Photographers, Instagrammers: Stop Being So D*mn Selfish and Disrespectful

Well written article on the current unpleasantness going on with instagram influencers and their impacts on locations.

“For instagrammers, and wannabe “influencers” – learn that there are people on the planet who might not be interested in YOU. They might want to see the view without you in it. They might even want to just sit and enjoy a scene without a camera (shock!). While it’s easy to get wrapped up in this stuff online, they have every right (or maybe even more) to enjoy a place without it being ruined by your need to be “liked” by people you’ll never meet.”

Horror books and Illustrations

Pretty interesting short video talking about the design of horror book covers and how they changed over the years. Basically, while they look better overall, you no longer can tell what the hell they are about. Kinda a good reminder that your illustrations and design should always reflect the content and not just exist for design sake.

Plus, you know, cool as shit old horror illustrations.

RedShift and the Adaptive Error Threshold (AET).

One of the most annoying things about RedShift is that the defaults for everything is pretty much shit. This means you gotta spend 5-10 minutes setting up everything correctly at the start of a project. Well yesterday I was rendering out some very reflective thin type with moving lights and was running into the flickering highlight problem. I recalled reading a bit about AET but forgot the gist of it but after a bit of googling I found this forum post about it. This pretty much sums it all up. Bookmark it…

“In the Unified Sampling there is also Adaptive Error Threshold (AET). "This parameter controls how sensitive the noise detection algorithm will be. Lower numbers will detect noise more aggressively which means that more rays will be shot per pixel and vice-versa. It is recommended that you use the ‘show samples’ feature to visualize the effect of this parameter. The default 0.01 value should work well for a variety of scenes. For production-quality results, we recommend lower settings such as 0.003." AET seems to work amazingly well with it not taking much more processing power to figure out which pixel needs more samples. Knowing this let's say we set US Min to 1 and Max to 512. As said in the first post 512 seems to give the best quality for some odd reason and lower render times. A higher US max does not seem to give better quality for some strange reason. Now we set BF rays at 16384 it's max. We do this because AET seems to also control BF samples. The more BF samples the better. Set Irradiance Point Cloud samples to 1. The AET is so powerful we can now control exactly how fast Redshift renders and with what quality with the one parameter. Doing it in this way makes AET into a single make it pretty slider. Values between 0 and 2147483647 work for this with the higher number giving less quality and 0 being the max quality. I found a value of 0.001 is the lowest it can go without being 0 and seems to be needed for some scenes. A value of 0 gives the best results if one wants to wait much longer. If doing animations a higher AET could be used with Randomize pattern every frame as the different samples can be smoothed between frames with great results. Now that I know this I'm kind of scratching my head wondering why Redshift didn't simplify it to the one slider. It really does work that well.”

Pyro testing between Houdini and C4d

Doing some testing this weekend with Pyro sims and I noticed so interesting differences between how they look in Houdini / Redshift native and exported as VDBs into C4d / RedShift. This is part one, Houdini and Redshift native. It’s ugly and imperfect, but like I said I just wanted to test some things.

I like the C4d animation better. Has a more solid feel. But compare the stills and Houdini has more subtle things going on.

Next Step is to get the render settings and Post Effects more aligned and work up the textures of the grill to something more realistic. I was just happy to get this sim running cleanly like I wanted and in both programs in one day honestly.

Happy Weekend!

Hope everyone out there is having a great weekend. Here’s a fun little weekend looper.

Set builds

Thinking about maybe doing a daily series of images based around CG Set builds. Just some simple still life things that have a bit more commercial appeal then skulls and heavy dark shit. LOL! Anyways, yesterday I built out these two in C4d and Redshift just to get a feel for if I think it’s worth getting into. It’s that or go back and revist some older projects and figure out how to update them to C4d and Redshift. That would be a longer process but I would get to remake a ton of assests for the library so it’s a hard call.

Volumetrics innnnn sppppaaaaaaaaaacccceeeeee!

Worked up a volumetric study in C4d and Redshift last night. Was interesting to put the thing in a cloner and play with it that way. The cloner idea was from that LFO Desgin class I am taking ATM. Learning a ton from that, probably one of the best classes I have purchased and I have bought a tooooon of tutorials. He really explains what everything does instead of just walking you through entering numbers. That or my brain has exploded from Houdini and I am just happy to have a damn UI again instead of coding…..

Puck in Houdini

I was following along with this Houdini live stream the other day and thought it could be interesting to apply the Redshift stuff I have been learning to it but in Houdini. I actually got it all working and built out this creepy little puck statue. You can see the nodes for tight wires and how I textured the main Puck figure in the screen shots. Did the grading in Adobe Camera Raw to finish it off and that was a wrap at 10:30 or so, lol!

Recent progress

I have continued with more RedShift in C4d and have really been enjoying it. Went back to Houdini to mess around and ran into a bug where I can’t get the lights to look at nulls. I can load the null as a target and it will track it for the first movement and then it clears the field and drops the link.

No Idea.

Then I tried to load a fbx file and what a freaking nightmare it is. Tried the first free solution below and it worked but a simple pair of shoes that in C4d is 4 pieces of geometry became over 150. So yeah, really frustrating. That said, being back in C4d has been really nice and easy. It’s nice not to have to break my brain to build out simple sets. So many possibilities with Houdini but it’s really frustrating to do simple ass shit.

Redshift is starting to really grow on me though. Everything works like I think it should. No abstractions or messed up ways of getting something done. Wire it up and it works. Octane is really, really easy but it does some things really quirky and non-standard. Plus, light linking is a joy in Redshift.

I will say gamma correcting scaler values is pretty abstract and should not be needed. That should be added on the programming level at the start of those channels. It is also not well documented as being needed for true representations of your textures.

Anyways, here are some of the things I have been doing along with the classes. Nothing special really but it’s nice to have a log of what I was building out. Some of these are just saved from the RenderView so I can find them later. A few are a bit more thought out ;)

One of the nice things to make is a default three point lighting set with Nulls as targets for the lights and camera. Set your GI and change the default render settings and bango, saves 5-10 minutes at the start of everything. Highly recommend building out one of those.

Also, Ramps are really, really, really important. Like use them on all the things.

Some Houdini OBJ stuff

Had a chance to start that RedShift Lesson from LFO Design last night and I am super happy with that purchase already. Lots of good general tidbits in there. In the meantime, the MoGraph Slack has been posting a bunch of great ways to bring in OBJs into Houdini I can’t wait to test out. Here is a free method for simpler models:

And here is a method that will do more complex models and match all the materials but it’s a shelf tool you have to buy. But at $50 it’s kinda a no brainer. OD Shelf Tools.

Can’t wait to dig into both of these at some point. But for now it’s all about RedShift, Redshift and a touch of Redshift…. maybe?

Busy busy busy

Trying to get caught up with work so the blog and Instagrams are a little thin ATM. My apologies. Going to shift from doing a lot of Houdini learning to a deeper dive into Redshift for a bit. Going to start off with this longer lesson from LFO Design that I came across from Lester Banks. Hopefully this weekend I’ll get to dig into it but in the meantime, I gots to go shovel more pixels in the pixel mine!

Site and email issues

We are currently having issues with our domain provider where they kindly deleted all of our DNS logs and won’t roll them back. So if you need to contact us please reach me at danklife at gmail dot com .

Update, we appear to be able to get and send emails again. Yay! Jeremy rules!

Tut example

Was just working my way through a tutorial by Arvid Schneider and I got it kinda working in RedShift so I just wanted to through the results up here. Want to redo it all with a different object and styling but I was happy with this result. I need to figure out how to solve the Highlight flickering in Redshift I keep getting. Was a problem in the raven skull smoke animation as well. Really distracting…..

Smoke imported back in C4d

Just wanted to bang out something in C4d where I brought a smoke VDB object into it from Houdini. Did the cheesy neon and Tron thing just to get something happening in there. Hopefully I can be forgiven. It’s a Sam Prekop lyric that was going through my head on Sunday. Redered in RedShift.

News and Updates!

The fun stuff first! Jeremy Wilkins of the band We Are Parasols did a lovely blog post on all the art work I have made for their band over the years. Check out the write up here, “ARTWORK BY DANIEL KOPTON (DANKLIFE) -OR- SPHERES, SKULLS, & LIGHT.”

I finally got a bit of time to start updating the portfolio as well and added a project we did for Sierra Nevada that needed landscapes and log cabins rebuilt. Pretty fun stuff.

Smoke interacting with objects

Yesterday I wanted to get some smoke to roll down a sweep, interact with a object and then have some wind come in to clear the set. This is where I ended up and I’d chalk it up as a success. I did not get into lighting or textures too much because I wanted to focus on the sim mostly. There is also some annoying flicker in the textures I need to look into fixing. Then I brought it into Resolve 16 and dove into some of the nodes for the first time. The Fusion part of Resolve I think I can sink my teeth into. Interesting stuff in there.