New Work in the Wild: Specialized Tires.

We got to help out with the whole tire line at Specialized for the Season and those are starting to appear all around the site. We ended developing a new technique we call, “Texture Stealing” in house to help with the textures on the rubber when they punch in with a 9k camera. It’s kind of a variation on High Frequency Separation. /end nerd talk ;)

Albert Bierstadt- painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes

Just a little dive into Albert Bierstadt, this painter I was looking up. His landscapes are really something. I like the lighting quiet a bit.

New Work in the Wild: Sitka

Some apparel in ice retouching Jeremy did for Sitka went live on their site a little bit ago. Working with ice is always fun.

RTO is bullshit, here's a real life case study from Zillow

RTO is Bullshit. We all know. AI is Bullshit. We all know it. Come on people. Anyways, some interesting data points from Zillow.

“The company has drastically cut costs by shedding offices. Zillow’s total leasing costs reached $54 million in 2022 and dropped to $34 million last year. The company’s total revenue for 2024 was $2.2 billion.

Zillow’s financial results from last year suggest the workforce has been productive while logging in from home. The company reported Tuesday that it beat Wall Street expectations for the last three months of 2024 with a quarterly revenue of $554 million

Zillow shifted to allowing people to work fully remote during the pandemic. It’s been a recruiting and retention tool for Zillow as they “now see four times the number of job applicants for every job we have versus what we did before the pandemic,” Wacksman said.”

New Work in the Wild: Trailborn

Some architectural retouching work I did for Trailborn is showing up on their website. Looks super clean in their design / layout. Surf and Sand and Grand Canyon.

I offered the work in exchange for a couple weeks of free nights but could not get them to bite on that hook ;)

Revised name of band to Dyerin

So I had to make a new render this AM ;)

And so it begins...

Great Metafilter thread here on the trade war. It’s bad. My favorite post so far is this one.

“I  said to my therapist last week, "I fully expect that in three years I'm going to be either picking fruit or rendering chicken corpses. If I make my quota and attend the Praise Meeting for our Glorious Leader, I might get a fish head with my bowl of rice." My therapist: "You really think it'll take that long?"

Houdini Doodle - Dyer

Little doodle I whipped out today for something still cooking in the oven.

Have a lot going on and been busy with the life and work so trying to post when I can. Need to update the portfolio as well, but I kinda don’t enjoy that and it’s a lot of work that I don’t have time for at the moment, lol! But it is on the radar as something that needs to get done.

What was old is new again....

How to survive being online.

The only way to defeat a narcissistic sociopath is to starve them. Protect yourself from their bullshit, of course, but move away from it. Let them have their stage, but refuse to be their audience.

This isn’t easy. It’s especially difficult because capitalism is an attention economy. The New York Times and The Washington Post love a narcissistic sociopath because they generate clicks and clicks sell ads. Social media loves a narcissistic sociopath for the same reason, but it’s even worse. On social media, we’re the ones carrying their water. Trump says something that he knows will get him attention (i.e. renaming the Gulf of Mexico) and not only does it fire up hundreds of media outlets, who now divert attention to this idiocy, but it also fires up tons of people like me and you, who end up reposting his garbage.

You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism

If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president, it’s that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, it’s exactly what they want.

It isn’t quite as simple as “touch grass,” but it also sort of is.

Trusted information networks have existed since long before the internet and mass media. These networks are in every town and city, and at their core are real relationships between neighbors—not their online, parasocial simulacra. 

You can d­iscourse and quote-dunk and fact-check until you’re blue in the face, but at a certain point, you have to stop and decide what truth you believe in. The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having enough information. As the internet continues to enshittify, maybe what we really need is to start trusting each other and our own collective sense of what is true and good.

We don’t need any more irony-poisoned hot takes or cathartic, irreverent snark. We need to collectively decide what kind of world we actually do want, and what we’re willing to do to achieve it.

Turn of Gemini in Gmail and other bits

“How to turn off Gemini AI in Gmail, Google Workspace

Disabling Gemini is fairly straightforward if you have access to your email domain’s administrator settings. First, access the Admin Console. Next, go to your Menu, select Generative AI, and choose Gemini.

From there, under the section that says Service status, select OFF for everyone.

It’s as simple as that.

If you don’t have access to the admin console, in your personal inbox settings you can go to General and turn off Smart features and personalization.

While that won’t entirely block the feature’s presence in your inbox, it will limit it.”

This kinda ties into something I have been meaning to mention here. Mainly, I am majorly limiting my internet time now so the blog posts here will probably dry up. I started Blogging back in 1998 and kinda kept at it all this time. But the internet is not what it once was and the rot is spreading so god damn fast. Most stuff I look up is AI generated trash or poison pill MAGA crap. So, well, I am just reading more books, doing more art and music. So, take this as my last post for awhile.

DanK- Signing off

New Work in the Wild- XMAS!

Bunch of work we did just went live on the Specialized website. Came out super clean IMO. Holy crap was this a ton of clipping and composites, lol!

"NO CGI" is really just INVISIBLE CGI

Cool break down of some older movies and very old VFX techniques. From the comments:

‘5:47 Removing bluescreens from behind the scenes footage is just wild”

Karma default clouds versus Redshift Standard Volume

So in my challenge to start using Karma / Solaris more in Houdini I went and did some cloud tests one a cloud I modeled back for the guitar project. Same scale height and settings as close as I could get them. Karma volume settings are just default, no changes. I had to tweak the Redshift Standard Volume Shader a good deal to get it this far. Rendered both out at 1920x 1080. The Karma one looks more like a cloud though while the Redshift one still feels more like smoke to me. Karma on left, Redshift on right. Using Houdini 20.5.410 and Redshift 2025.1.1.

Are the fires of hell a-glowing?

…

There’s no earthly way of knowing

Which direction we are going

There’s no knowing where we’re rowing

Or which way the river’s flowing

Is it raining?

 Is it snowing?

Is a hurricane a-blowing?

Not a speck of light is showing

So the danger must be growing

Are the fires of hell a-glowing?

Is the grisly reaper mowing?

Yes, the danger must be growing

‘Cause the rowers keep on rowing

And they’re certainly not showing

Any signs that they are slowing!

Gene Wilder / Mel Stuart’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)

VIA 20th Century Man (nsfw)