50 Favorite Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books Of The Past Decade

NPR just released a damn good list of books to check out. We listen to a TON of audiobooks here so this list is great. Currently really into Jade City by Fonda Lee.

“These past 10 years have brought seismic change to science fiction and fantasy (sometimes literally, in the case of N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth series), and we wanted to celebrate the world-shaking rush of new voices, new perspectives, new styles and new stories. And though we limited ourselves to 50 books this time around, the result is a list that's truly stellar — as poll judge Tochi Onyebuchi put it, "Alive."

We Asked, You Answered: Your 50 Favorite Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books Of The Past Decade

HyperGrass!

This asset looks pretty good, adding it to the list of assets / tutorials to try out for sure.

HyperGrass is a multi-purpose collection of realistic 3D grass assets unlike any other. Create realistic fields of grass with ease and craft the perfect look you need with an unprecedented amount of flexibility, control and creative possibility.

With a unique multi-layer design and endless amounts of variation, HyperGrass will be the only 3D grass library you ever need for adding incredible realism to your artwork.”

HyperGrass.jpg

Mixer 2021 Deep Dive: Multiple Texture Sets

Since adobe bought out Substance Designer I have been messing around with Mixer occasionally. I use Bridge and Megascans all the time but have not really dug too deep into the integration and customizing you can do with Mixer. The new 2021 update seems to add a lot more functionality though that has me more interested in messing around more. The siren song of real-time rendering with Unreal is growing stronger as well….

New work in the Wild

I did some album artwork for local Portland band “Hawks Do Not Share” that will be on vinyl and CD. The imagery is also featured on the website, will be a shirt and did a looping animation for a lyric video. Pretty fun project. When I get the product here I’ll probably update the portfolio with it all proper.

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.

Houdini Labs Updates

I dunno how I missed this video, but it’s the Side-Fx folks going over some new stuff in Labs. Lots of cool new nodes to play with. Just kinda messed around with this ugly thing to try out the new rope and edge wear nodes. I also finally updated to the newest Houdini and Redshift so I can start working with ACES colorspace more which is pretty interesting. Textures seem better without as much tweaking now, check out that floor.

I’ll probably be posting more Houdini links in the future so I can use the blog as a reference. My bookmark folder is a mess….

LIke all of 30 seconds went into this lovely image.

More teasers

Just some more teaser images for some stuff coming out soon.

Random Bevel in Houdini

Some things in Houdini are just stupid simple to do, this 1-minute tut from Simon Houdini is just pure gold. His whole channel is pure gold FWIW.

I never knew about the “Exclusions > Ignore Flat Edges” option in the PolyBevel node…. yeesh!

Teaser

Screen shot teaser image from a flip book of a animation I have been working on for a music video. I think it comes out in early September?

Doodles!

Some bends, vdbs and other such things in Houdini.

Abstract Doodle

Messing around with some concepts from a class I am working on.

Houdini Vellum, random pins in simulation

Ran into a little bug messing around with vellum where it looks like pins are set to the cloth even though I have no pins set.

The way to fix is to go into vellum node and change “Mass: Calculate Varying” to “Mass: Unchanged”. That will unstick them.

Vellum Doodle

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

The internet is destroying our brains, but we can't quit. It's a factory we're forced to work in without any pay.

Good write-up here on Business Insider about social media site like instagram making money of its content creators for free. It’s one of the many reasons I have left pretty much all social media. Now I just yell into the vacuum on my lonely little blog, lol!


“The internet is destroying our brains, but we can't quit. It's a factory we're forced to work in without any pay.”

“As culture and media theorist McKenzie Wark writes in her book "Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?", the internet uses our labor without us really knowing it. Unlike the broadcast era of media, during which the owners of television networks and movie studios had to at least create the content to sell to us, we now create all the content for each other, mostly without being paid.

"[Social media companies like Facebook] don't even bother to provide any entertainment," Wark writes. "We have to entertain each other, while they collect the rent, and they collect it on all social media time, public or private, work or leisure, and (if you keep your FitBit on) even when you sleep."

We produce the memes, tweets, posts, and pictures that keep us tethered to the internet, and then that content is monetized in the form of advertisements - revenue users help produce, but do not usually see a penny of. “

“As culture and media theorist McKenzie Wark writes in her book "Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?", the internet uses our labor without us really knowing it. Unlike the broadcast era of media, during which the owners of television networks and movie studios had to at least create the content to sell to us, we now create all the content for each other, mostly without being paid.

"[Social media companies like Facebook] don't even bother to provide any entertainment," Wark writes. "We have to entertain each other, while they collect the rent, and they collect it on all social media time, public or private, work or leisure, and (if you keep your FitBit on) even when you sleep."

We produce the memes, tweets, posts, and pictures that keep us tethered to the internet, and then that content is monetized in the form of advertisements - revenue users help produce, but do not usually see a penny of. “