Clear LCDs as animated stained glass

This is pretty amazing. "‘Illuminated Glass’ is an interactive art experience that reimagines the traditional art of stained glass. The heart of the installation features a 4 panel box made with transparent screens and mirrors. A generative art system plays across the screens, appearing at first like modern stained glass. Light shines through the art, letting colored light into the experience."

Great tofu and a good story

Read this story on Ota Tofu this morning. Really interesting story on a local shop. It's the oldest Tofu shop in America.

"Anzen was Ota Tofu’s longest-standing customer until they closed in 2014 (after 109 years in business). Today, a distributor in eastern Washington is the shop’s longest-standing account—around since Ko’s parents’ day—thanks to Andy’s Market in College Place, catering to the students at Seventh Day Adventist-affiliated Walla Walla University. Most of their business comes from wholesale accounts held by local restaurants and stores, but they still graciously sell their tofu to people like me, regular folks who wander in off the street with a few bucks in their pocket. If you bring a bucket, the pressed-out soybean meal called okara is free (it’s great mixed with ground pork and fried into patties or meatballs, to eat with ramen). Ota Tofu Company does this as a service to the community. Anyone who has tasted tofu made only hours ago knows what a service this is."

Loops and Learning

Starting in May we took on a big CG project where we were doing all the finishing on product renders.  They would send us the raw renders and we would clean up and UV glitches and work up light passes to get the renders to a super clean hero look. This gave me the chance to pick the brain of the CG lead over there about what he was using in his workflow to get his results. They centered on C4d and Octane and the results were really good.  I never tested C4d because most of the rabble on the internet seem to slam it as only being good for making spheres look cool on instagram. But after this conversation, I picked up the Demo at the start of June and now can not stand to open Modo. Anything more than converting a file to FBX and I want to tear my head out. With Cinema 4D I find making animations super easy and rewarding. Plus, this also has opened up using DaVinci Resolve to do my post on the renderings which is a very powerful tool as well. Here is a before and after of my latest animation that shows what DaVinci can bring.

Before and After DaVinci

You can see more of the animations on my instagram page which is where I primarily post these things. So far I mostly just use the Physical Render in C4d and have not hit any major snags but I am running some tests with Corona which is really interesting.  Corona was also just bought out by The Chaos Group who make V-Ray which is really interesting to me as I really liked the results of V-Ray in Modo. Anyways, just some rambling on what I have been doing for fun, enjoy!

Good podcast alert!

Been busy learning C4d as of late and been listening to the Greyscale Gorilla podcast because of that. This one is pretty relevant to anyone in the creative industry. 

If you are curious my instagram on the right has some of the animations I have been doing. 

Learn new skills!

Good read by Paul H. Paulino about how learning traditional media really helped him understand and push his CG work. 

"During my lunch break I would bookmark all kinds of free tutorials I could find and at night I would follow them meticulously, trying to achieve the same result.

After a couple of months doing this, I realized that I wasn’t improving at all. I couldn’t solve problems without looking at step-by-step tutorials and I didn’t feel I was creating anything. The reason was simple: I wasn’t learning. I was copying.

I felt like I needed to do something different to learn things properly and master the skills to become an artist. Soon I realized that it wasn’t just about practicing, it was about knowing how to practice.

After arriving at that conclusion I decided to put my 3D studies aside and, instead, I began learning more about drawing and painting.

To be honest, that conclusion didn’t come quickly. I spent a long time observing, reading and studying successful stories from artists all over the world and I realized that almost everyone highlighted the importance of learning at least the basics of art fundamentals."

Hasselblad Acquired by DJI

The writing has been on the wall for awhile about the Hasselblad, here is a pretty good summery of what happened at Luminous Landscape plus a bit about what they think it means. Good read. I remember when Hasselblad made it so you could only use their backs and pros ran from the system into Phase One / Mamiya. Hassablad glass was amazing and I used one for a few years when I worked as a architectural / construction photographer. Loved that cam. 

"DJI now owns the majority share of Hasselblad. You heard me right. This information has come from numerous, reliable sources. Hasselblad, the iconic Swedish camera company, is now owned by the Chinese drone maker DJI. Sooner or later, this will all become public. Maybe now that I am spilling the beans, it will be sooner rather than later. It seems that everyone inside Hasselblad knows about this, as well as some distributors and resellers. You can’t keep something this big a secret for very long, eventually, it is going to get out.

What does this mean? Well, we can speculate all we want. I have been in this industry a very long time. I can imagine that many of Hasselblad’s employees are a bit worried, to say the least. It could be that a few of them are no longer with the company or are already looking elsewhere for employment. I am sure that DJI is going to come in and make significant changes. The investors have most likely arranged a share transfer program so that they will get some of their investment back. But what about the new X1D, the H line, and most importantly, the future of the company?"

Are you a “bricklayer” or an art director? Chris Do explains.

Good write up on Art Direction versus Design here. 

"To me, an art director has the very difficult task of (working either directly with a client or a creative director) to decipher the needs of a client. This could be going through a script, brief or conversation to understand what the design and communication objectives are. They have to relay this to the client, gain their trust and win the job in a competitive pitch situation.

There are a lot of interpersonal or “soft skills” needed to do this. They have to demonstrate an ability to ask great questions, remain objective, listen intently, parse wants from needs and convert vague language (e.g. “cool,” “organic,” “epic”) into a shared visual language. This is the first challenge and not everyone is cut out to do this."

End of Year Personal project Round Up!

Just posted a End of Year round up of more personal work to Behance if you wanna see what I have been up to on Instagram and in CG. Here are a few as well, enjoy!