Houdini Doodle: Beer O'Clock

Was enjoying playing around with glass the other day so I started messing with some beer glasses and a sandblasted looking texture on it. The pattern does interesting things as you zoom in and out and it becomes more abstract.

Redshift render, "No Devices Available" error.

Congratulations, you are dumb like me and upgraded your graphics card driver. Go team! There is no roll back function in the Device Manager anymore and Geforce Experience does not have that function either. But here is a handy link to the Nvidia Old Drivers search page.

Fun way to start the day troubleshooting… yeesh.

Sam Prekop and John McEntire, “Sons Of”. Music Time!

Been a big fan of Sea and Cake and Tortise since I lived in Chicago way back in the day so I am pretty happy with anything these two folks do but I am enjoying this even though electronica is normally not my jam. Nice write up on Bandcamp as well.

“Whether it was inspired by Kraftwerk or Bitchin Bajas or a middle-aged desire to touch the canon of abstract dance music, it’s a pleasure to get lost in these pulses. They take all sorts of shapes: Some cascade as programmed keyboard textures, buoyed by keyboard melodies; others spring out of the kick drum, whose metronomic noise lays the groundwork even as the drum programming splinters it into a dubbed-out, polyrhythmic fantasia. (The dimestore presumption is that these bear McEntire’s fingerprints, but the album’s minimalist recording credits obscure the division of labor.) Among equals, the 23-minute “A Yellow Robe” rises to the fore: a sunrise dancefloor reverie, with its grand sweeping synth chords, and joyfully bouncing sequencer, all serving a steadily rotating, forever driving beat, taking its time getting to place but all-in on in its destination. Take that ride.”

Houdini Doodle

I saw this piece in Portland Monthly shot by Mike Novak and wanted to take a swing at something similar in Houdini. First image is the inspiration, second is my interpretation.

Fleeting Memories of Youth and the Increasing Impermanence of Culture

This essay puts into words some thing I think about fairly often, mainly, what becomes of all this digital content we create? Take this silly blog for example. It does go back to 1998, 23 freaking years if you know where to dig in theory. They say the internet is forever, but stuff gets shut down and things get lost all the time.

“ In fact, up to and including the digital consumer cameras, communication and creation had always been a struggle with brevity and bandwidth. It was costly to send mail and time consuming to write by hand, so letters were usually kept fairly short: a few pages, perhaps. And they took up space: proficient correspondents, unless wealthy, eventually ran out of reasonable storage for their letters and had to discard some of them. Audio and camcorder cassettes had limited running times. Rolls of film had a fixed number of frames and once you'd snapped your 24 pictures, that was it. Even if you were a hobby photographer with an endless budget and your own darkroom, there was a physical and temporal limit to the number of pictures you could develop and keep. There was a similar process with the digital cameras: CF cards filled up and you had to transfer the files to your computer, in the process deleting the bad ones in order to save space on your external hard drive.

Then the smartphone happened, and the cloud, and something fundamentally changed.

...

If you're young today, your formative years depend on auto-deleted snapchat videos, short-lived memes, stories told in computer games likely unplayable in 30 years (without running rogue game servers and emulating complex proprietary CPUs and GPUs), and whatever happens to flutter by in a feed. I'm curious what the future of reminiscing will look like, even if all of this is saved somehow. So much to sift through, so few tangible artifacts. Even traditional culture is less permanent: we get our music and movies from streaming services, we rent our e-books through EULA:s and consume them on devices controlled by the manufacturer. I do most of this myself - but I was young in a different era and I at least have my stacks of CD:s (including bob hund) tucked away in a safe place, and shelves full of the prose and movies that shaped me.

...

And yet, despite these and countless other examples, we still put our faith in digital permanence. We create so many mementos we hardly have time to look at them and then we entrust them all to companies and platforms beyond our control, storing them on machines we don't own running services that could disappear tomorrow. Will Youtube still be there in 50 years? Will Instagram and Dropbox?”

Built to Spill. Music time!

Enjoy some new music here from Built to Spill on Bandcamp. For the love of satan, get the hell off of Spotify and use Bandcamp. Spotify not only rips off it’s artists but it also pushes alt right, faschist podcasts. What in the hell or you doing giving them money?

New Work in the Wild!

Some renders we did went live on the Specialized site not too long ago. The lighting on these was pretty complicated and really happy with the results. I’ll post a screenshot of the set when I get some free time to dive back into it.

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.

Have some drum fun in your day!

“Gregg Bissonette and I discuss the drummers that every serious drummer should know from Gene Krupa to Ringo Starr to John Bonham to Questlove. A comprehensive guide of styles from Swing, Jazz, Rock, Fusion, Hip Hop and Funk.”

UE5 vs Vray | Can Real Time Results Match Vray Realistic Lighting and Reflections?

Digging a bit deeper into UE5 and I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of comparing Lumen versus Path Tracing, Versus Hardware Ray Tracing and other such nonsense. It’s a complicated issue and the trade-offs of real-time versus offline come into play here.

During my research, I found this interesting Vid from an ArchViz artist working on comparing V-Ray to UE5 which actually gets closer than I thought it could.

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.

Unreal 5 animation study

I little animation I did to get familiar with the Sequencer in UE5, animating camera moves, focus pulls and lights. Pretty intuitive once you get into it. Just assets from the store with some wind animation tweaks. Custom LUT made in Resolve and applied in Unreal.

Lake Mead stuffs.

Been watching this channel this afternoon all about Lake Mead. Just a father and son fishing and documenting the water drop. It’s really interesting on the ground type stuff. Just super casual and chill. This one they go to Hoover damn which they read up on is in “Inactive Draw” which means no electricity for Los Vegas….. crazy stuff.

The Personal Brand Is Dead. Gen Z would rather be anonymous online.

Good read on how the kids wanna avoid all the social media trappings now-a-days. Good for them. I have really enjoyed getting the hell off of instagram and facebook and all that crap. I’ll just hang out here in my own little backwater of the internet, thank you very much!

Something has shifted online: We’ve arrived at a new era of anonymity, in which it feels natural to be inscrutable and confusing—forget the burden of crafting a coherent, persistent personal brand. There just isn’t any good reason to use your real name anymore. “In the mid 2010s, ambiguity died online—not of natural causes, it was hunted and killed,” the writer and podcast host Biz Sherbert observed recently. Now young people are trying to bring it back. I find this sort of exciting, but also unnerving. What are they going to do with their newfound freedom?

CG vs Photography

Interesting discussion here between the fine folks at Entegma.