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.

Unreal 5 animation study

I little animation I did to get familiar with the Sequencer in UE5, animating camera moves, focus pulls and lights. Pretty intuitive once you get into it. Just assets from the store with some wind animation tweaks. Custom LUT made in Resolve and applied in Unreal.

Lake Mead stuffs.

Been watching this channel this afternoon all about Lake Mead. Just a father and son fishing and documenting the water drop. It’s really interesting on the ground type stuff. Just super casual and chill. This one they go to Hoover damn which they read up on is in “Inactive Draw” which means no electricity for Los Vegas….. crazy stuff.

The Personal Brand Is Dead. Gen Z would rather be anonymous online.

Good read on how the kids wanna avoid all the social media trappings now-a-days. Good for them. I have really enjoyed getting the hell off of instagram and facebook and all that crap. I’ll just hang out here in my own little backwater of the internet, thank you very much!

Something has shifted online: We’ve arrived at a new era of anonymity, in which it feels natural to be inscrutable and confusing—forget the burden of crafting a coherent, persistent personal brand. There just isn’t any good reason to use your real name anymore. “In the mid 2010s, ambiguity died online—not of natural causes, it was hunted and killed,” the writer and podcast host Biz Sherbert observed recently. Now young people are trying to bring it back. I find this sort of exciting, but also unnerving. What are they going to do with their newfound freedom?

CG vs Photography

Interesting discussion here between the fine folks at Entegma.

Unreal Engine 5, Texture Streaming Pool Over Budget message

Been running into the Texture Streaming Pool Over Budget error in UE5 this morning and found this blog post that fixed it in a jiffy. Check it out on stefanperales.com

For example, if you're still getting the texture streaming pool error, then you may need to increase the pool size.

To do this, open your /Config/DefaultEngine.ini file and look for a [/Script/Engine.RendererSettings] section. If it doesn't exist, create it. Then add the following:

r.TextureStreaming=True

r.Streaming.PoolSize=1000

Restart your editor after updating. The the value you pass to r.Streaming.PoolSize=1000 will vary depending on the needs of your project—it may even change during the lifetime of your project. The error will have given you an idea how much over the existing budget you are. For example, if you set it to 1000MB and the error says you're still 300MB over, you need to bump it up past 1300MB.

The file to edit is in your project folder FYI, not in the default application folder.

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….

Smartphones will kill off the DSLR within three years says Sony

While I do prefer the look out the gate from my iPhone, when I look at 100% or in a print they do not hold up compared to my fuji x100. Will be interesting to see if this pans out.

“Some fascinating slides (opens in new tab) presented during the briefing were even more specific, with one slide showing that, according to Sony, "still images are expected to exceed ILC [interchangeable lens camera] image quality" sometime during 2024.

Those are two slightly different claims, with 'ILCs' also including today's mirrorless cameras, alongside the older DSLR tech that most camera manufacturers are now largely abandoning. 

But the broader conclusion remains – far from hitting a tech ceiling, smartphones are expected to continue their imaging evolution and, for most people, make standalone cameras redundant. 

So what tech will drive this continued rise of the best phone cameras? Sony points to a few factors, including “quantum saturation” and improvements to "AI processing". Interestingly, Sony also expects the sensor size in "high-end model" phones to double by 2024.”

New Work in the Wild: Stills and Motion

Some more of our work went live at some point. Check out what we did for Specialized Prime Apparel. Retouching and Grading on stills and Color Grading on the motion work Had a rather large deck of color options for them to pick from before we landed here. It was challenge to unite all the different environments and time of day across 100s of images.

Jeremy also did the grading on some of these motion clips as well.

Recreating The Lord Of The Rings Doors of Durin in Unreal Engine 5

As you probably know, I have been learning more in Unreal 5 and find it pretty amazing. This article goes into to some interesting lighting techniques I wanna make a note of.

“For this project, I used Lumen for GI, screen space reflections (Lumen reflections didn’t support translucent materials in early access 2), and Virtual Shadow Maps to be able to get nice soft shadows in the Nanite meshes and also increase the shadow resolution overall. For the post process, I kept the exposure locked at 1 for minimum/maximum brightness. I also used a LUT with a subtle color correction that I did in Photoshop.

I added a lighting function in the directional light to create pockets of lights and shadow that gave a more interesting look to the scene: as if the clouds were moving and creating those light openings. To achieve this, I used a material with panning noise for the light function. Since this was a small scene with not so many elements, I wanted to introduce as much dynamism as possible to give some life to it, so the moving clouds, the wind in the trees, the moving particles used for the fog, etc., really helped the scene come together. “

New Work in the Wild

Some product renders I did for Specialized went live at some point, check them out. Pretty happy with the lighting and tone. Models were provided, had nothing to do with that. I had dabbled in photogrammetry but never really got to this level with it. They were quite nice I will add. Great art direction from the folks at Hovercraft here in PDX.

Unreal 5 Test Render

Been starting to work in Unreal 5 since it’s release and have been finding it pretty interesting. The idea of being able to animate easily in it has a lot of appeal to me for loops and music videos. With this still life I was just kinda blindly messing with the camera and post settings to see what kind of realism I could get out of it. Pretty happy with this result.

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.

Better late than never: Falling in love with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on its 20th anniversary

Cool write up on AV Club about Wilco’s YHF.

“His lyrics expertly capture conflicting feelings, often seeming like he’s attempting to make sense of them in real time. That sentiment is expressed in “I’m The Man Who Loves You,” with Tweedy struggling to find a way to understand his thoughts and put them into words, allowing him to explain to his partner how he feels:

All I can see is black and white and white and pink with blades of blue /

that lay between the words I think on a page I was meaning to send to you /

I couldn’t tell if it’d bring my heart the way I wanted when I started /

writing this letter to you

Can’t he just hold his partner’s hand and show her how much he cares and loves her, rather than go through the brain-wracking process of putting those emotions into words? It’s a relatable feeling.

The pacing of the song is arranged in a way that sounds like the way scattered thoughts trickle in, with a rapid, thumping beat. You can tell he knows how he feels deep down: It should be as simple as that. But the lyrics also come from an anxious source, that understands that love isn’t clear cut. It’s a sentiment delved into throughout much of the record, including songs like “Radio Cure” and fan-favorite “Poor Places.”

And here is a brand new track from them that came out. Happy Friday!