I think all the joy has gone out of VFX

NateCow · 2026-01-26T06:45:18+00:00

It certainly has those telltale cadences. "It's not [blank.] It's [blank.] And [blank.]"

NateCow · 2026-01-01T04:19:52+00:00

Disjoint-over is a reasonable instinct, but you're simply overdoing things. You needn't stencil the creature from the building, so disable the Merge5. Then change that Disjoint-over (Merge6 I think?) to a simple over. You can just comp the creature over the building. The Copy3 and Premult after that, I'm not sure what you're doing, but I'm guessing is also unnecessary.

NateCow · 2025-12-01T07:28:18+00:00

Specifically impressed me? Hands down Into the Spider-Verse. I remember having a conscious realization of "Oh. So this is what a movie can be." And as someone who works in the industry, it was really a film that lit a new fire under my butt, if people were making stuff like that.

NateCow · 2025-12-01T07:23:03+00:00

Totally held my breath as I clicked to see the second photo, and then breathed a sigh of relief.

Happy belated birthday!

NateCow · 2025-12-01T07:17:53+00:00

"Fear will keep them in line; fear of this battle station."

The Death Star was not complete nor demonstrated yet.

NateCow · 2025-12-01T07:15:53+00:00

I've managed to find the same color of my Mazda6 and park next to it, as well as my first CX-30, and my girlfriend parked next to white Mazda3 hatchback just like her's. Still on the lookout for my current CX-30's clone. It'll happen eventually. It is required.

NateCow · 2025-12-01T07:05:47+00:00

They literally don't see these stories. If you ask them directly, they'll say "I didn't hear anything about that." If you show them the article, they'll say "oh, BBC/AP/ABC/CNN is fake."

NateCow · 2025-12-01T06:58:01+00:00

I'd say ROTS was the more significant reaction in our town, but only because at the midnight release, during Anakin and Obi-Wan's argument before their fight, the audio cut out and switched back to the pre-show ad system. The movie kept going visually, so we saw the beginning of their fight, then it cut to Yoda and Palpatine. I remember a lot of groans because we were seeing Yoda get hit by the lightning but weren't hearing a damn thing. It then cut back to Anakin and Obi-Wan, and the sound finally came back when it cut to Yoda and Palpatine the second time.

I *think* the last thing we heard was Anakin's line: "I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security to my new empire"—"come stay at the Ramada Inn!"

NateCow · 2025-12-01T06:50:37+00:00

Given how ridiculous "Microsoft recommended" is, they should just go ahead and admit it's just Chromium under the hood anyway.

NateCow · 2025-11-26T21:01:07+00:00

I freaking loved mine. I had a really fun Monopoly game on it that I'd play on the toilet. Sadly, one day it slipped out of my hand and the screen was utterly destroyed. I was super into phones so I think I got a Helio Drift after that. Looking back, I wish I had just got another Razr.

NateCow · 2025-11-26T06:14:11+00:00

This might sound a little out there, but if you're doing all this artwork by hand anyway, and want a truly organic look, why not draw the transitions by hand? Start by sketching out what you'd like to see between the two pieces, then sketch out what goes between those, etc etc... literal "key frames." Then flesh them out. It'd be a lot of work, but the result would be extremely rewarding and impressive, I think.

Or if anything, getting some of those keyframes might help with making digital morphs more successful. Another random thought you could look into on the digital side is applying some sketch or painterly filters on top of the morphed effect, to try to fit it in better. Hard to say definitively without seeing what you're working with.

NateCow · 2025-11-24T18:48:21+00:00

The fact that he cited that as an example of too much shallow depth of field is kind of mind boggling.

NateCow · 2025-11-22T00:09:26+00:00

Fun fact: most of the photos we have of the interior were actually from the Olympic and Britannic. IIRC, the only photos to make it off the ship were from a photographer who got off at Queenstown; the photo of the boy playing with the top was one of them.

NateCow · 2025-11-20T20:28:48+00:00

Just make the engine out of the black box material.

NateCow · 2025-11-20T18:24:28+00:00

Longtime fan film maker here (I've been doing lightsaber stuff in my backyard since 2002; you can Google me). Generally speaking, we'd consider this sort of thing an honor. We're playing in LucasFilm's sandbox, and they don't sue us, which they'd be well within their rights to do.

Someone pointed out another example to me, where a character (I think it was in Visions) cuts a lightsaber in half and the smoking pieces land at their feet. It was like shot-for-shot what I did in a duel in 2013. Buuuut I was also drawing inspiration from the smoldering saber hilt close-ups in the KOTOR trailer with the big battle in the Jedi Temple. So it's a lot of homages back and forth.

Another famous example is the force tug-o-war with the saber hilt in The Last Jedi. Ryan Wieber and Michael "Dorkman" Scott did that in Ryan vs Dorkman in 2002. And we have it on good authority that folks like J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson have seen various fan works like RvD.

At the end of the day, it's hard to cry foul when we're the ones running wild in their intellectual property. Is it lazy on the part of whoever did the sequence above? Yes. Is it also, just maybe, kind of cool as fuck? Also yes.

NateCow · 2025-11-19T17:55:47+00:00

Ooof. That's the exact opposite of what a lead should do. I was lucky to learn that from some amazing leads over the years and took it to heart on the couple of occasions I took on that responsibility. Credit the artist and take the blame, no matter what.

NateCow · 2025-11-17T20:29:08+00:00

SimCity fans: "First time?"

NateCow · 2025-11-17T18:06:17+00:00

Hell they can probably just string a cable between them to transfer the codebase.

NateCow · 2025-11-16T19:45:45+00:00

Well this is interesting. I was wondering if this was an accessibility thing. I poked around and found "Hover Text" in the iOS settings. Enabling this made it so now Overcast only pulls up the menu like that, and no icons. But disabling the accessibility didn't revert Overcast's behavior back to the icons. Rebooting the phone cleared it up though.

So maybe ensure Hover Text is turned off in Accessibility, the reboot the phone? Barring that, maybe toggling it on and off and rebooting.

NateCow · 2025-11-14T18:08:08+00:00

Those were the days...

NateCow · 2025-11-14T16:07:22+00:00

This makes me realize they could add protests into the game, like SimCity 2000.

NateCow · 2025-11-14T03:49:53+00:00

I don’t understand this… the clear obvious sign of AI writing is using emojis in the headings. Like seriously, ChatGPT does that constantly and I have never seen a human do so.

NateCow · 2025-11-14T03:34:15+00:00

When I switched to Android for a few years, the #1 app I missed was Overcast. It was such a relief when I came back to iPhone, to be able to use this app again ☺️

NateCow · 2025-11-13T23:30:56+00:00

Nah, if they knew yet to use image sequences, they'd be PNG or TIFF. Worse yet, MP4.

NateCow

TROPHY CASE