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)

Photoshop Bug: Droplet couldn't communicate with Photoshop

So you updated Photoshop and now all your Droplets don’t work. Cool cool…. Yeah, you can still use “Bridge > Tools > Photoshop > Batch” like a primitive or you can fix it. Well, how to fix it you ask? On Windows, run Photoshop as an admin and THEN make your Droplets. Reboot Photoshop OUT of admin mode and they should work. Screenshot here for how to run PS as an admin.

Bonkers

What a crazy idea….

Band poster and EP artwork!

Made a new band poster for a show and did the artwork for this EP by Manx. Rock and Roll Portland Peoples!

The Pedersen bicycle, also called the Dursley Pedersen bicycle.

Wow, this thing is freaking nutso. A bike based on suspension bridges. From the Wiki.

“Pedersen wrote that he developed the hammock style seat first. It provides suspension from road imperfections with much less weight, 4 ounces (110 g) instead of 3 pounds (1.4 kg) of traditional leather and steel spring saddles of the day. Pedersen then developed a frame, a truss assembled from several thin tubes, around his new seat design. He attributed his inspiration to the Whipple-Murphy bridge truss. The design initially did not support seat height adjustment, and even after some adjustability was added, required the manufacture of eight different sizes. The non-standard frame design would not accommodate a traditional front fork. Instead, Pedersen developed a fork that also consisted of thin tubes assembled into a truss, which was attached to the frame with bearings at two distinct points, instead of through a traditional head tube. Pedersen also received patents for a chainwheel and bottom bracket combination and lightweight pedals.[2]”

tumblr wisdoms

Just some rando screen grabs from tumblr that are pretty spot on I thought I post.

The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age

“You should do that for money.” LeSigh… Everything is a commodity. Good long read here. Sorry for the wall of text, but it’s complicated to break it down to a blur. Just go read it, lol!

“There must exist professions that are free from capture, but I’m hard pressed to find them. Even non-remote jobs, where work cannot pursue the worker home, are dogged by digital tracking: a farmer says Instagram Story views directly correlate to farm subscriptions, a server tells me her manager won’t give her the Saturday-night money shift until she has more followers. Even religious guidance can be quantified by view counts for online church services, Yelp for spirituality. One priest told the Guardian, “you have this thing about how many followers have you . . . it hits at your gut, at your heart.”

But we know all this. What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. Friendship is ground zero for the metrics of the inner world, the first unquantifiable shorn into data points: Friendster testimonials, the MySpace Top 8, friending. Likewise, the search for romance has been refigured by dating apps that sell paid-for rankings and paid access to “quality” matches. Or, if there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value of your delights. Even engaging with art—say, encountering some uncanny reflection of yourself in a novel, or having a transformative epiphany from listening, on repeat, to the way that singer’s voice breaks over the bridge—can be spat out as a figure, on Goodreads or your Spotify year in review.

I tell you all this not because I think we should all be very concerned about artists, but because what happens to artists is happening to all of us. As data collection technology hollows out our inner worlds, all of us experience the working artist’s plight: our lot is to numericize and monetize the most private and personal parts of our experience. “

High-resolution image of The Night Watch

Man they are not kidding. You can really punch into this thing.

“The new high-resolution image of The Night Watch represents a major advance in the state of the art for imaging paintings, setting records for both the resolution and the total size of the image. The sampling resolution is 5 µm (0.005 mm), meaning that each pixel covers an area of the painting that is smaller than a human red blood cell. Given the large size of The Night Watch, this results in a truly enormous image: it’s 925,000 by 775,000 pixels – 717 gigapixels – with a file size of 5.6 TB!”