Found this series of photographs by Niall McDiarmid on This Isn’t Happiness. The color and composition is pretty awesome. Really would like to try something like this in CG. That lighting is so spot on.
Pandemic blues....
We have gone from, “Remember when we used to go out to eat?” to just, “Remember when we used to be able to go outside?” here. It’s pretty god damn bleak. Anyways, trying to dive back into some creative projects and this quote kinda sums up my scatter brain creative thinking.
“Whatever I know how to do, I’ve already done. Therefore I must always do what I do not know how to do.”
-Eduardo Chillida
This is probably why I am so drawn to working in CG. It’s a truly limitless medium and there is always something new to learn and explore. Anyways, stay safe out there and keep your shit together.
So, yeah.
This is where we are now I guess.
Have a few box fans with air filters on them running on high and an air purifier going full blast with some windows and doors taped up but the smoke is still getting in. Before this, at least we could all go outside and do stuff there. Now, we can’t even go outside because the air is freaking toxic. It’s getting loony tunes out here…
It's MemeTime!
Yeah, shit’s fuck yo.
Home Studio Setup Costs Compared - 1980s And Now
I have been dabbling in home recording for about 25 years now and this article is a really fun read.
“As you can see, the cost of entry to get the same, if not better results than those afforded by recording setups of the 1980s, is around a 10th of the price, as a community member pointed out, if you account for inflation then the cost today would be an eye watering £33,580.65. Furthermore, modern systems are more flexible, take up far less space, burn far less electricity and use far fewer user serviceable parts.
Gear has never been cheaper or been as flexible and powerful. The next time you want to moan because a piece a software or a plugin doesn’t do everything you wished it did then you may want to remind yourself of how lucky we are to record and mix today!
Modern recording gear is a bloody miracle, there is no other word to describe it. Now go and make some music!”
Check out this awesome UI!
Live Dangerously
I don’t think I have had a “no Issue: update this year. Pen jumping, hand tool not working with space bar, pressure not working with size, UI glitching out….. Lets see what fresh hell this brings this morning.
Principles for better design
Crazy, windy, smokey weather here and not enough time to continue with the Jar project. I did start to play with adding more jars and getting the boolean dirt to work with them before I got busy again though. Found this good article on Design though.
“The moka coffee maker may not produce perfect coffee, but it requires so little maintenance compared to a large coffee machine with radiators, pipes, grinder, etc. that it makes the compromise “complexity / coffee taste” great.
Remember the Pareto principle: in general 80% of a things can be done in 20% of the total allocated time. Conversely, the hardest 20% left takes 80% of the time. Perfection requires infinite time and energy. This is impossible and therefore should not be part of your design.”
And here is where I left off with the jars. Need to tweak the UV’s on the far left and do all sorts of other stuff, but it’s coming along.
Friday things to hear and watch.
Well, we got a new Mogwai live album to check out here. Sounds pretty damn good. Also Rick Steves’ put out an awesome breakdown about fascism. It’s super good and highly worth a watch.
Not a Drop to Think.
Water, water everywhere….
Newest little jar study I worked on over the weekend. Pretty happy with the sand texture I was able to come up with. The water itself works but is a hacky bit of shading held together with duct tape and chewing gum. I did one version where I punched in with a 110mm lens instead of a 90mm like in the first and added some volumetrics to the lights, but It kinda broke it out from the series too much. So now the whole series will have the same lens and light settings. I don’t even think I’ll rotate the jar. Just change up floor textures along with what’s in the jar. Might drop some cloth in the background for some texture and see if that works though. The light rig is basically a room with a slight gap to the “front” and two windows on the side. It’s giving it that nice classic still life look. As always, click the thumbnails to see bigger images.
Pretty happy with this series so far. Next one will be fire.
Been enjoying staying off of social media and my very limited news diet. Highly recommend a news detox to anyone. Also, facebook is mostly made of evil. Check the links on the right for non, “Walled Garden” content. 3 Quarks always has some good long reads to check out.
Lightning in a Bottle
Working with clouds some more and went for a clean still life for this one. The “trace_psd_file” node works a lot better then I thought it would, it’s how I made the lightning. Pretty handy thing. Makes type much more usable in Houdini.
Photoshop 21.2.1 not recognizing Pen Pressure in Windows 10
So yeah, Adobe’s newest update to Photoshop fixes the pen pressure bug that made you have to include that PSUserConfig.txt file in your Photoshop Settings and turning off Windows Ink in Wacom Prefs.
So with this update you need to DELETE that file from
C:\Users\(your pc name)\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop 2020\Adobe Photoshop 2020 Settings
Then turn Windows Ink ON in your Wacom Prefs.
Snaps from Manzanita
Couple frames from a family trip to Manzanita Oregon we just got back from. Did all the edits in Luminar again. No Photoshop used at all.
Luminar is pretty interesting. I am hammering these pretty hard and not getting a ton of artifacts or issues. The one-button AI sky swap is pretty fun to play with as well. All shot on the new Fuji 100v which I recently picked up.
Cloud Study 2
Here is another take on those VDB clouds. This time I went for a bit more abstract, odd angular shape on them. Kinda like if it was, “At the Mountains of Madness” vibe.
Just got back from the Oregon Coast and I am shockingly exhausted for some reason. Wanna work on some of my photos from there but just kinda staring blankly at Bridge.
Some VDB Clouds and words from Wil Wheaton
Was playing around with the cloud and cloud noise nodes yesterday in a attempt to make a abstract cloudscape. Here are the results of that. Today I might get away from round shapes and see how they behave when I use angular shapes for the base. Possibly grids scattered like broken shards? Dunno. The Amplitude and Element Size settings in the cloud noise node can really change things up. Rendered in Redshift because Octane in Houdini hates me.
In my efforts to get off social media I am searching out blogs and other sites that allow me to escape the “walled garden” of insta, facebook etc… Go back to the day when the web was more based on people and not giant hoses draining all content, lol. Anyways, Wil Wheaton wrote a nice piece the other day and I thought I’d link it here. I can fall asleep on a dime, but I’ll wake up around 2-3 for a few hours with this crap spinning away in my nogging.
“It’s tough to fall asleep for me, because that’s when my anxiety does its most aggressive work expressing itself. Before I even hit the pillow, my brain is replaying everything I’m pretty sure I did wrong that day, taking occasional breaks to worry about, well, everything. My brain will work itself up so much it actually makes my heart speed up. When I’m supposed to be relaxing.
It’s not great, Dan.
But I started doing something that’s been incredibly helpful, and I thought I’d share it.
Every night as I’m getting ready for bed, I focus on a list of things for which I am grateful. I call it “doing my gratitudes”. I just start somewhere, like “I am grateful that I am going to sleep in a warm, safe bed. I am grateful that I get to share this bed with Anne. I am grateful I have enough food.” Stuff like that. I remind myself that there is so much that is good in my life, and by thinking about those things, recognizing those things, and making space to feel grateful for them, I do not give my anxiety an opportunity to grab hold of anything and go to work on me.”
Gregory Crewdson, New Work. "An Eclipse of Moths"
Write up in the NYT about his new work, “An Eclipse of Moths”
“The section of Pittsfield where he staged his pictures is near a General Electric transformer plant that poisoned the environment with PCBs but also employed most of the town. Ms. Hiam, who was born in Pittsfield, said, “My parents worked for GE. Everyone I knew had parents who came here for GE.” Pittsfield was devastated in 1987 by the closing of the factory, which now looms over the landscape like a ruined castle in a European village.”
VIA, This Isn’t Happiness.
Luminar Testing and leaving instagram
I went out and picked up the newest version of the x100, the x100 v the other day and just started doing some testing comparing it to the original. Right off the bat, the sharpness of the lens is so much better it’s kinda shocking. Also, with the camera I got a free version of Luminar and I am pretty surprised with that as well. Does a lot of interesting one-click solutions that don’t seem to straight-up break the images. It’s a bit chewy, but I’m hitting it pretty hard with some bad exposures and getting decent enough results for the average consumer.
At some point, I wanna write something up about me leaving instagram, but I just don’t have the focus or mental fortitude to dig up all the links on the evil crap Facebook is pulling. Suffice to say that they are stealing all your biometrics, actively promoting Trump in has tags over Biden and straight-up promoting Conservative views. That’s just for starters and all from the past month. Yeah, no shit. So they can eat a bag, I’m done. Need to just put something on there to explain it and point to the blog. Instagone.
Mazanita Landscape
Just tinkering around a bit with a landscape study done in Manzanita, Or.
Moon Hooch!
Kinda feel like everyone could use a little Moon Hooch in their life right now. And it’s Friday so Fuck It.
Landscape and a shift in direction.
i have been working mostly in Houdini and Redshift for a good bit of time but I started to feel that it’s just a bit too much for what I want to do. It’s taking a sledge hammer to kill a fly. I really enjoyed the challenge of it and all the stuff there is to learn but at the end of the day, was I making what I wanted to make? I kinda realized that, nope, I wasn’t. So with that in mind I decided to go back to playing around with Cinema 4d and Octane for a change of pace. It’s kinda silly how much easier stuff is to do. So here was something I was working on yesterday.
Yachats, Oregon.
Went out to Yachats, Oregon for some much needed decompression time a little bit ago and here are some snaps from my phone that I took while wandering around. Really beautiful place.
