Happy Friday!

Have some music to lift your day and burn this past week to the ground.

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.

Bandcamp is joing Epic Games?

Wow, did not see this coming. Bandcamp is joining Epic Games? Wild stuff. I wonder if they are going to make a easy pipeline to get artists into video games or something. Interesting for sure.

“I’m excited to announce that Bandcamp is joining Epic Games, who you may know as the makers of Fortnite and Unreal Engine, and champions for a fair and open Internet.

Bandcamp will keep operating as a standalone marketplace and music community, and I will continue to lead our team. The products and services you depend on aren’t going anywhere, we’ll continue to build Bandcamp around our artists-first revenue model (where artists net an average of 82% of every sale), you’ll still have the same control over how you offer your music, Bandcamp Fridays will continue as planned, and the Daily will keep highlighting the diverse, amazing music on the site. However, behind the scenes we’re working with Epic to expand internationally and push development forward across Bandcamp, from basics like our album pages, mobile apps, merch tools, payment system, and search and discovery features, to newer initiatives like our vinyl pressing and live streaming services.”

If yer burnt out, work out!

Interesting white paper here.

“Conclusion: In conclusion, this study suggests that a single bout of acute aerobic exercise supports regeneration of cognitive flexibility performance and of subjective well-being. This holds true not just compared to artificial active control treatment but also compared to widespread leisure time activity, namely watching TV.”

So when you are fried from work, get a work out in. Like, you know, when you have to do 20 part colors ups on 25 freaking product shots or something…

Bandcamp over Spotify any day of the week.

With all the crap coming out about Spotify and the fact that they pay crap I was just digging around for other ways to buy and stream music and Bandcamp has really came out on top. They pay the artists 90% of the money from a sale for starters. Check out this good write up from NPR.

“Spotify and Bandcamp could not be more opposite. Where Spotify highlights playlists, most often of its own creation, Bandcamp sticks to the album (or any other format, as determined by the artist). Where Spotify pays royalties according to little-understood formulas that can only be analyzed by reverse calculation, Bandcamp lets artists and labels choose their own prices. Where Spotify requires working through a limited number of distributors to access their services, Bandcamp is open to anyone. Where Spotify has revenue streams dependent on ads and data, Bandcamp operates on a simple revenue share with artists and collects no information on its users.”

Quixel Bridge fix for Houdini/Redshift (Update)

New update to make Quixel behave better with Houdini and RedShift was just released on Denes Dankhazi's Blogfolio. Gotta love anyone with “dank” in their name you know. Get the RedShift fix Here.

Basically, Quixles textures come in wrong, especially the displacement and this fixes that. Wrong might be the incorrect way as it’s fine in Unreal, just a RedShift implementation in Houdini is odd I guess?

“The Quixel Bridge fix for Houdini/Redshift.
For Houdini, I changed the 3D Asset, the 3D Plants and the Surfaces part.

How to use it:

  • Install the latest update (4.5) for Houdini in Quixel Bridge
    The plugin path is something like this: Megascans\Library\support\plugins\houdini\4.5\MSLiveLink\scripts\python\MSPlugin

  • Download the files and replace the original ones: download

    • ImportSurface.py goes to the AssetImporters folder

    • Import3D.py goes to the AssetImporters folder

    • ImportPlant.py goes to the AssetImporters folder

    • Redshift.py goes to the MaterialsSetup folder

  • The changes are significant

    • Subdiv settings

    • Shader settings

    • and most importantly Color Management settings for the RS Texture nodes
      Without this you can’t render correctly anything.
      Now the colors are using sRGB and everything else is linear as it should be.

  • You still have to fix the Displacement EXR textures thou.

    • Open in Photoshop (for example)

    • You’ll see there is data only in the red channel

    • Copy that as an the RGB layer and merge (Ctrl+E)

    • Sometimes you still have to linearize the data, use the exposure adjustment layer with gamma 0.454

Cheers, D”

Unreal Engine and film making

I have been wanting to start messing around in Unreal Engine for some time now. With Unreal 5 coming out soon it might just be the time to see what it is all about. Doing some research the other day I found this video that is pretty interesting.

Houdini Macro Fluid Sims Using Vellum Fluids.

Was doing a bunch of R&D into close up fluid sims and discovered some pretty cool stuff. I Started with FLIP sims but could not get the detail I wanted, so I started trying out Vellum Fluids. Started getting some interesting results that let me punch in pretty close and they hold up. I went down to 0.007 on the particle size but with some Vellum Post Process it cleans up pretty well.

6 new galleries posted to the portfolio

Trying to get the portfolio dusted off a bit so I finally got around to posting 6 more galleries. Put up two music videos with album art mostly made in CG and a bunch of retouching stuff. Check em out!

Portland music scene overview

Back in June, I played a show that was recorded and posted to youtube. Super fun night and the videographer was just the nicest person. This morning I was curious about if she has done any other videos since and god lord man! Looks like she goes out almost every night and records local music here in Portland. A really interesting look into the scene here and who is doing what. Check out her channel at Blue Heron Video.

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.

Nvidia Canvas App

Was messing around with the Nvidia Canvas App a bit last night and it’s pretty trippy. It only outputs at 512x512 but the AI does some pretty interesting things. For being the first of this type of stuff, I can’t imagine what it will be able to do in 5-10 years. AI is freaky stuff. What I painted on the left and what the AI made out of it on the right.

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.

Retouching Before and Afters

Just wanted to post a few random before and afters I pull from the archives before purging the servers for new space. Might be adding some more projects soon if I can find the time. Keep an eye out ;)