Houdini Doodle: Cloudscape

Todays Cloudscape doodle was a lot of back and forth with different settings for clouds. More info below the doodle.

I started with this tut, “Create the Beautiful Cloudscape and Render it with Karma XPU – Getting Started With Houdini ep. 8” using the newer Cloud SOP and Karma render but started to deviate pretty quickly. Couple of issues that I had. Karma kept hard crashing to the desktop, which was a bummer I have been trying to get more into it as a Redshift replacement but it's just too unstable. The Camera Focal Length in Karma was set to something like 50000 which is not real-world numbers so I have no idea what lens I am using. Very odd.

An issue with the tut itself, his use of the Cloud Noise SOP was heavy handed with the Element Size kind of blowing the shape apart. He also did not get into the Scatter Shapes or Flatten tabs on the Cloud SOP which are really cool. I also doubled the Uniform Sampling to get a higher resolution on the clouds. Could possibly double it again I think. Also, I did move the whole project into Redshift as well. (I can’t embed the video for some reason, it kicks back an error. Sorry about that.)

I used a lot of techniques from this tut on making a cloud generator, but interesting enough, most of what he covers is now baked into the Cloud SOP itself which is nice. Flatten, scatter etc…

And here is a screencap showing the difference between 350 and 700 Uniform Sampling.

Deeeeeeeeeep dive into games and WoW culture in particular.

If you wanna get deep inside the culture of World of Warcraft this is a crazy detailed video on it. This is from a paper they cite for example.

“Play from a theorycrafting perspective is about the correct input and output of numbers, challenging the narrative of play as something free and frivolous. Seeking to understand how play and knowledge relate to each other, the article discusses how theorycrafting’s seemingly abstract, objective, and neutral information about the game is also embedded with values, ideas, and norms.”

The Balenciaga controversy, explained - Glossy

This is pretty wild ride to read about. IMO, it’s all on Balenciaga. No way they did not approve or make mood boards, have someone, if not 5 people on set, and then have teams of people sign off on this before it went live. Suing the SET DESIGNER for $25 million? Give me a break. Balenciaga screwed the pooch here and need to just say, “Whoops, our bad. In trying to be edgy we pushed to far.” Otherwise, this is gonna just drag out in the new for a loooong time.

“One ad included a child model standing with a teddy bear that was wearing black leather and chains that many compared to BDSM apparel. The other, even stranger, included a pile of legal documents, one of which included the text of a Supreme Court decision related to child pornography.

On Friday, November 25, Balenciaga brought a $25 million lawsuit against North Six for being responsible for the spring ad featuring the Supreme Court documents, but not against the photographer, Chris Maggio. Balenciaga called the inclusion of the document in the ad “malevolent or, at the very least, extraordinarily reckless.”

A rep for North Six told the New York Post that the company had no creative control over the content of the ad. Chris Maggio has not made a statement. Gabriele Galimberti, who shot the teddy bear ad but had no involvement with the spring campaign, said in a statement on Instagram that he too was given no control over the creative content of his shoot, other than details like lighting and framing. The content — pairing child models with the teddy bear bag — had already been decided before he was hired, he said.

Essentially, Balenciaga, North Six and the photographers all point to each other as the ones who carry the blame.”

Twitter analytics staff decimated by layoffs and resignations -AdAge

The Twitter dumpster fire continues and is spreading pretty deeply into their advertising space. Pretty stupid move there…

“The Audience Insights unit, which was heavy with technical talent and looked at conversation volume and trends and worked with Twitter sales and marketing teams, lost 70% of its staff, the source said.

The Advertising Research group that worked with client teams for big advertisers such as Samsung, Verizon, AT&T and Google, doing custom studies and handling third-party measurement, also lost more than 70% of its people, this person said, leaving only two to handle prioritized work for a host of tech and telecom advertisers.

However, staff cuts could make it hard for brand advertisers that have paused spending to return to Twitter. And they also raise a question of whether Twitter can continue to provide brand safety controls for advertisers or get MRC accreditation for its processes, since almost every person on the team working on the audit is now gone, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Of course, the brand safety team at Twitter has one less thing to monitor these days. Sky News reports that Twitter has quietly dropped its policy against sharing Covid-19 misinformation. And the same advertisers that want brand lift studies and third-party audience measurement also tend to be the ones most concerned about brand safety.”

More Talking Heads and some new portfolio stuff.

Added some new stuff to the portfolio the other day, some renders and some serious color ups / product swaps. I really do not enjoy making those galleries for some reason, lol!

And for whatever reason, I am really digging early live Talking Heads. It’s so stripped down yet holds up as full songs. Some real artistry going on without just doing anything flashy.

Unreal Engine 5.1

I have been messing around in Unreal a bit here and there and find it pretty powerful for real time stuff but narrow use cases for my actual work. It’s not photoreal enough for some of the stuff I do but it’s damn close. I want to work up a music video in there eventually for instance. Music vids are not that particular on being photo real for instance. I did use it to render out a bunch of ears for a work project using metahumans though the other day and it turned out to be an excellent solution for that. Hence, narrow use cases for actual work.

That said, this new update is pretty exciting. Better foliage, reflections and GI, that’s all pretty exciting stuff. I could see pitching this to a studio that does installations for instance.

Red meat is not a health risk. New study slams years of shoddy research

Shoddy research….. interesting…

In a new, unprecedented effort, scientists at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) scrutinized decades of research on red meat consumption and its links to various health outcomes, formulating a new rating system to communicate health risks in the process. Their findings mostly dispel any concerns about eating red meat.

But the take away line is buried which is important.

“The evidence for a direct vascular or health risk from eating meat regularly is very low, to the point that there is probably no risk,” commented Dr. Steven Novella, a Yale neurologist and president of the New England Skeptical Society. “There is, however, more evidence for a health risk from eating too few vegetables. That is really the risk of a high-meat diet, those meat calories are displacing vegetable calories.”

The first cubesat to fly and operate at the Moon has successfully arrived.

Being kind of a geeky person, kinda surprised I knew nothing of this project.

“After a journey of nearly five months, taking it far beyond the Moon and back, the little CAPSTONE spacecraft has successfully entered into lunar orbit.

"We received confirmation that CAPSTONE arrived in near-rectilinear halo orbit, and that is a huge, huge step for the agency," said NASA's chief of exploration systems development, Jim Free, on Sunday evening. "It just completed its first insertion burn a few minutes ago. And over the next few days they'll continue to refine its orbit, and be the first cubesat to fly and operate at the Moon."

This is an important orbit for NASA, and a special one, because it is really stable, requiring just a tiny amount of propellant to hold position. At its closest point to the Moon, this roughly week-long orbit passes within 3,000 km of the lunar surface, and at other points it is 70,000 km away. NASA plans to build a small space station, called the Lunar Gateway, here later this decade.”

…

But the one-sentence mind-bender is this IMO.

“NASA plans to build a small space station, called the Lunar Gateway, here later this decade.”

Like, what? Hold up here, WHAT?

Houdini UV Flatten - Rectify to Quads

What a great new node in Houdini for dealing with UVs.

“I'll show how to use a handy feature of the UV Layout SOP to quickly arrange quad groups to perfectly straight islands. I also go over a few features of the Curve SOP that are new to Houdini 19.5”

Undetectable very-low frequency sound increases dancing at a live concert

Crank up those Subs people!

“We tested whether non-auditory low-frequency stimulation would increase audience dancing by turning very-low frequency (VLF) speakers on and off during a live electronic music concert and measuring audience members’ movements using motion-capture. Movement increased when VLFs were present, and because the VLFs were below or near auditory thresholds (and a subsequent experiment suggested they were undetectable), we believe this represents an unconscious effect on behaviour, possibly via vestibular and/or tactile processing.

People attending a performance by the electronic music duo Orphx at the LIVELab were recruited for the study. Participants gave informed consent, were fitted with motion-capture marker headbands, and completed pre- and post-concert questionnaires (see Supplemental information). We turned VLF speakers (8–37 Hz) on and off every 2.5 minutes over 55 minutes of the performance (Figure 1D), calculated head movement speed (the three-dimensional path length per sampling unit of time) for each participant in each of the eighteen segments, and compared average normalized movement while VLFs were ON vs. OFF. Our data show that audience participants moved more, on average by 11.8%, while VLFs were ON vs. OFF (t(42) = 5.32, p < 0.0001; d = 0.81; Figure 1E).”

Freetone!

With all the crap going on between Pantone and Adobe I kinda knew it only be a mtter of time till someone comes up with a solution. Check out Freetone. Cool stuff.

“FREETONE by Stuart Semple contains 1280 colours including digital versions of his Pinkest Pink, Incredibly Kelinish Blue, Black 3.0 and TIFF.

A SIMPLE & TOTALLY FREE COLOUR PALETTE PLUGIN FOR ADOBE

That unlocks a whole books worth of very Pantone-ish colours.

1280 Liberated colours are extremely Pantoneish and reminiscent of those found in the most iconic colour book of all time. In fact it's been argued that they are indistinguishable from those behind the Adobe paywall. “

New work in the wild:Altra running

Just saw this insanely punched in crop of some work we did for Altra Running. Like that’s over 100% punched in. Glad we pay close attention to the details!

Trying to use Squarespace from the iPad ands cluuuuunnnnky……