Hello,

If you've tried to contact me on Linkedin in the past few months, I am unable to respond because I believe that account is compromised, hacked, or in some way restricted. Whatever the case may be, the result is the same: I'm locked out of it. ☹

Most of this year I've taken time away from game work so I didn't notice. Linkedin has been like the furthest thing from my mind. So I have no idea how long it's been in that state.

I've reached out to Linkedin support around a month ago to hopefully get that resolved but the process seems slow and the communication sparse.

In the meantime, please send any messages here instead.

Thanks! 🙂

Yoooooooooo

Hope ya'll are having a good 3-day weekend (if you're in the States). And if you're working, get yourself some good BBQ after work. You know what's up

Work's kept me busy busy busy. You know how that is. Get money. I've been putting in a few long weeks this month really trying to nail things down at the job. 

BUT IN THE MEANTIME

Here's what I've been up to

Houdini

I've only just picked up Houdini and I'm making strides to learn as much as possible for integrating it into my projects. If you know anything about me it's that I FUCKING LOVE COCAI-- TO LEARN. This time it's Houdini. My journey into nodes and -OPs has begun in earnest with tuts from around the internet. Houdini has a great library of learning material right on their own site! How dope is that?

Things I love about Houdini right now:

• the whole node-based workflow is right up my alley-- so non-destructive!
• Houdini has the best documentation and implementation of it I've seen in any program. Not only do buttons tell you what they do, what shortcut they're assigned to, but also if you hit F1 while hovering over an action, you get the help doc for that feature! Masterful
• All I've made in Houdini FX is shitty fire, but man was it easy to get used to and I am no FX artist
• Currently I'm doing a tutorial on making procedural buildings and it's mean af
• When I bought Houdini, my Paypal shit itself so I used a card instead. Then the Paypal went through next day. The same day without having to ask via support ticket SideFX emails me to say they went ahead with a refund cos it looked like a mistaken second purchase. Hello new best friends

Tips for fellow Houdini new booty:

• Houdini is Substance Designer but all 3D. Ok it's a lot more than that, but if you know SD, you'll ramp up real quick in Houdini
• You can learn Houdini for $0 if you use the Apprentice version
• If you decide you need to upgrade from Apprentice to the Indie version like I did, know that the login you have won't work for the license server installed on your computer for Apprentice. Instead, SideFX sends you a link for an updated login. 
• Houdini is setup to be FAST! So many things you do there can be baked down to keep your velocity going including sims and destruction. And of course, you don't have and if you do it's still non-destructive
• Houdini may require your computer's full attention (hardware resources) depending on what you're making! I breezed through making complex chains of nodes to create particles and destruction, but I absolutely chugged when it came to anything that required voxelization for instance

Redshift

Another exciting development. I'd been searching for a new renderer since the start of the year. Most of my projects are done in UE4 cos I'm a game guy and that makes sense. Sometimes I use Marmoset which is FAST af, but still pretty challenging to stage whole environments. I've also been looking to mix up my workflow in some currently super secret ways (sorry) so I decided to investigate other options! I really wanted something that could do realtime in some way, but had way better lighting. And above all I really wanted speed

Stuff I looked at:

• Ocatane - pretty awesome! but on my setup, pretty buggy!
• Corona - Super great quality! CPU rendering only!
• Arnold - Free with Max/Maya, GREAT quality and probably my favorite for rendering hair in particular, but also not fast
• Blender - EEVEE is awwwwesome, but unstable and I don't know Blender well enough.... yet

I ended up picking Redshift and boy am I happy. Check out this test render:

Using only free assets from Megascans, you cheap bastard

It's so easy to use and integrates super well into my current pipeline. I feel like Redshift is Marmoset on crack. It's not fully real-time, but its GPU rendering is pretty much the fastest I've experienced. And it was pretty affordable as far as renderers go! $500 still ain't nothing to sneeze at. We're not out here making Bill Gates money. I am amazingly satisfied with the speed, quality, and options. (If you're wondering I'm using it in 3DS Max)

Things I love about Redshift right now

• Couldn't be easier to get good results by default. Make some models, drop in some lights, it already looks dope
• One license for Redshift gets you integration with everything Redshift supports. Octane was having me pick and choose which package I wanted to pay to render in. "You want Octane in Maya? Sure! Also Houdini? That'll cost extra!"
• You might remember how I lost my mind over MODO's bevel shader... well Redshift comes with it! I didn't even know when I bought it, but I now use it to visualize all my modeling all the time in real-time. I think you can bake it too, but I'll have to investigate further
• Being able to see all your materials change before your eyes has made making complex material node graphs in Max a lot more attractive
• If you've read this far send me a PM that says 'study break winner' and you'll get a prize
• Renders are FAST
• Dat render time tho
• Also, renders are pretty quick.
• AOVs are fast and easy to generate AND there's huge bucket of em by default plus you can make custom AOVs

Tips for fellow Redshift new booty:

• know your color spaces with Redshift
• you have to enable GI, it's not on by default
• some FX can be enabled/disabled without having to re-render at all
• if you want super duper fast realtime preview renders, Redshift got denoisers with them big dicks
• some features have to be enabled in multiple places! While this is great for control, this is not my favorite thing because it reminds me of why I didn't like working with Mental Ray in Max: Why isn't _____ working? Did you enable it in the shader, render options, render settings, on the mesh, and call Tyrone?
• Redshift's documentation is great but sometimes spotty so I have to supplement it with Youtube tutorials which are frequently for C4D and Maya

Man, this was packed! Thanks for reading and see ya next week!

BONUS: Music to do art by - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph_IhNseCBc 

Outside of art I tend to spend around one weekend a month doing what I think of as a quality of life pass on my workspace. This includes stuff like re-organizing projects, tutorials, and clearing out my ever growing downloads folder. It also includes solving or working around issues that have slowed down my workflow. As I come across tips I'm happy to share whatever I find that helps my fellow art homies work better.

So let's talk about some cool fixes and tools for speeding up thumbnail browsing in Windows Explorer. And a little bit about the process of course!

[TL;DR, scroll down to Solutions for the fixes]

"FUCK!"

How does this work?

Usually it starts with foul language. If you're outside my window you can probably hear "FUCK" every few hours. When you hear that, you know I went to do something in 3DS Max or Windows only to be boned in the end. Might be something as small as lamenting the half-baked UV straighten tool in Max or... waiting a full minute for thumbnails to load in a frequently visited folder in Windows. 

In the past, I had a pretty bad habit of stopping right then and there to track down how I could solve whatever the problem was because like, the internet is right there. But I kinda realized that that wasted time and threw my focus off in the middle of a session. So instead I switched over to one of my favorite pastimes: writing random things. It's how I begin all my projects. Usually I pop open a doc and start jotting down ideas. So this time, I started doing that in a sequence of files that came to be known as [fill in the blank]Annoyances.txt.

These docs are usually pretty short and consist of rows of very angry sentences:

This helps me to prevent myself from being derailed during the creative process by googling to fix random non-blocking technical problems. As you can probably tell, last time I investigated a source of major slowdown for me: thumbnails in Windows Explorer. 

Thumbnails, please

If you're an artist with a computer you have more images than is legal (in some country, probably).  Likely you don't have hundreds, but like thousands in a bunch of weird file types,  and you love thumbnails. More than that, you probably need thumbnails to be able to quickly tell the difference between T_thiccBrick_A.tga and T_thiccBrick_B.tga  when you're working on a project.

Gross

Solutions

So in my doc, I end up trying out a couple of solutions and making notes of what works. Here's what's been working for me to eliminate slowdown in thumbnail browsing.

A) Windows doesn't remember my folder sorting because I have too many folders apparently

• solution: registry edit to tell Windows to stop forgetting my folders

B) Windows icon cache is automatically deleted for some reason, usually between computer power downs but also when it's most inconvenient I guess

• solution: registry edit to turn off SilentCleanup of icons 

C) BONUS! How can I generate thumbnails without visiting the folder?

• solution: AWESOME tool called WinThumbsPreloader

D) BONUS! I want a faster image viewer

• solution: Irfanview wins for speed, hands down

Once I tried these, I noticed instant improvements in my windows explorer browsing experience. My downloads folder was no longer a mess of half loaded images. My project texture folders were no longer causing my expensive PC to somehow chug as I browsed them. And the best part is... it has stuck, even after restarts. There are some things I'm mentally preparing for because this is Windows. Like, I fully expect to have to redo some of this after some random Windows update. But for now, I'm enjoying browsing my images at top speed.

The sweetest part of this deal is the WinThumbsPreloader. This thing works recursively (that is, it can generate thumbs for folders inside of folders) and is crazy fast. Just right click on a folder and tell it to do it's thing. The longest thumbnail gen took about 2 minutes and that was for 15K images. 2-3K it can chew through in mere seconds. So great!

I've used Irfanview, but fell away from it for a while. I'm back because it's the fastest image viewer I can find and because I finally figured out options that work for my viewing experience. I tried out a few other programs, but none were anywhere near as fast.

Well, that's it. Hope these tips are helpful to you and if you have suggestions for speeding up Windows, I'm all ears.

Thanks for reading and see ya next week!