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MJV

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Everything posted by MJV

  1. What would I advise a young artist to do vis a vis a future where AI will increasingly compete for a larger and larger share of people's time and attention? Number one. AI is already alive in the sense that it is never going away and it will forever hereafter compete for people's time and attention. The important thing to note about it is that it does not and will not ever need facilitators or human shepherds to steer its future direction or influence. Rather, how people collectively respond to it will determine where it goes and where its influence ends. AI will eliminate the need for many different kinds of jobs that exist today. On a massive scale. This societal upheaval and the resulting population of unemployed persons will result in many looking to make themselves employable by studying and looking for jobs in AI, but AI itself doesn't have nearly any need to employ humans. Its strength comes from mining all of human digital history and a feedback loop with how all of humanity responds to it. It has no need for employees and there won't be jobs requiring people who know how to use it. Everyone will both know it and know how to use it by its very ubiquitousness. Thus, it's very likely that the very idea of work itself will have to change. All we humans can do in response is to foster and develop the innately human advantages we have as humans that AI can never fully possess. Mobility and dexterity for starters, but also the power to physically, materially and spiritually comfort and support one another. AI will probably make a lot of beautiful music, but AI will never be able to sing through your vocal cords, or those of the persons you love; make your body dance in rhythm, spoon feed a baby, or paint a landscape through human eyes on canvas using real paints and pigments. It may inspire us, but it cannot animate us. So to an artist of the future I would suggest to focus artistic energies on non AI things that animate and move you and others. Figuring out exactly what that is will be art in itself, but forget digital arts for now and focus on traditional human arts like drawing, painting, singing, dancing, gymnastics, acting, tilling the soil, etc. Beautiful and artistic synergies will surely arise between humans and AI, but only between AI and those who are good at non AI things. Artists in the future won't make names for themselves by being good at AI, or using AI, or shepherding AI, but rather by being good at things AI can never do. With the exception of an IT job or similar, put the notion of making a living with AI or having some influence on it or through it out of your mind: AI doesn't need humans or humanity except in the collective sense, but it will never be able to satisfy human desire for what is real.
  2. MJV

    3D world #310

    Congratulations! That's great.
  3. Worst advice ever. Don't capitulate to AI in any way. It offers nothing to an artist. It is, strictly speaking, a replacement of the artist.
  4. I would check if the points in the middle are connected and there are no duplicate points, edges or polys anywhere else, and try optimizing it. If that doesn't fix it then check the phong tag settings. If that doesn't fix it then post a file.
  5. Great seeing this feature finally. 👍 I believe Houdini's implementation also allows the user to set the node output shown in the editor view while not changing the output to render, which I think was implemented in response to so many people forgetting to set the output node back when rendering following the original implementation that didn't allow that.
  6. VAMP has never been anything but a complete waste of time for me. Maybe it's different now but I doubt it.
  7. Oh wait I thought you were asking about C4D. Sorry I don't know about Houdini.
  8. Thanks for this! Very nice. Only I couldn't make the Global Scale setting do anything when in 3D projection mode. I usually do scale 3D noises when using old fashion standard texture displacement.
  9. Layouts are not and cannot be project specific, so no.
  10. It's best to avoid very large or very small numbers. The new Simulation seems particularly subject to various issues of scene scale and even has some settings to address them but none that work in any intuitive way. Also, it is important to note that only scene scales set to centimeters in project settings will behave physically accurately, unless you manually reset the gravity to 9.8 meters in the respective dynamics or simulation gravity settings when using other scene scales.
  11. With that budget I would buy this, have a $1000 party and pocket the rest: CyberPowerPC Gamer Supreme Liquid Cool Desktop Computer https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1791007-REG/cyberpowerpc_slc10360cpgv7_gamer_supreme_liquid_cool.html
  12. That person asked you to post a scene and you didn't. No one is going to help you without a scene because it's impossible.
  13. This post literally made me want to weep for humanity.
  14. We held off our future AI overlords for another year. Happy 2024 everyone. 😀🎇🎉 (The Times Square NYE crowd looks more and more computer generated, but nice job whoever did the KIA graphics. They worked perfectly for social media framing.)
  15. MJV

    LIghtwave 2023

    Can someone post some industry newsletters, articles, interviews with Maxon, etc that discus the new c4d core, because I don't think we're talking about the same things. C4D has a new physics engine but as far as it having an all new core, I don't think so.
  16. I have been migrating layouts since r6. They live in the preference folder and are easy to migrate from one version to another, no import-export needed. But things started breaking a lot since they introduced the new layouts that feature the auto hide/reveal stuff. Now I can't full screen my render window without it breaking and corrupting everything, and if I place a uv manager in my layout it always opens corrupted. I submitted bug reports but Maxon just says to rebuild the layouts, which doesn't fix anything so yeah, for me it's just another hassle and reason (of many) to avoid the new versions, which don't offer enough upsides to offset the downsides.
  17. Another reason to use r21. Custom layouts still work.
  18. The thing is that r21 was effectively the last version of Cinema that was developed under the old ownership structure. Every version since is simply licensing r21 with different numbers attached. Materially there is nearly zero difference between r21 and any subsequent version, except r21 had a better interface and supported custom layouts, had more and better available scrips and plugins that keep working as long as you don't update to something later, and of course is a more familiar and comfortable working environment for us old timers. Anyway this sort of thing is not uncommon in the software world. After Effects is virtually unchanged since version r7, except back then you could own the licence. The old Maxom ownership was very forward looking and nodes were probably their vision for the future and not the current ownerships, which simply maintains it as a cash cow to license. That is a testimony to how great the old ownership was.
  19. It was supposed to be... er, something! It was definitely supposed to be something. Maxon used to talk about deprecating xpresso but have more recently said that Scene Nodes are not meant as a replacement for and will never be a replacement for xpresso.
  20. For more about Octane I just noticed recently that the Cinema 4D Octane support articles on the OTOY site are really comprehensive and well written. This article on displacement for example in Octane for Cinema 4D: https://help.otoy.com/hc/en-us/articles/5384832960539-Displacement-in-Octane-for-Cinema-4D-Part-2-Model-and-Texture-Considerations
  21. You could write company press releases and promotional material because that sure sounded like it but I thought this was a discussion about Octane vs Redshift in 2024, which really boils down to a discussion of biased vs unbiased rendering, as things currently stand today. The thing I want others to know about Octane, if you are comparing it to Redshift or any other biased renderer is that, mostly because of the nature of what it is and how it works (and limitations of today's computers rendering power) an unbiased path tracer, it has a very high noise floor compared to what can be achieved with biased rendering tools. Octane's big innovation is having a great denoiser. Without the denoiser it would be pretty hard to impossible to do almost anything in Octane. And yet anyone who uses Octane knows very well it can be a tricky balancing act between preserving necessary detail vs reducing noise. This can be especially tricky if the detail in question is itself noise (as with a noised based bump map), or noise-like (small craters on the backside of a moon, metal flakes in car paint). And it's a destructive process, that is, once you denoise it, you can't go back to the un-denoised state that contains the original information unless you deliberately save a copy of that as well. Biased renderers have a bunch of different scene sampling methods and options that let the user dial in where and what and how rays are directed and how things are sampled (monte carlo, semi monte carlo, directed, targeted, etc.). The downside to this is, 1) it sometimes feels like too many choices and 2) a possible lack of photographic realism resulting from the different user settings and scene evaluations methods composited together into the final result. If you look at Maxon's old Physical renderer for example, different settings here and there can lead to vastly different results, but the final result may be best for product advertising or architecture or whatever because it looks good and clean and not because it is shaded photorealistically perfect. A biased renderer should probably also offer additional compositing options, since the render itself is a composite. I personally prefer using Octane because it looks most real to me compared to anything else I have used, and I simultaneously dislike the layered or composited look of biased renderers. That said, I wanted to acknowledge the weakness as well as the strengths of both.
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