Image Savant is a fine art studio operated by Richard Baily. Baily's goal is to build a "living" system that will breed and evolve designs and animations. To this end he has created SPORE -- a proprietary particle system that was apparently used in Steven Soderbergh's Solaris. The Quicktime gallery of SPORE animations is full of eye candy, as are the galleries full of still images.
Today I've been experimenting with HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography using HDR Shop. As you can see, I've selected a glass globe sitting on a white piece of paper in the sunshine as an initial subject. I set the tripod up, bracketed the shots 2 f-stops apart, imported the shot trios into HDR Shop for processing, tweaked the gamma and exposure values a bit, and the images I've posted here are some of the results. 
I've been a last.fm fan for quite a while now, but today I discovered Pandora, which might turn me into a defector. The two services work quite differently. last.fm assumes that if you enjoy music popular with a group of listeners, you'll enjoy other music popular with those same listeners. The last.fm recommendation algorithm works solely on the basis of users' thumbs up/thumbs down reports, knowing nothing about the actual qualities of the music itself. Compare this with Pandora, which bases its recommendations on the work of a team of music analysts, who have classified songs according to many properties (melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics, etc), and recommends songs on the basis of these properties. It's early days yet, but based on my experience so far, Pandora's recommendations seem superior. If you're interested, I've included a link to my Pandora favorites in the sidebar of this blog. You can listen to my station by clicking on cyberchaos radio. Although I'm pleased with Pandora, I can see that it has a dangerous bottleneck -- the system can only introduce new songs as quickly as a team of human experts can analyze them, whereas a system like last.fm can add new songs to its database and let users start rating them immediately.
I recently came across podcollective while searching for flash tutorials. This art collective is definitely worth checking out -- stimulation for both the eyes and ears. Enjoy podcollective member phong's informative Photoshop tutorials here.
...nobody talks about Pillow Fight Club. I guess that's why I'd never heard of it until now. It looks fun.
Well, I'm spending a good part of today immersed in pop art. I must be seeking inspiration after a full day in support call hell yesterday. Browsing Google Local for info about 3D animation in London, Ontario, oddly directed my attention to The Ebeling Group. I'm glad it did, because the work coming out of this production company is some of the finest I've seen. TEG is a production company representing world-leading design collectives MK12, Nakd, Lobo, LBA, and live-action director Caskey (see Caskey Ebeling's fly's-eye view video here). Searching for more info on TEG led me to an article about Mick Ebeling's collaboration with Coca Cola Corporation to bring the M5 project into existence. Apparently, M5 "is a combination of an idea [Ebeling] had to bring international artists together for a creative workshop with Coke's desire to create an unbranded 'message of optimism'".
My eyes can't get enough of this imagery this morning. I'm totally grooving on the following artists. If you're anything like me, and looking to bathe your eyes in slightly disturbing, yet oddly soothing visuals, I highly recommend you check them out: Ray Caesar, Mark Ryden, Eric White, Colin and Sas Christian, Chris Ryinak, Gary Baseman, and Marion Peck.
I don't know if it's because I'm sitting here sipping my morning cup, but there's something fundamentally satisfying about this flickr photo set.I've been looking into vlogging options for a while now, trying to decide the best way to go about it. I could host the video myself, but I'd rather farm that headache out to someone else. Options like Ourmedia.org supply the best licensing options, but apparently suffer from performance kinks? Google has gotten into the game, with a Terms of Service Agreement I don't fully understand, and that makes me squirm a bit when I read it. To fully understand the ramifications of Google's ToS you'd have to be a lawyer, but the way I read it, you're granting Google the right to:
Uh oh, I've been having fun with Realflow. Is the glass half empty or half full? Oh wait, the glass isn't even there!
I've been reading George Maestri's Digital Character Animation 2 (an excellent book by the way), and have rendered my first ever walk cycle:
SmartFeed
My blog is worth $564.54.
How much is your blog worth?
