2024-05-03 | 01:49:11 PM
Hey there. Honestly, nothing much to write today. Busy day today, and I really have to cram a client project that’s been sitting on my to-do list for at a day or two. It’s due in 2 days but I have to finish it today, so wish me luck!
2024-05-03 | 08:21:48 PM
Hey there. I started working on the project at a time later than 1:49:11 PM, I’m pretty sure. A lot of things got in the way, but I would say today was an OK day. I also feel a lot better now, thanks to the medications the Doctor gave me. I’m exporting the initial export of the project now, so I could compare and contrast it with the other versions that I might make for the project. It’s nice getting a little bit of a refreshser in After Effects, especially with my fascination for the procedural things I could do with it.
I’m obsessed with procedural design, and it really shows. In the context of 3D, I love working with procedural textures. Nodes, basically. In the world of After Effects, procedural stuff could be something as simple as roughen edges. I’m enamored by the idea of getting instant feedback on something you’re making. The speed of feedback when working with procedural effects allows you to learn and explore in a manner that otherwise wouldn’t be possible with other methods. I might expound on this later, once I get more time.
2024-05-03 | 10:19:04 PM
I’m back lol. Okay, so what I meant by the thing I put above regarding procedural design is that there’s sooo much nuance that you can eliminate simply by having almost real-time feedback. I say ‘almost’ real-time because there really isn’t any computing power at the moment that could provide instantaneous, 100%, unfiltered, and raw feedback.
Think of Autodesk’s Arnold renderer, for example. The beauty in a modern renderer like Arnold is the ability to work alongside an Interactive Preview Render (IPR) window. As the words IPR already so clearly state, Arnold’s IPR is an interactive render preview. Here’s a direct quotation from Arnold’s documentation:
The Arnold IPR window is designed to give real-time feedback on changes made in the scene, offering a significant workflow speed-up. The Interactive Preview Render window will automatically update the render every time it detects a change in the scene (such as moving the camera, objects or lights, or any kind of lighting or shading modification). This speeds up your workflow as it is not necessary to keep starting new renders because the IPR is constantly updating for you.
Immediate feedback almost always translates to better, more contextualized responses. Knowing the what, why, when, and how of the re-iteration process allows for adequte efficiency in testing solutions. What I like about procedural textures is the ability to tweak things real-time. Adjusting the metalness attribute of a material doesn’t, for example, take any more than a few seconds and a click of a button. Compared to traditional art, where feedback is mostly limited to the abilities of the artist, I would say that Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) gives, to a point, the most amount of leverage we could ever have for our creativity. Notwithstanding, of course, leverages for context, such as Artificial Intelligence or AI. Context-leveraging is lifting extant language up to another level, or dimension. It is allowing computers to calculate our imagination to approximate imagery or visual representation.
Also, I think what’s really interesting about procedural design besides real-time feedback is the speed at which we could determine which design decision to make. In traditional art, where the methods of an artistic method are reliant on the combination of an artist’s imaginative and technical capabilities, devising a method to, say, draw a human body is complex. The artist must be, fundamentally, knowledgeable about the intricacies of the human body. The artist must know where the glabella is, where the bicep is connected to, where the latissimus dorsi remains, and whatnot. In addition, the artist must be well-versed in other, smaller skillsets, such as, for example, how to properly hold a pencil to efficiently achieve a desired result.
In the technological world, our capabilities are multiplied. Especially with blazingly fast machines and the presence of AI models that can contextualize and represent much of how we imagine things, human creativity will reach a level never before reached. There even is already an intersection of AI models and CG, which fascinates me so much. Here’s a video I saw about Airen 4D, an AI Render Engine:
I foresee a future phenomenon in the Arts that combines the infinite capabilities of a human’s imagination as well as the extremely powerful computing power of computers to exhibit creativity in forms we haven’t thought about seeing. Sora AI, for example, is already skirting the edge of what could be possible using such combination.
Sora AI's Introductory Video
Some more example outputs from Sora AI