DS022: More photo captures hoisted by my recurring addiction to the sumptuous qualities of Cycles.
It’s soupy out there. The air looks thick and grey.
I really don’t have time today. Blender crashed in the middle of the night and dropped a load of frames so I had to spend the morning going back to patch it up. There’s several stages to producing these things and though that pipeline’s getting smoother, an error at any point is a goddamn annoyance. I did another ‘making of’ for Instagram which I like doing, helps me think about it too.
MF DOOM has been on repeat for coming up to two weeks now through the early morning starts, the cascading windows of Word documents and Excel sheets. I cracked the spine on Bifo’s new book last night and I might as well have been trying to read cuneiform for how quickly my brain reverts to admin mode. I’ll get back to a good balance shortly of being able to read and think again.
I’m sorry, I wish I had more for you. Love, you speak to you next week if not before.
DS021: Finding ways to work with Trnio and Blender. Scanned the statue and then impoted into Blender.
Well, Rimworld did end up consuming four days of my time over new year. There’s no high like a micromanagement space simulator.
I moved posting these back to Wednesday. It worked well for me before and I’m not sure why I decided Monday would be better. Monday mornings are always really busy and as I’m increasingly doing my renders over the weekend, they’re often not ready for Monday. Wednesday works.
I had a couple of goes at photogrammetry a few years ago when it was first on the phone with 123D Catch. You’d never guess that it wasn’t that great in 2014. So I got Trnio the other day with a view to expanding my pre-made assets and cutting down on hard surface modelling time. I was out on a ride the other day and statue hunting where I found this one of William Tyndale – an early Bible translator in Victoria Gardens. I took a scan in AR Kit and the normal object mode and the AR Kit version was unsurprisingly better. AR Kit feels like an unusual concession to exploratory creativity on Apple’s part and it’s a definite advantage to newer iPhones.
I managed to learn a bunch of stuff doing this: Trnio can’t really catch objects of this scale in much detail. It works really well at the scale of household objects but the statue is very distorted close up. Trying to capture in neutral light conditions will make setting up scenes much easier – the texture is baked on and in this case was catching the specularity of a low winter sun so I had to get lights in place that didn’t obviously contradict it. There’s not a huge amount you can do with the mesh beyond basic clean up; there’s no logic to the structure and it just comes out as a mess of triangles. This would be good for organic objects like people but for hard surfaces like the plinth it just limits options to tweak and tidy. And obviously the scale limits rendering possibilities, the top areas of the statue where I couldn’t scan were best-guesses on Trnio’s part – not bad but they wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny.
Anyway, lessons for next time, which I guess will have to be household objects now. For this week I also decided to produce a ‘making of’ IG reel. Might keep these up if it seems like people are enjoying them.
I spent this morning revisiting an old piece of writing on CGI and imagination I needed to redraft and have been feeling very guilty about avoiding. It was from the Before Times which dates it to around late 2019 and it’s amazing how much you can learn in a year. A bit of me wanted to do a wholesale rewrite with all the stuff I’ve figured out since then but there’s only so much time in the world and too many things to do. I managed to slip in a few references to support some of what at the time time were just vague notions and send it back off. The thing’s been a weight on my conscience the last six months so I’m glad I got hassled back in to kicking it into gear.
As I write, Warnock has secured his victory in Georgia so this is shaping up to be a good day so far. I’ve been avoiding the US news podcasts in the last week because I resent the kind of frenzied speculation that accelerates closer and closer to these events and inevitably turns out to be meaningless. They’re amusing to listen to after the fact though. Particularly if Ossoff also wins.
There’s no short stuff today because I’ve been playing video games and riding bikes for a week, leave me alone.
DS020: Some admin presents under your tree. I’ve started falling back in love with Cycles which is why this was late again. Even this measly 250 frames took over 24 hours.
They say everyone has a book in them. Unfortunately, the best bits are being previewed in emails and tweets.
I had originally planned not to do a ‘this is what I did this year’ then last night I thought I might and then I thought again that no, I don’t want to read that so I’m not going to write it. People do ask me for recommendations of things, so I’m going to recommend some things I really enjoyed this year:
I adored Control and all the expansions, it’s the only game I played to full completion with all the achievements. I sunk a few hundred hours into Planet Zoo (the animals are cute and it has a high degree of customisability). I started getting into Rimworld on Wes’ recommendation before realising that it was a black hole of time and managed to pull myself out before it consumed me. I also replayed a few hundred hours of No Man’s Sky but hit that plateau point where you realise that there’s just a lot of doing the same thing over and over again to go and stopped.
Somewhere I properly read like maybe three books and they had such a significant impact that I can’t remember any of them. I’m still working on The Idiot. I read hundreds of papers, chapters and essays which I update you on here pretty regularly anyway. One day I’ll assemble a library of stuff, I’m still migrating Evernote to Keep It so once I’ve done that it might be easier.
Short Stuff
I rebuilt the Haunted Machines site. Check it out. We’re working on some stuff so it needed updating.
This blog also needs a redesign. It’s settling in now from the big overhaul but, for example, the tags need to be somewhere else. I’ve started to refer back to things and there’s not an easy way to search at the moment.
Some people got stroppy when I was exasperated about the use of fishing as a hostage in Brexit negotiations. I’m not going to concede; yes – it will effect some people’s lives but it is marginal compared to the utter havoc and destruction the nationalists have unleashed on far more significant sectors of UK economy and culture.
An engrossing bit of visualisation; the Timeline of Failure of UK’s response to the Covid pandemic. It’s produced by tireless satirists Led by Donkeys and paints a picture of a group of people who won’t take serious stuff seriously.
The first alt-universe Covid movies have been cropping up. I wondered a few weeks back about the diegetics of Covid and how it would effect the reliance of films on certain social cues and tropes. Imagine it as something like a world war – there are films specifically about war where the war is essentially a character. And then there are films where war is a big, unavoidable bit of context. In the second case this is usually covered with a bit of exposition and then everyone goes about their normal business but how will you create films where everyone has to keep a distance and the social rules are different? It necessitates new tropes: Zoom calls, the end of quiet, conspiratorial hallway conversations, people standing 2m apart. Well anyway, luckily for us these first films are are just terrible.
Apple have decided to say they are going to be making a car. Do they need to make a car? No. Does the world need another car? No. Will it positively impact their perception in the eyes of the tech bois? Yes. This is just profoundly sad. Remember when Apple actually invented stuff rather than just attempting to carve out territory and invent competition? Imagine if Apple said ‘We’re going to compete with all the companies designing cars by designing-out cars. We’re going to use our decades of understanding user behaviour and needs [to better or worse extents] to redesign urban infrastructure and services such that we can significantly reduce road deaths.’ I’m too jaded to wallow in disappointment at this stage in my life. I’m reminded of an idea I read years ago that Concorde was killed off by Skype. Yes, the safety problems were what did it in, but the fact that no-one invested in developing iterations or alternatives is because the primary use-case – fast travel across the Atlantic for business people and celebrities – was made cheaper and easier by Skype.
What was the last thing you remember being invented?
Homelessness is a maligned and ignored problem in London and many other cities and it can be easy to forget how it is getting worse all the time, exacerbated even more by Covid especially when we’re not out and about being confronted with it so much. If you’ve got some change rattling around at the end of this month, consider giving some to Crisis if you’re in the UK. It’s going down to freezing this week and some change could help keep someone warm.
That wasn’t very short. the keyboard feels really heavy, like it’s an effort to type. I guess I’ve bene out of practice the last few days. I’ve got to get on the bike, there’s still 195km to ride in the next three days. Remember that I love you, see you next year.