Houdini show camera frustum in view port

Happy I found this little nugget when I was scattering trees on the doodle from the other day. You can turn on and leave on the camera frustum in Houdini. Frustum is a fancy way of saying field of view or to dumb it down more, what the camera can see.

RMB click on the camera and click on “Frustum Handle“ (Or click F). Then RMB Camera again and hit the check box, “Persistent”.

VFX r u ok? Why It Feels Like the End of VFX

Interesting vid about the VFX industry and how it’s kinda limping along at the moment. I kinda consider danklife VFX adjacent as it’s VFX but for stills. A lot of this pertains to my day-to-day operations for sure.

“This video has been a long time coming. A year post strikes and our industry is still struggling to recover. Many of us are struggling to find work and make sense of everything going on. We've definitely been battling a lot of career anxiety lately...

We delve into the issues the industry had for years prior, and all of the current threats to our industry like strikes, tax credit reductions, the trend of downplaying CGI (No CGI) and AI.”

The Iron Claw

Watched this the other night and by the end of it I was utterly fascinated. What a crazy real life story about the Von Erich family called, “The Iron Claw“. Starts kinda slow but well worth a watch.

ASMP Calls Out Adobe for Its ‘Shocking Dismissal of Photography’

Yeah this is pretty awful of adobe. Plus, the AI functions are pretty garbage for anything above 2k.

“At the beginning of the month, PetaPixel reported that Adobe was running advertisements for its software on various social media platforms with the tagline “skip the photoshoot.”

The ASMP felt strongly about this statement — enough to write an open letter to the Silicon Valley software giant, calling them out for attacking the very creators it relies on.

“As one of the largest professional associations representing photographers and all visual creators, and as our 6,500 members well know, creating a career in photography is harder than ever, with the average photographer having to navigate stolen images, copyright infringement, broken business promises, and now, the specter of wholesale replacement of their art and craft by AI platforms,” ASMP Chair Gabriella Marks writes.

“But while fighting these battles on these multiple fronts, photographers would not have expected to have to defend themselves from attack by the company whose products are inseparable from the current and past toolbox of the professional photographer. Put simply, why, Adobe, would you dismiss and discount all that your most fervent and loyal customers aspire to?

“And this was an attack; an attack on the creativity of the photographer, on the skill and nuance they bring to the photoshoot, and the countless hours they spend preparing for, and working after the photoshoot you are so cavalier to simply throw away.”"

U.S. Calls for Breakup of Ticketmaster Owner

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay! They have gotten away with too much crap for too long. Bring em down.

“In the lawsuit, which is joined by 29 states and the District of Columbia, the government accuses Live Nation of dominating the industry by locking venues into exclusive ticketing contracts, pressuring artists to use its services and threatening its rivals with financial retribution.

Those tactics, the government argues, have resulted in higher ticket prices for consumers and have stifled innovation and competition throughout the industry.

“It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster,” Merrick Garland, the attorney general, said in a statement announcing the suit, which is being filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.”

New Work in the Wild! Specialized

Looks like some more stuff we did is coming online at Specialized. Some lifestyle, some high end product, some have renders in them as well. Check it out and buy some nice bikes ;)

Houdini Doodle

Some more water explorations going on and playing with displacement.

North American purgatory, Glen Rubsamen

Very cool photography here by Glen Rubsamen. Sorry for the insta link, it’s all I can find. Might do some CG based on these…

Was the 401(k) a Mistake?

“The first generation to be fully reliant on 401(k) plans is now starting to retire. As that happens, it is becoming clear just how broken the system is.”

The amount of jobs I have had that even offered a 401k is like 20%.

Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

Ah, crap….. and this is why we can’t have nice things.

Investor statement.

Hacker News discussion on it.

Private Equity has not completely killed bandcamp yet, so maybe it will be OK. But they are gonna wanna make back that, checks notes, 6 billion? WTF?! From the Hacker News discussions:

“I hear that PE destroys products and culture to make money at all costs, but i don’t get how that can net them back the >$6 billion they paid for a company with <$300 million yearly revenue and negative profit.”

I Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Western Automakers Are Cooked

Now that the tariffs are in place, I thought it would be interesting to post this piece about how American automakers are not really trying to innovate anymore compared to China.

I’d later learn that the auto show had more than 100 new model debuts and concepts. That’s a far cry from the Detroit Auto Show last September, which only featured one fully new model. Two other models were refreshed versions of current cars already on sale. None were electric.

…

In China, the showroom floor was filled to the gills with new electrified models from every single domestic automaker. They all had something to prove, and by god, they were trying. There were hundreds of models on the floor from dozens of brands, most of them just as compelling as what I had seen the day before from Geely.

…

The first stand I stumbled upon was Buick’s. It unveiled two GM Ultium-based concepts, the Electra L and Electra LT. It had also unveiled a PHEV version of its popular GL8 van. But where the hell was everyone? It was barely 10 a.m., on the first day of the Beijing Auto show; two concepts were just revealed sometime earlier that morning, yet there were only a handful of spectators at the Buick stand. There was no information on either concept. No one seemed to care.

I was embarrassed. Here I was in China, trying to empathize with Western brands, thinking they were being pushed out of China due to politics and things that were no fault of their own.

…

In reality, it felt like it was the late 1980s again, when American manufacturers felt like they could sell whatever underdeveloped models its accounting department had cooked up to the public, and we’d just have to deal with it. Now that I’ve seen a glimpse of what’s going on in China, the Western manufacturers, particularly the American ones, don’t seem like they’re trying at all.

Instead of competing, they’d rather just shut out competition entirely. The concerns about cybersecurity don’t address the elephant in the room here: Your product sucks, compared to what China is putting out now. It doesn’t go as far. It’s not as well-made. It’s not as nice. It’s not as connected.

…

If the U.S. and Europe get what they want—a crackdown on Chinese imports—it doesn’t feel like it would result in better cars. It feels like it would keep buyers of those markets locked to cars that aren’t executed as well. It’s nakedly protectionist because deep down, all of the Western auto executives and some hawkish China pundits understand that Chinese EV and PHEV models are more compelling than what European, other Asian, and American brands have come up with.


Remove AI Assistant from Adobe Acrobat.

If you are like me and are kinda anti AI AND dislike horrible UI design and want to get rid of the big ass colorful “AI ASSISTANT!!!!!” button in Adobe Acrobat I found this on the forums that works.

On Macs, go to the View menu and select Disable New Acrobat. (I'm not on Mac, so I cannot test).

On Windows, to the hamburger menu in the upper left corner (where the old File menu used to be) and select Disable New Acrobat, it's about 2/3 down the menu (this worked for me).

Lops Lighting Quickstart

Great post from Reddit about trying to get into USD and Solaris in Houdini. I keep bouncing off of Solaris and Karma so hard. I see the advantages but I can’t crack it. Hoping reading these things will help. This page seems particularly interesting.

“Overview

You have a scene that you're just about to start rendering in Redshift/Mantra/Arnold, but you're keen to give Karma a try? Don't wanna learn all that prim/reference/sublayer/delegate stuff all the USD nerds talk about?

Hopefully this will get you started. USD jargon is unavoidable at some point, but I think its possible to dive in without getting too caught in the weeds. The aim here is to take a /obj, /mat, /rop setup, and port it to Lops as painlessly as possible, while picking up some basic USD concepts on the way.

This whole thing should be 20 mins at the max. Lets gooooo!“

Expectations Versus Reality

Interesting read from Edward Zitron of “Better Offline” called, “Expectations Versus Reality” that is about AI in film making that is wort a read.

“These stories only serve to help Sam Altman, who desperately needs you to believe that Hollywood is scared of Sora and generative AI, because the more you talk about fear and lost jobs and the machines taking over, the less you ask a very simple question: does any of this shit actually work?“

“The answer, it turns out, is “not very well.” In a piece for FXGuide, Mike Seymour sat down with Shy Kids, the people behind Air Head, and revealed how Sora is, in many ways, totally useless for making films. Sora takes 10-20 minutes to generate a single 3 to 20 second shot, something that isn’t really a problem until you realize that until the shot is rendered, you really have absolutely no idea what the hell it’s going to spit out.”

This part from the linked article sums it up really well. 300-1 usable shot ration is insane and they had to do a ton of post to clean up strings, stabilize and all sorts of other crap.

“While all the imagery was generated in SORA, the balloon still required a lot of post-work. In addition to isolating the balloon so it could be re-coloured, it would sometimes have a face on Sonny, as if his face was drawn on with a marker, and this would be removed in AfterEffects. similar other artifacts were often removed.

For the minute and a half of footage that ended up in the film, Patrick estimated that they generated “hundreds of generations at 10 to 20 seconds a piece”. Adding, “My math is bad, but I would guess probably 300:1 in terms of the amount of source material to what ended up in the final.”

That is not a actual production ready tool with this info. This is kinda the usmmery of Ed’s piece.

“That’s ultimately the problem with the current AI bubble — that so much of its success requires us to tolerate and applaud half-finished tools that only sort of, kind of do the things they’re meant to do, nodding approvingly and saying “great job!” like we’re talking to a child rather than a startup with $13 billion in funding with a CEO that has the backing of fucking Microsoft. “