Background plate study

Kinda had an idea to start doing my abstracts in environments so today I wanted to play with getting BG plates to work with the renders. Not sure if smoke helps or hurts though….

POPnet study

Just a doodle messing with a POPnet in Houdini.

No safe way for singers to rehearse together ...

Wow, this is pretty gnarly….

“On May 5th, an expert panel assembled by the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS), the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA), Chorus America, the Barbershop Harmony Society, and the Performing Arts Medical Association (PAMA) laid out a sobering vision for the future of public singing in America. The primary goal of the panel, according to NATS Executive Director Dr. Allen Henderson, was "to bring scientists and medical professionals directly to our audience, as those of us who run professional organizations do not have the direct knowledge ourselves of these complex issues."

In a presentation that sent shockwaves through the singing community, Dr. Lucinda Halstead, the president of the Performing Arts Medical Association and the Medical Director of the Department of Otolaryngology at the University of South Carolina, concluded that there is no safe way for singers to rehearse together until there is a COVID-19 vaccine and a 95% effective treatment in place, in her estimates at least 18-24 months away.”

Redshift and removing noise from shallow Depth of Field renders.

Little doodle I did today was to work on getting rid of noise in shallow Depth of Field images in Redshift. Here are my notes from today:

Turn off DoF (Bokeh) and Motion blur.

Start with default Unified Sampling. Unified Sampling are PRIMARY RAYS. All the overrides are Secondary Rays.
Use overrides with AOVs to get clean, diffuse, refractions, reflections GI, SSS, etc...

Test each AOV with buckets in the interactive window till they are noise-free.
AFTER that is clean, turn on any DoF and then dive into Unified Sampling.
Defaults: Min 16
Max is MIN *4
Then start lowering Adaptive Error Threshold.
If still getting fireflys, lower Sample Filtering. If you go too low here it will get dark.
Always use 2x more GI rays than the samples max.

And that’s my new method. Here is the study.

"Flooding the zone with shit."

This is a pretty good write up on where things are headed sadly…

““The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible— by telling the governors they’re in charge without doing what only the federal government can do, by fighting with the press when it shows up to be briefed, by fixing blame for the virus on China or some other foreign element, and by “flooding the zone with shit,” Steve Bannon’s phrase for overwhelming the system with disinformation, distraction, and denial, which boosts what economists call “search costs” for reliable intelligence.

Stated another way, the plan is to default on public problem solving, and then prevent the public from understanding the consequences of that default. To succeed this will require one of the biggest propaganda and freedom of information fights in U.S. history, the execution of which will, I think, consume the president’s re-election campaign. So much has already been made public that the standard script for a White House cover-up (worse than the crime…) won’t apply. Instead, everything will ride on the manufacture of confusion. The press won’t be able to “expose” the plot because it will all happen in stark daylight. The facts will be known, and simultaneously they will be inconceivable. “"

Knife still life study

Been meaning to do this lighting study for a bit now and I finally decided it was time to put up or shut up, lol! I did not want to clean the knife too much because I want to show the texture there. Many knives have some really cool surfaces and that could really be brought out with this technique. Also, this knife is like 20 years old so it’s earned those scuffs.

Landscape Study

Felt like getting lost in a landscape for a bit instead of messing with the technicalities of Houdini. Spent most of yesterday and this morning working up this fantasy style landscape. D&D hidden grove type thing. Made in Cinema 4d with Redshift render. Started using Redshift proxies on this one but I kinda miss Octane scatter. That is a much better scatter system.

Lego Sim with Houdini

Made a sim using a Lego model I imported into Houdini. Started out just as a test to see if I could get the model imported, then I end up making the full sim out of it. Fun stuff.

Houdini Doodle 3

Todays doodle is brought to you from a failed animation. Way to much flickering to make it look good. But here are 3 frames from it that look pretty good.

Way back machine engaged!

Video of a mini ramp session from like 2001ish just surfaced online and I’m the guy in the flannel. Crazy flash backs, lol!

Houdini Doodle #2

Just another doodle.

And some news about music that is a total bummer. Man, I really miss playing live music….

“Restarting the economy has to be done in stages, and it does have to start with more physical distancing at a work site that allows people who are at lower risk to come back. Certain kinds of construction, or manufacturing or offices, in which you can maintain six-foot distances are more reasonable to start sooner. Larger gatherings — conferences, concerts, sporting events — when people say they’re going to reschedule this conference or graduation event for October 2020, I have no idea how they think that’s a plausible possibility. I think those things will be the last to return. Realistically, we’re talking fall 2021 at the earliest.”

Houdini Doodle

Today’s Houdini Doodle is brought to you by being completely zoned out and just moving sliders around in a For Each loop. Really simple node tree on this one.

MoGraph Class, Chp 8

Just finished out a little edit and sound design on Chapter 8 from “Stop Being Afraid of Houdini.” I did not have much time to customize this one out so it if pretty much just the lesson. But I do plan and coming back to this technique and doing more with it in the future.

Updates and all of that.

Hey all,

I just wanted to touch base and let you know what is going on here at the studio during all this madness. Maybe some of you know, but we have all worked remotely since the start of danklife 16 years ago. Me and Jeremy being the core and with all of our freelancers having nice rigs with calibrated systems. We have dialed it in pretty solidly in the past decade and a half using Rumpus servers, WeTransfer and now Slack to communicate. I also have a full photo studio in my space so I can do all of that here as well. Jeremy has a pretty sweet recording set up called Underwater Research and Design as well for you musical peoples out there.

We are very fortunate and lucky that our workflow and personalities lead us down this path. I really do feel truly lucky to be where we are now.

So for us, it’s really business as usual besides the constant screaming, anxiety-induced panic humming along in the background of our minds. (REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!)

Be safe out there, look out for one another and stay the hell inside will ya?

If anyone needs any work from home tips, Photoshop, Houdini questions or just needs to vent, feel free to reach out.

Best,

Dan K.

Yeesh...

Heya everyone, hope you all are being safe out there and hunkering down. Kinda hard to believe this shit storm we are in. Taking some of the time to work on getting through Mographs, “Stop Being Afraid of Houdini” class and did a little variation on Chapter 7 here. Great class and highly recommend. Had fun with the sound design as well.

Will the millennial aesthetic ever end?

“If you simultaneously can’t afford any frills and can’t afford any failure, you end up with millennial design: crowd-pleasing, risk-averse, calling just enough attention to itself to make it clear that you tried. For a cohort reared to achieve and then released into an economy where achievement held no guarantees, the millennial aesthetic provides something that looks a little like bourgeois stability, at least. This is a style that makes basic success cheap and easy; it requires little in the way of special access, skills, or goods. It is style that can be borrowed, inhabited temporarily or virtually. At the very least, you can stay a few hours in a photogenic co-working venue. At the very least, Squarespace gives you the tools you need to build your own presentable online home.”

Amazing....

Wow, just wow. I have a fairly nasty cold at the moment and this is cutting though the fog in a lovely way….