually enjoyed the process and exploration of it again. Which was the goal of taking a break in the first place. Now I just need to update the portfolio….