Podcast time: Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Wild stuff here with MK-ULTRA, Mason and all sorts of strange tales. Takes a bit to get moving but then it starts to open up about 20 minutes in.

“Tom O'Neill is an award-winning investigative journalist. His book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, is the culmination of a 20-year investigation, which unearthed information about the murders, the murderers, the prosecutors who tried them, and the complex web of connections between Charles Manson, the CIA's MKUltra program, the counterculture movement, and other powerful individuals during the 1960s.”

Houdini Doodle: Motion Blur Study

After testing out some extreme caustics the other day, I kinda wanted to get into some crazy motion blurs. I made three different kinds of motions here to get these effects. The biggest hiccup I had was that my render window in Redshift was showing the blur but the final Render wih Mplay was not. Turns out if you have a motion vector AOV turned on, it won’t render out. Dunno if that’s a bug or not. But was odd to trouble shoot.

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again

LOL! What a great write up, love this kind of humor.

“I. But We Will Realize Untold Efficiencies With Machine L-

What the fuck did I just say?

I started working as a data scientist in 2019, and by 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes despite insisting that things like, I dunno, the next five years of a ten thousand person non-tech organization should be entirely AI focused. The number of companies launching AI initiatives far outstripped the number of actual use cases. Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders1.”

“II. But We Need AI To Remain Comp-

Sweet merciful Jesus, stop talking. Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they're going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything - or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits. Artificial intelligence, as it exists and is useful now, is probably already baked into your businesses software supply chain. Your managed security provider is probably using some algorithms baked up in a lab software to detect anomalous traffic, and here's a secret, they didn't do much AI work either, they bought software from the tiny sector of the market that actually does need to do employ data scientists. I know you want to be the next Steve Jobs, and this requires you to get on stages and talk about your innovative prowess, but none of this will allow you to pull off a turtle neck, and even if it did, you would need to replace your sweaters with fullplate to survive my onslaught.”

It just keeps going like that. Yeah, I am of the camp that AI is the new NFT, 90’s .com crash coming.

Houdini 20.5 MPM - what is that?

Really good write up on Reddit about what MPM actually is in Houdini 20.5. Really good explainer here.

“When it comes to simulation currently in the industry there are a few major kinds of solvers - 1. Grid based (Eulerian solvers) 2. Particle based (Lagrangian solvers) 3. A mix of both (Hybrid / semi Lagrangian solvers) 4. There’s also a 4th kind, mostly point or geometry based (PBD solvers, Bullet, NVIDIA PHYSX). Although PBD can be categorised as Lagrangian too.

So what are Eulerian and Lagrangian solvers? In very simple words if you’re calculating and storing your velocities on the grid like bounding box that you use in FLIP fluids or pyro solvers basically solvers that use a voxel grid then it’s Eulerian. Example of such solvers are FLIP fluid and pyro solver in Houdini.

On the other hand if you compute and store velocities and forces on the particles instead of any VDB grid etc then it’s Lagrangian. Example of Lagrangian solver can be SPH (smooth particle hydrodynamics) probably was used in old versions of Bifrost, Real Flow etc. Currently not very famous or used. Probably the most common example of this method in Houdini is vellum which uses PBD (position based dynamics) or XPBD (extended position based dynamics) where velocities and forces are computed and stored in the grid.

As you may already know in both the methods you can simulate various materials to some extent like cloth, soft bodies, fluids, grains etc.

When I worked in Dune 2 we used FLIP solver extensively to create some of the sand shots while in other shots where it wasn’t necessary we used vellum grains or even particles.

But here comes the major problem. You can’t make Eulerian and Lagrangian solver talk to each other easily without creating a custom bridge.

So in order to do that, the solution is MPM or material particle method based solver. MPM uses both the characteristics of Eulerian solver and Lagrangian solver.

How?

In MPM you store the forces and velocities of a particle in the particle like you do in Lagrangian but then you interpolate that velocity back into a grid , solve the forces and then interpolate the forces / velocities back to the particles and move the particles.

Whereas is FLIP the whole velocity projection / Pressure projection stage happens in the grid itself.

MPM is sort of a hybrid solver. It was built as an extension of FLIP solver. While FLIP is very good at handling fluid behaviours by keeping the simulation divergence free, MPM is more of a general purpose solver that can handle stretch, strain, granular sims a lot better however it can also do fluids.

Now through MPM you can have a good interaction between various materials that you didn’t have before like cloth and fluid, grain and fluid etc.

Not only that in some cases like snow accumulation etc MPM can give a lot better results than PBD based solvers like vellum. However one drawback is that with MPM you’ll have to make bounding boxes like FLIP or Pyro solver which might not always be very memory efficient.”- Icy-Acanthisitta3299

Houdini 20.5 Keynote

It’s nice that there is still a technology / program that I am actually excited to use and learn about new stuff in. Houdini is STILL really interesting tech. Digi cameras are boring, Photoshop is a pile of broken glass, windows is bloatware and macs are boring. But this stuff still gets me excited.

Houdini Doodles: Cassette

Just messing around with some clouds and voronoi fracture which was not really working for me. So I shifted it up and went into doing a caustics study which I like more. Works pretty good now in Redshift and renders fast.

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.”