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…
I could hug each and every Houdini developer right now. Backup recovered….. whew.
You gotta love tumblr, the blogging platform that cause yahoo to lose almost 1 billion dollars. I have been going there for years and have never once made a account, lol! Anyways, here are some gems from one named, “Teenage Wasteland”.
Cars were not always the rulers of the roads. Just imagine how it would be is the car was not so totally dominant here in the States.
“To many urban Americans in the 1920s, the car and its driver were tyrants that deprived others of their freedom.”
City people saw the car not just as a menace to life and limb, but also as an aggressor upon their time-honored rights to city streets. “The pedestrian,” explained a Brooklyn man, “as an American citizen, naturally resents any intrusion upon his prior constitutional rights.” Custom and the Anglo-American legal tradition confirmed pedestrians’ inalienable right to the street. In Chicago in 1926, as in most cities, “nothing” in the law “prohibits a pedestrian from using any part of the roadway of any street or highway, at any time or at any place as he may desire.” So noted the author of a traffic survey commissioned by the Chicago Association of Commerce. According to Connecticut’s first Motor Vehicle Commissioner, Robbins Stoeckel, the most restrictive interpretation of pedestrians’ rights was that “All travelers have equal rights on the highway.”
I might have posted this before, but it kinda touches on this from another view.
It’s the cars, stupid. Why we must restrict cars to save our cities
“When you next walk around your town or city, look around at the space we dedicate to cars. When you next press what has been nicknamed the ‘beg button’ to allow you the luxury of crossing from one side of the road to another, have a think about why those travelling alone in a metal cocoon belching out poisonous fumes have priority over you.”
Spent a good amount of time in Chicago and was even lucky enough to play a few shows at the Metro which turns 40! Fun little write up on them from NPR. Imagine how crazy it is to try to keep a venue like that running for 40 years….
“Another memorable act was Iggy Pop, whose Blah-Blah-Blah tour show Ambo calls “one of the wettest, sweatiest, bloodiest shows” he’s ever seen.
“I remember I was just melting in my gym shoes,” Ambo says. “There was so much blood and sweat and beer on the floor.”
Shanahan remembers Iggy Pop trying to rip out the speakers on stage and throw them into the crowd.
“He actually lifts the cabinets off the floor!” Shanahan says. “I mean, he was trying to move something that's not quite movable. Plus it was strapped down, which he didn't know.”
Been doing a bit of a deep dive into Deerhoof lately. This drummer is really interesting in what he does with a small set. This album is recorded live in one of their basements and he is using a snare, bass drum, rack tom and a ride. That’s freaking it. No hi hats, no crash, no other toms. Pretty crazy. If you buy it you get a video link to them playing, pretty cool.
Here is a live show from Brooklyn in 2015.
And a interesting interview with the drummer here.
Found VIA a post on the still amazing Metafilter.
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.
Congratulations, you are dumb like me and upgraded your graphics card driver. Go team! There is no roll back function in the Device Manager anymore and Geforce Experience does not have that function either. But here is a handy link to the Nvidia Old Drivers search page.
Fun way to start the day troubleshooting… yeesh.
Been a big fan of Sea and Cake and Tortise since I lived in Chicago way back in the day so I am pretty happy with anything these two folks do but I am enjoying this even though electronica is normally not my jam. Nice write up on Bandcamp as well.
“Whether it was inspired by Kraftwerk or Bitchin Bajas or a middle-aged desire to touch the canon of abstract dance music, it’s a pleasure to get lost in these pulses. They take all sorts of shapes: Some cascade as programmed keyboard textures, buoyed by keyboard melodies; others spring out of the kick drum, whose metronomic noise lays the groundwork even as the drum programming splinters it into a dubbed-out, polyrhythmic fantasia. (The dimestore presumption is that these bear McEntire’s fingerprints, but the album’s minimalist recording credits obscure the division of labor.) Among equals, the 23-minute “A Yellow Robe” rises to the fore: a sunrise dancefloor reverie, with its grand sweeping synth chords, and joyfully bouncing sequencer, all serving a steadily rotating, forever driving beat, taking its time getting to place but all-in on in its destination. Take that ride.”
I saw this piece in Portland Monthly shot by Mike Novak and wanted to take a swing at something similar in Houdini. First image is the inspiration, second is my interpretation.
This essay puts into words some thing I think about fairly often, mainly, what becomes of all this digital content we create? Take this silly blog for example. It does go back to 1998, 23 freaking years if you know where to dig in theory. They say the internet is forever, but stuff gets shut down and things get lost all the time.
“ In fact, up to and including the digital consumer cameras, communication and creation had always been a struggle with brevity and bandwidth. It was costly to send mail and time consuming to write by hand, so letters were usually kept fairly short: a few pages, perhaps. And they took up space: proficient correspondents, unless wealthy, eventually ran out of reasonable storage for their letters and had to discard some of them. Audio and camcorder cassettes had limited running times. Rolls of film had a fixed number of frames and once you'd snapped your 24 pictures, that was it. Even if you were a hobby photographer with an endless budget and your own darkroom, there was a physical and temporal limit to the number of pictures you could develop and keep. There was a similar process with the digital cameras: CF cards filled up and you had to transfer the files to your computer, in the process deleting the bad ones in order to save space on your external hard drive.
Then the smartphone happened, and the cloud, and something fundamentally changed.
...
If you're young today, your formative years depend on auto-deleted snapchat videos, short-lived memes, stories told in computer games likely unplayable in 30 years (without running rogue game servers and emulating complex proprietary CPUs and GPUs), and whatever happens to flutter by in a feed. I'm curious what the future of reminiscing will look like, even if all of this is saved somehow. So much to sift through, so few tangible artifacts. Even traditional culture is less permanent: we get our music and movies from streaming services, we rent our e-books through EULA:s and consume them on devices controlled by the manufacturer. I do most of this myself - but I was young in a different era and I at least have my stacks of CD:s (including bob hund) tucked away in a safe place, and shelves full of the prose and movies that shaped me.
...
And yet, despite these and countless other examples, we still put our faith in digital permanence. We create so many mementos we hardly have time to look at them and then we entrust them all to companies and platforms beyond our control, storing them on machines we don't own running services that could disappear tomorrow. Will Youtube still be there in 50 years? Will Instagram and Dropbox?”
Cool photo illustrations by Oleg Oprisco for your eyeball enjoyment.
Enjoy some new music here from Built to Spill on Bandcamp. For the love of satan, get the hell off of Spotify and use Bandcamp. Spotify not only rips off it’s artists but it also pushes alt right, faschist podcasts. What in the hell or you doing giving them money?
While this is surprisingly, insanely complicated, it’s still something I need to learn inside and out.
Some renders we did went live on the Specialized site not too long ago. The lighting on these was pretty complicated and really happy with the results. I’ll post a screenshot of the set when I get some free time to dive back into it.
Dang, this looks like a big one for fluids and rendering!
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.
Sums up the mood here.
“Gregg Bissonette and I discuss the drummers that every serious drummer should know from Gene Krupa to Ringo Starr to John Bonham to Questlove. A comprehensive guide of styles from Swing, Jazz, Rock, Fusion, Hip Hop and Funk.”
Digging a bit deeper into UE5 and I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of comparing Lumen versus Path Tracing, Versus Hardware Ray Tracing and other such nonsense. It’s a complicated issue and the trade-offs of real-time versus offline come into play here.
During my research, I found this interesting Vid from an ArchViz artist working on comparing V-Ray to UE5 which actually gets closer than I thought it could.
