Walk in the park, look at the sky: collected thoughts, processes and observations made during the course of making things

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/2020

06.12.20 Creating a Custom Mantra Renderer Preset in Houdini
Over the years I've always tried to make some of the more utilitarian processes as efficient as possible, so I can spend more time creating…
06.12.20 That Was The Week That Was – 6th December 2020
This week was all about the release of a dream project I had been working on for some weeks. Back in July, Jim Coudal, co-founder,…
30.11.20 A Technique to Reveal Points Over Time in Houdini
I recently had a need to reveal a series of points over time, but in a random way. There's no doubt a myriad of ways to do this in Houdini,…
29.11.20 That Was The Week That Was – 29th November 2020
This week I found myself filled with equal parts excitement and nervousness. On the Wednesday was my debut drop on NiftyGateway – an NFT A…
22.11.20 That Was The Week That Was – 22nd November 2020
After buying a Beomaster 1900 from Ebay to replace my Beomaster 1500, I realised a few days later that several of the bulbs – the ones for b…
24.08.20 That Was The Week That Was – 24th August 2020
The majority of my time this week was spent working on my third commission from Trend Micro. The majority of the scenes are now rendered,…
16.08.20 That Was The Week That Was – 16th August 2020
I've always been a fan of mechanical keyboards, my absolute favorite being the Apple II extended. Yet it's a pain to use with modern…
09.08.20 That Was The Week That Was – 9th August 2020
For twelve years my 2nd generation Drobo has been my main archive drive, with 16TB of data whirring away under my desk, storing all my…
02.08.20 That Was The Week That Was – 2nd August 2020
For the second year in a row I found out this week my work Black Mamba's Revenge had been long listed for the prestigious Lumen art and…
26.07.20 That Was The Week That Was – 26th July 2020
This week I had a call with a dear friend of mine, who's asked for my assistance on a very exciting project, involving making potentially…
19.07.20 That Was The Week That Was — 19th July 2020
This was the week my site, and a few sites I host, totally blew up, and not in good way. It started with a text from a restaurant owning…
12.07.20 That Was The Week That Was – 12th July 2020
I have a little device sat on my desk which lights up when I'm uploading uploading updates to my site via the site repo. I built it myself…
05.07.20 That Was The Week That Was — 5th July 2020
A new book arrived in the form of Genetic Algorithms and Machine Learning for Programmers. Much of my work these days looks at using such…
04.07.20 Creating Variable Length Trails in Houdini
Using the Trails SOP in Houdini makes it pretty trivial to create trails from points. However these trails will always have the same…
28.06.20 That Was The Week That Was — 28th June 2020
HAS magazine from UNESCO appeared this week, featuring my Art of Cybersecurity work. The magazine looks great though I personally hate…
21.06.20 That Was The Week That Was — 21st June 2020
A new piece of client work appeared this week in the form of a second commission from Trend Micro. Originally this was work for an event in…
14.06.20 That Was The Week That Was — 14th June 2020
This week I've been exploring some ideas with Vellum — Houdini's soft body simulation system. It seemed my wobbly low-poly horse struck a n…
07.06.20 That Was The Week That Was — 7th June 2020
The notebook I ordered from Armorial arrived and it was very disappointing. The finish of the binding was very badly done, and in the…
31.05.20 That Was The Week That Was — 31st May 2020
Danielle Newnham published an interview with me as part of her Beyond Work series, looking at how founders and innovators have been coping…
24.05.20 That Was The Week That Was — 24th May 2020
In the course of researching an approach to creating a new piece of client work, in WebGL, I searched around for something node / graph…
17.05.20 That Was The Week That Was — 17th May 2020
MOPs is an open source toolkit for Houdini for motion design and is something I began to explore this week. The use of an offset ramp to…
10.05.20 That Was The Week That Was — 10th May 2020
Love the work of Jacqueline Casey, especially all the posters she did when at MIT. Stunning work. The book of her posters is pretty hard to…
03.05.20 That Was The Week That Was — 3rd May 2020
During the sixth week of lockdown I explored some sound reactive work in Houdini. I'd played around with this type of stuff before, and…
26.04.20 That Was The Week That Was — 26th April 2020
Lusted over the stationery made by Amorial. Like this quote from Freud about consideration when writing a letter: I consider it a good…
19.04.20 That Was The Week That Was — 19th April 2020
Saw these Masuya Monakai notebooks, but so far have resisted clicking the add to cart button. Talking of notebooks, this piece in Fast…
12.04.20 That Was The Week That Was — 12th April 2020
Sad to see both Computer Arts and Net Mag closing. Whilst I haven't bought it for a long time, in the early part of my career they were…
05.04.20 That Was The Week That Was — 5th April 2020
During the second week of lock down, I started on a new idea, taking the colours from the final fight scene in Kill Bill Vol One and…
29.03.20 That Was The Week That Was — 29th March 2020
First week of full lock-down following the announcement on the Monday night. Watching the address from Boris Johnson was certainly "a…
22.03.20 That Was The Week That Was — 22nd March 2020
Last weekend we were meant to be in Paris, but of course we had to cancel due to COVID-19. We lost pretty much all our money, with the…
15.03.20 That Was The Week That Was — 15th March 2020
Whilst sequences were rendering for this client video piece in 4K, we managed to steal away a few hours at the park — making sure to keep o…