Psychedelic Looping Animations by Colin Macfadyen

Some really awesome looping animations by Colin Macfadyen that I found at BOOOOOM the other day.

DALL-E experiments

Over the weekend I received my invite to play around with DALL-E the AI art engine and it’s been pretty trippy messing with it. Here are some of my prompts and the results. I could see it being very useful in doing Look Dev and concepting for sure. Use it as a tool to rough out ideas and then work on the actual piece in CG.

This is one of the abstracts I polished up and scaled up to 6k using GigaPIxel AI. SO much AI…

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.

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.

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.

CG vs Photography

Interesting discussion here between the fine folks at Entegma.

Unreal 5 still life doodle

Been doodling in Unreal 5 a bit and here is a quick little thing. I really need to get a better understanding of the cameras, post processing and sequencer….

Yachats Oregon

Just got back from a little trip to Yachats on the Oregon coast and here are a few snaps from our walks. Great place.

Houdini Doodle

Here is today’s Houdini doodle using some of the scatter tricks I used on the album artwork from the other week. My coffee sketch from this morning for the concept as well.

Outgrowth Podcast Soundtrack Artwork

Just finished the cover art for the soundtrack to the podcast Outgrowth. It’s a horror story set here in the PNW. You can check out the soundtrack by We Are Parasols on Bandcamp now.

EP Artwork. We Are Parasols

Just finished up the artwork for another We Are Parasols EP release and got the permission to post it here. All done in Houdini and Redshift. I am tinkering with the idea to give Karma / Solaris a try and see how those work. Would be nice to stay entirely native to Houdini for the renders. I’ll have to do some testing.

Cloth Sim study with Sub-D experiments.

The Chair study from the other day had a cloth sim on camera right that I made in DOPs, which is what made me want to mess a bit more with some cloth sims and this is the result of that study. This time though, I just made it directly in a vellum SOP with some pinned points. It’s a much simpler workflow for sure. Used good old JSplacement for the textures and displacement and subdivided the cloth mesh with a poly reduce to get the “webbing” stuff.

Lighting Studies

Worked up another lighting study today for practice. Quick cloth sim thrown in to keep that stuff fresh in my head as well.

Mike's Motels 1974

Pretty cool photo set here from Mike Mandel on Motels from the 70’s. Some fun stuff that could be interesting to recreate in CG… maybe…

Mike's Motels 1974

Some Digi Painting from the Oregon Coast.

Was messing around with Procreate on the iPad while at the coast and started to get some interesting results.

Vellum Doodle

Just messing around with some vellum cloth sims today. Going for that cloth landscape kinda look.