Did you know the US Mint has a really interesting online shop? One of their more interesting products is uncut sheets of currency. You can get uncut sheets of most denominations: $1, $5, $10, $50, $100, and even the wonderful $2 bill. The sheets come in lots of different formats too. You can usually buy sheets of 50, 32, 25, 20, 10, 8, and even 4 note configurations.
Some gotchas:
You may need to come back to the site multiple times over a period of months if you have something specific. $2 bills were out of stock for almost a year at one point during Covid but have recently returned. In addition, since this is legal currency, the cost of the sheet is actually more than the full face value of all the bills on the sheet. For example, a 32 sheet of $2 costs $102 (more than the $64 face value). A 50 note sheet of $1 is $86. A 16 note sheet of $100 bills costs an eye watering $1860.
There is a new stop-motion game like The Neverhood and Armikrog or recent movies from Laika. Harold Halibut is a adventure game that uses stop-motion and physically captured model objects to tell the story of a community that crashes their spaceship into a planet covered by the sea.
They made all the objects and stop-motion characters by hand, with real cloth, paint, sculpting, etc. When they realized how much work the stop-motion animation was going to be, the big idea was to 3D scan their hand crafted scenes, objects, and characters in the classic T pose, then use standard digital rigging systems to apply motion captured animations instead of painstakingly hand-animating every frame.
While this was a brilliant method to reduce the massive amounts of time and animation effort required, it still took them over 14 years to complete the game. They freely admit that most of that time was spent just figuring out the workflows since they weren’t well versed in game development tools. Still, what takes Laika hundreds of workers years was completed by this team with a fraction of that effort. They were able to add use all kinds of amazing effects and create scenes nearly impossible for true stop-motion animation.
Watching the resultant gameplay, some of the scenes are gorgeous. The close-ups and dialog shots are amazing and the facial animations are butter smooth. There are even tiny idle animations and movements that you would never do with stop-motion and a great depth to the game by letting you freely walk around – something impossible with hand-modeled animation. But there is maybe the only gripe: it’s too smooth.
Part of what makes stop-motion animation so quaint and ‘comfy’ is the little imperfections and limitations like clothing that interacts differently and animations that randomly pop and hitch. With this method, I notice the animations (especially walking animations) are a little too smooth and they often lose that stop-motion quality. There are times when they stretch the mesh too much and it becomes obvious the model is just getting stretched/bent. Individual clothing layers do not interact separately – they bend together as one. It feels like a solid plastic model – instead of having individually reacting layers of clothing/hair/etc. There is also none of the random occasional popping of clothing/animations mysteriously between 2 frames.
There could be ways to fix this by turning off random parts of motion blending between keyframes and having shaders that could randomly add some pop/hitching. Layers of materials could be animated separately. Still, it’s a noticeable distraction and difference between real stop-motion.
Also very noticeable is that the lighting is computed not physical. Especially in the larger/wider scenes, lighting is clearly rendered and it makes things look flat. Objects do not cast the physically correct kinds of shadows or receive mixes of soft and hard lighting edges as if the physical objects were place together and lit as a whole. This makes the rendered versions of the 3D objects (especially in wide shots) look flatter than they would if the real scene were physically created and lit.
This is definitely a novel new technique that is likely going to transform some of the industry. I think it has some amazing possibilities for speeding up dialog and closer-up shots; but probably not good at totally re-creating the aesthetics of stop-motion. I do think some of the smoothness/deformation and lighting issues could be fixed – but that will take a lot more work. Interestingly enough, Laika goes the OTHER direction. They computer generate/animate their faces in modeling tools, then physically 3D print them to put onto the objects into the physical world.
Prompt engineering is a bit of a dark art. Crafting prompts with positive and negative keywords requires finesse and creativity.
Geeky Gadgets has a selection of helpful prompt keywords that can help you create interesting lighting/exposure effects, texture/surface effects, color/tone, composition and perspectives, motion, environmental effects and artistic styles/techniques.
Being able to create consistent characters with an AI art generators is not easy. AI has a habit of generating completely different looking characters between each prompt.
One trick is to use variables in Dalle-3. These variables enable the establishment of specific character traits that persist across generations.
Entertrained has a novel way to teach you how to type. They let you type along to its catalog of public domain books which include: Dracula, Walden, and Leaves of Grass. Learn how to type while reading classics at the same time.
Just select your book and start typing. There’s neat little scoring/error run system that gives you an overall score and performance breakdown.
Starting with the basic idea of using a hot glue gun to form and build up a model, why not make whole objects in this way? Why not shoes? If you attach that glue gun to a robotic arm and the glue into a light filament – voila: LightSpray.
LightSpray is a technique that use a robot arm to spray a recyclable filament around a mold to create a seamless one-piece upper that is directly attached to the midsole, eliminating the need for stitching or glue. The entire shoe is fully assembled in just 3 minutes. Supposedly coming Fall/Winter 2024.
The video is pretentious – thinking they invented something new – but it does get the idea across. Like Nike’s attempts at 3D printing, and 3D printed clothing, I think it’s definitely going to change things.
Teenage Engineering makes some beautiful products. Now they’ve come up with a new one: the EP–1320 which features hundreds of built-in medieval sounds. Create your own medieval melodies with drums and medieval string and pipe instruments such as their kind of wacky intro video below.
There’s also some folks already making medieval jams on youtube.
Now on their 5th version, Light Toys Visual Poi V5 MAXI are LED light sticks that can produce some amazing patterns when swung around. Persistence of vision illusions (in this case a pair of sticks) uses densely-packed RGB LEDs and circuitry that displays a line at a time to produce complete images when spun. They are pretty amazing, but ought to be since a pair costs an eye watering $2190
Amaze your friends at the next rave for about 30 minutes – or more likely synced up as a backup dancer for the next Super bowl concert.
Despite having taken a number of salsa and swing dancing lessons, I’m afraid that I’m just not that natural of a dancer. But boy I love swing dancing when I see it. It’s definitely my favorite.
Stephen and Chanzie put on an amazing show at the Rock That Swing Festival by dancing to The Nitty Grity (by Shirley Ellis). Performed at the Deutsches Theater (February 6th, 2016)
Man – I wish our culture had a lot more of this kind of quality.
What if you re-told the movie “The Fifth Element” as a 1950’s sci-fi flick using a generative AI. Yes, everything you see is generated by AI – and you can learn the techniques too from Curious Refuge’s AI filmmaking classes.
