*Slap*
Wii’s Mii theme
Voice assisted tool chest
Ever ask “Where are those red LEDs?” or “Where did I put that electrical tape?” Now you can – and your tool chest will help you.
Time and fashion
Giving up on greenscreen?
CG has always had problems with realism. Eye-lines and focus distances are never perfect. Colors between live/CG elements never quite match. Reflections can be directionally incorrect, missing, or mismatched in color/intensity. Lighting color/intensity/direction is often inconsistent between the live elements and CG elements. Mattes have problems at edges. Motion tracking is usually off by just enough to cause odd movement discontinuities. All of this makes CG look cheap.
But there is a new approach using LED stages – large displays surrounding your shooting scene. It’s completely changing the game. Even more amazing, camera movement and simulation are done using the Unreal gaming engine. Even back in the mid 2000’s, I worked on a project that attempted to use a game engine for movie pre-visualization. That’s how far things have come. The amazing visuals of the Mandalorian were created using this technique – and it’s blowing green-screens away.
When you can’t find a N95 mask
mozu studios creates impressive tiny rooms
Mozu Studios is lead by a young artist that creates the most amazingly detailed tiny rooms/scenes – often hidden in the most unusual places. These were the kind of tiny worlds I dreamed of as a kid…
He even makes some very detailed ‘how-to’ videos that show how he makes these great scenes.
$2.4 Trillion went where?
This website has been created to report on where pandemic stimulus money is going, and allow anyone to file waste complaints they might witness.
Anyone else find it interesting it cost $82 BILLION dollars just to oversee the spending of $2.4 trillion? That’s almost 6 times what is going in assistance to schools.
Virtual Racing
What happens when a global pandemic shuts down F1, Nascar, Indycar and other professional auto racing? The pro racers become internet competitors! Real life F1 stars Max Verstappen and Lando Norris, IndyCar drivers Simon Pagenaud and Felix Rosenqvist, and a bevy of popular professional sim racers and YouTube personalities got together and raced online. There were commentators and the virtual event was every bit as good as an actual live one by most accounts.
Before that, Nascar did a similar race earlier and was met with good reviews. Like real life, one race event even lead to its own scandal.
This raises some really fascinating implications for our post-corona world. With computers and simulators becoming ever better – as good as real life – could the likelihood of increasing numbers of pandemics like H1N1 and Covid-19 cause a major shift in real sports?
Could real or interrupted seasons be augmented, or even completely replaced, by online competitions? What would this mean for the millions in advertising and promotion that ride on these events? Will giant, technology ladened stadiums become a thing of the past? And while these online events were friendly, it also brings up the extremely difficult topics of hacking, doping, cheating, and other nefarious activities already plaguing e-Sports.
Grocery Trip
“Computers are good at lots of tasks – but they’ll never replace creative activities and artists”
May I present Pouff’s grocery shopping video (Grocery Trip). It was created back in 2015 using neural network technology which attempted to identify animal faces in places where they didn’t actually exist.
Incidentally, Mario Klingemann disagrees with the first statement. “Humans are not original,” he says. “We only reinvent, make connections between things we have seen.” While humans can only build on what we have learned and what others have done before us, “machines can create from scratch”