Adobe Firefly testing

So I got into the Adobe Firefly beta and did some quick testing. It seems to be going for a more illustrative look then most other AI programs. Here are some images with my prompts to check out.

New Work in the Wild: Specialized

Some interesting retouching and grading work we did for Specialized went live a little while ago. Really fun glass work and toning going on on these. The lighting was really nice to work with.

So I guess we will be adding these to the portfolio update soon as well!

Art Director: Pete Panciera

Senior Designer: Walton Brush

Photographer: Yossiel Rodriguez

Producer: Erick Marcheschi

Post + Retouching: Danklife

Portfolio updates incoming!

Working on getting some portfolio updates posted some time soon and thought I would drop a preview since it’s been a hot minute since an update here. Just have not had a ton of free time to sort it all out. Hopefully, before May I can start getting these things live. Some fun stuff in here!

New Work in the Wild? Maybe?

Kinda a new Work in the Wild here. Played, recorded and mixed a demo for one of my bands a few weeks ago and one of the tracks got played on XRay.FM the other night. It was pretty awesome to hear on the real deal radio! Check out the demo here, this band is named “Manx”.

Not MIA, just a busy start to the year

Been abnormally busy so any free time I have has been spent away from screens and in meatspace doing things with my actual hands, lol! Here are some Houdini tests I did a month or so ago though. Hoping to carve out more time for blogging and getting new portfolio pieces up before the end of the month? Maybe?

Common Windows Maintenance

Here are some simple tasks to run to help maintain your windows machine and keep it virus free. I do this about once or twice a week. Does not take long at all with modern SSD drives.

Simple Windows Maintenance with Power Shell.

In the search bar, type, “powershell” and right click on that and pick, “Run as Administrator”.

Then type or copy and paste this:

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth

Let that run, then enter this:

sfc /scannow

Run that till there are no errors reported and then reboot.

Windows Offline Scan

K, I was just describing this to someone and did not realize how deep in menus this setting was, good lord. Anyways, here we go. Follow this freaking click path.

Start menu > Settings > Update and Security > Windows Security > Virus and Threat Protection > Scan Options > Microsoft Defender Offline Scan.

Run that and your computer will reboot into scary mode and hopefully remove any deep buried malware on your system.

So there are three simple steps for a clean running windows system as of January 2023!

RIP: Jeremiah Green

45, yikes.

I first found Modest Mouse during a visit to Portland in 2001, just after 9-11. I was at Music Millennium and picked up probably one of the last CDs I ever bought, “The Moon and Antartica”. Back in LA, they became a soundtrack during skate sessions, backyard pool hunts, surf trips and many nights better left unsaid.

“Jeremiah Green, the longtime Modest Mouse drummer, has died, the band announced. Green’s bandmates had recently disclosed that Green was undergoing treatment for cancer. Jeremiah Green was 45 years old.

Green co-founded Modest Mouse with frontman Isaac Brock and bassist Eric Judy in Washington in the early 1990s.”

The internet is headed for a 'point of no return,' claims professor

I remember the early internet and how it seemed to hold so much promise. Hell, I started this blog back in 1998 if you can believe that. If I were to go back in time and be some kinda hero in a “Terminator” movie plot. “No, we must destroy the internet for it becomes a power for evil!”. No one would have bought it.

“Can the internet, in fact, be fixed? "There may come a point when that's no longer possible, after which time the adverse consequences can no longer be controlled. The internet is headed for a point of no return, and Big Tech is probably already aware of this, too. Mark Zuckerberg has moved away from his social media platforms and launched Meta, as if nothing's wrong and we can just start over again, but it's clearly already broken."

...

"This price is a psychological one in the first place. Not only are a lot of young people suffering from a distorted self-image and anxiety disorders, there's also been an externalization of functions: certain critical functions of our brains are being outsourced. Our short-term memory is getting worse, and our attention is becoming increasingly fragmented and very specifically directed."

...

Repercussions are also to be expected here as control becomes increasingly more sophisticated. "In China, it's already the case that you can't board a train if you have a 'wrong' opinion. In the United States, you have to share all of your social media profiles if you want to apply for a visa. Things don't seem to be so bad in western Europe yet, but your online activity is so traceable and visible now that there's a real possibility that at a certain point people will no longer be able to travel or get a mortgage or insurance."

Houdini Doodle: Xmas Still life / cloth sim.

Today’s doodle was a vehicle for working on some more cloth sims. Particularly, draping cloth over a bunch of boxes to make that base shape. The rest of it is kinda meh, but whatever, it’s just a doodle, lol!

Houdini Doodle: Cloudscape

Todays Cloudscape doodle was a lot of back and forth with different settings for clouds. More info below the doodle.

I started with this tut, “Create the Beautiful Cloudscape and Render it with Karma XPU – Getting Started With Houdini ep. 8” using the newer Cloud SOP and Karma render but started to deviate pretty quickly. Couple of issues that I had. Karma kept hard crashing to the desktop, which was a bummer I have been trying to get more into it as a Redshift replacement but it's just too unstable. The Camera Focal Length in Karma was set to something like 50000 which is not real-world numbers so I have no idea what lens I am using. Very odd.

An issue with the tut itself, his use of the Cloud Noise SOP was heavy handed with the Element Size kind of blowing the shape apart. He also did not get into the Scatter Shapes or Flatten tabs on the Cloud SOP which are really cool. I also doubled the Uniform Sampling to get a higher resolution on the clouds. Could possibly double it again I think. Also, I did move the whole project into Redshift as well. (I can’t embed the video for some reason, it kicks back an error. Sorry about that.)

I used a lot of techniques from this tut on making a cloud generator, but interesting enough, most of what he covers is now baked into the Cloud SOP itself which is nice. Flatten, scatter etc…

And here is a screencap showing the difference between 350 and 700 Uniform Sampling.