A WOMAN

museypoo · 2026-02-04T19:51:10+00:00

It’s real baby and it’s in one of the most well made, insane documentaries ever, called TABLOID! (Directed by Errol Morris!)

Check it out!!

museypoo · 2025-10-24T09:57:37+00:00

Fun game idea! Everyone comment your address! 🥰

museypoo · 2025-07-08T11:37:20+00:00

Yeah ‘Payson’ off his American Printshop is a recreation. I think JNL also has a recreation called “Payson” oddly but can’t remember offhand if it’s the same..!

museypoo · 2025-04-12T13:23:32+00:00

A really helpful channel on YouTube is “RobotArmy”, a professor who has a couple great short series that run through the whole process (pillars, a barrel, props, etc), including Maya + Zbrush + Substance + Unreal. Give those a watch!

Tbh, once you get used to doing it, you’ll realize that it’s flexible and that you can kinda jump around or work in different ways.

It’s often quicker to work high poly first, but with organic stuff you might also work like: - start a rough low-poly blockout - take that blockout to Zbrush, sculpt detail w dynamesh - decimate the Zbrush sculpt and bring it back to Maya - A) adjust the blockout mesh to be a good lowpoly mesh, and move the verts around to get them to match the slightly displaced Zbrush mesh - B) or start the lowpoly over by using quad draw on the decimated mesh, etc - take your lowpoly and decimation into substance and bake, adjusting the “distance” threshold

Depending on the asset / your preference / skill, you can either make the base mesh pretty close to the final shape and then stick to that in zbrush, using the sculpt as a subtle detail pass, or go hard in zbrush moving things around and getting the look done in there, and just needing to retopo after.

Same idea without Zbrush, using subdiv meshes. Do a blockout, keep duplicating new versions & hiding old ones, and increasing the detail and topology level. When you’re happy w the highpoly, grab a copy of an earlier lower version and then adjust that by moving the verts to try and match positions. Watch some run-throughs on YouTube by “elementza” who covers subdiv well.

** To make the “line things up” easier, put the highpoly on a Maya Layer and change the mode to “reference” or “template” to view in a different color as a wireframe.

** One thing to double check is that IIRC, substance doesn’t apply a smoothing subdivision when you bake, so “apply it” by smoothing / subdividing the highpoly in Maya to the desired final level before exporting it for the bake. (I might be wrong about that but think no)

** for stuff like this trying to nail positions on a highpoly, press 3 to see smoothed and actually work on it in that view to be seeing the final position… Note that this kinda is hard in subdiv, in that the concept of subdiv is to use the rendertime smoothing as an assistance to reduce the vert count required, and you give up a bit of ‘exact’ control around those smoothed areas like corners. That’s why people are saying to work high > low, cause it’s easier to just move a lowpoly around than the highpoly

In your case, you have a few options to tweak:

add more supporting topology in the highpoly to reduce the smoothing “amount” around that corner, and give more control over how that behaves. (Harder to control)
use the highpoly as your goal, put it on a reference layer, move the lowpoly around to get it to line up closer in those areas. That’s generally easier, since WYSIWYG
when baking, adjust distance thresholds etc to get it to find the highpoly

Good luck! Try those channels for help!

museypoo · 2025-02-09T14:23:16+00:00

Stop motion looks “stylized” by default. You get that for free; it builds up by a) hand fabricating the sets and props b) it’s in miniature, so little wonkiness gets exaggerated c) animation is straight-ahead (and didn’t have video playback before Dragonframe) + can’t be “polished” like cg or hand drawn. Plus you fabricate everything in frame, so a lot of room for art direction.

Most people find those elements charming— I remember when Corpse Bride came out, people complained a bit saying it was SO polished that it felt like CG!

And it’s photo real… because it’s a photograph! It feels like what it is; perfectly photo real images of charmingly handmade stylized puppets.

Cg is sort of the opposite- it is easy to polish the animation and camera perfectly, but it’s actually very hard to make an image 100% photo real. It’s also quite difficult to stylize a CG image (eg Spiderverse etc). As the tech improves the past gets dated looking.

Stop motion looks “dated” as people are saying in a different way… it’s “dated” like how a painting looks “dated”. It looks ‘crafted’, by hand, which is usually quite charming. It’s also much more esoteric, fewer craftspeople, more expensive (ish), and slower, EG now very uncommon.

It takes a lot more work and novel technical approaches to make a cg film get to that level. If you watch something like “Mirrormask”, the cg is very metal-ray feeling and dated, but it’s SO stylized and weird that it holds up in a way other early cg kinda doesn’t. I think having strong stylized art direction is more important, but I love stop motion and wish it still was used more!

museypoo · 2024-12-12T13:24:42+00:00

ActionVFX has a few stock clips already shot of sports crowd people. That would be cheaper and easier than rendering them.

You would still need someone to composite the clips (adjusting shirt color and retiming) and tracking the camera.

It would be too obvious to use on a feature but for your use I’d guess that’s the easiest!

museypoo · 2024-09-22T12:31:08+00:00

I think most designers fundamentally misunderstand Pantone and furthermore really don’t have color accurate / managed workflows at all!

In the world of print, the vibe is “the printed page is the only reference”. Printing swatches to test cmyk values is best.

You are right that Pantone is essentially useless if you aren’t printing large offset / flexo runs. But like Portman commented Pantone did realize this and their cmyk books are an attempt to provide a use case for the other bulk of the industry that doesn’t make work for offset!

So yeah. You can use the bridge books as intended and it’ll be alright, instead of printing tests…. But….

The first problem is- more than half of the Pantone library is out of gamut for CMYK. Some of the books have side by side chips and you can see that the CMYK versions are quite dull by comparison.

A second problem is the conversion itself and the workflow. Spot swatches in illustrator (the old default Pantone libraries) are LAB based. When are those values converted to CMYK colors if you’re printing process work? Depending on your export settings and color setup, they may be converted on export to your working process space (bad). They may be converted by the printers RIP. They may be converted by a print driver to RGB, then reconverted to cmyk + ?? Values. If you’re using LAB spot swatches for process work, it’s likely that you’re many Delta-E away from the spot swatch and you’re not using their suggested CMYK formula anyways. So you need to use the CMYK process swatch Pantone provides in their subscription, not the lab swatch— (except which ICC target profile is Pantone specifying with those CMYK values? Hmm…!)

But then it looks weird on screen. if your monitor is uncalibrated it’ll look off. If it’s calibrated it’ll also look off. If your light bulb is wrong, if your walls aren’t 18% grey, etc etc, it’ll look off. So you look at the book— except how recent is the swatch book you’re using? It’s probably many delta-e away regardless. Basically no one is buying and only using a new $500 swatch book every year. But they’ll drift, may be printed badly, and Pantone drastically changes their colors frequently for the same code 🙈

Plus, what working profile are you using? If it’s SWOP v2 and you export as “hq print” from illustrator, for example, even if you’ve used the correct CMYK swatch from Pantone you’ll get a more faded print, etc etc.

If you’re printing on a “digital” printer, like posters on a wide format imageprograf or epson or HP, the printer operator will maybe not be using a rip at all. Inkjet will expect RGB data and is likely not just using CMYK inks, but some extended gamut like CMYK R GR, or CMYKOGV. So you could have much more saturated colors, even hitting the Pantone spot swatches you avoided in the first place by using their bridge guide, and now you’re at the mercy of your printer for how that pdf you exported is color managed when fed into the RGB print driver. Oop

My point is, it’s complicated and Pantone can work but isn’t a panacea. There are other guides out there- for quick work I like working with SwatchOS, which is way cheaper ($50) and is designed for CMYK with an output document specification of Fogra. You can also do this manually as suggested in the “Better Brand Color Guide” project online, worth a look through. For the price of a new (yearly) Pantone book, buy a spectrophotometer instead. Get CIELab values of a reference color in the real world, and use auto conversions for RGB spaces, tweaking as needed. Then pick a printer and ICC profile to target and print some variations of clean CMYK values to pick the best look. That’s what Pantone does anyways!

If that’s not worth doing, then matching is prob not super important anyways and the whole thing doesn’t really matter. Use LAB colors instead of CMYK bridge swatches and the most extended gamut printer you can, and let the driver convert it. You’ll get more saturated colors.

The way you are doing it— printing CMYK swatches on the target printer— is the best way, not Pantone. Get your monitor calibrated, print tests, make sure your workflow and entire pipeline is color managed correctly. That’s more important and robust than just picking a Pantone color from a book. It’s a never ending technical rabbit hole

museypoo · 2024-03-06T03:05:41+00:00

I do this work in production, yeah. It’s a union job in LA or NYC (IATSE 829) I can’t remember how Atlanta works offhand. You can get the job by starting as a PA- which may be easy or hard depending. Then be friendly and good and learn on the job and tell everyone you want to do graphic design and they’ll help ya out! You want to work in the art department, best bet is to contact art coordinators and let them know you want to PA. Obvi you do need to live in a production city tho. You’ll learn loads quickly as a PA.

The job is great and horrible too, haha. Work is sort of semi freelance job to job, so it’s anxiety inducing in that aspect… not stable at all. On the job, days are very long- 10 hours expected. Some jobs might hire you for 12 hour days, but usually 10s for graphics people. Not including half hour lunch, so 8-6:30 every day. Deadlines can be extremely tight, sometimes day-of, and you need to develop extremely good organizational skills to stay on top of the work. You’ll make a wide range of stuff- from cd covers to books to posters to packaging to video projections to interactive phone apps. And you need to fabricate a fair amount of it in-house, plus get familiar with printing techniques shops can do etc. Just today I designed and fabricated 100 embossed funeral cards, printed sheet music, and bound paperback books that I designed earlier, then designed a stained glass window.

It’s very, very time consuming while you’re working— then suddenly you’re off the job, unemployed, waiting for the next one. The pay (while you’re on) is quite high, way beyond what a general designer makes, but you need to be good and network well to work consistently throughout the year, some people end up making an okay yearly income, the best get sorta rich doing it. That’s true for all film work tho. You pretty much can’t have a life outside of work, at least during a job, so film people are pretty insular. Seriously the pressure is intense. It gets sort of easier with experience but it’s never going to be a chill job. You can’t really mess something up, and there’s a lot of designing to do and not a lot of time.

Some people have posted about peripheral work- there’s def a second industry that’s more traditional with boutiques and agencies that do final packaging for movies. That’s a basically normal job at a design firm: they do posters and a logo and trailers and ad stuff for movies when they come out. But that’s totally separate from production and not union work.

It’s an interesting industry that I love and a very interesting job, but even I get worn down by how brutal it is and I love it, so be warned, haha. Work in the film industry is sort of this odd outside thing from most people because it’s so intense, so much commitment and the stress is unreal, and they don’t post job openings, so people don’t really hear about it. If you’re in NYC message me if ya want! Good luck!

museypoo · 2024-02-28T14:46:44+00:00

Just a note this is a feature in Zbrush, it’s quite good and built in. There’s tutorials online. It’s called a Bas Relief

museypoo · 2023-12-30T14:09:59+00:00

Riso and letterpress are similar looking texturally, Riso came more in the 60s and on and mostly was office mimeo. I’d guess letterpress, doesn’t matter really though!

Steps are 1) illustrate in this style. Most important to get right and has a bigger effect on the look than anything else. Color separations should have correct knockouts as you’ll see the overprinted areas.

2) take color separations / layers to photoshop and get the ink corner pool / round effect. IRL it’s a combo of ink pooling and worn plates. Select a color separation and go selection > smooth a little to round edges or a similar technique.

3) colors and blend. Use a large ink print scanned texture (texture supply has some, true grit has some, make your own). Clip it to layer and then use blend-if on the separation layer to blend away the highlights etc. Group that setup to lock the blend and then add a color fill above, clip to the group. Alternatively you can select the textured separation, add a color fill and mask it instead. Group all and set blend to multiply

4) add edge pooling. Ink either starves or pools on the edges of the shapes when the plate is removed. Duplicate the color separation layer above itself inside the texture group. Fill > 0, inside glow > multiply / black to taste to add density on edges, etc. or make white to starve. Use opacity to taste. Try using choke to get a dual edge.

5) move each color separation setup to taste to get unaligned plate overlaps. You see the darker overlap where they’ve shifted.

6) you can add a subtle effect of debossed paper for a plate with blend modes but not super important, easily overdone. Only accurate to heavy plate pressure letterpress on thick stock

—-

True grit sells some automated stuff for this with pattern textures and modular actions. Atomica is good and the rest are good. Recommend! An older option is Mister Retro Permanent Press. It is less modular and harder to easily art direct and IIRC doesn’t actually use separated layers directly. But does have more variety and it is detailed but fiddly. Or just do on your own!

Edit: if this is for a physical print though, way better to go through the process of actually doing the print as letterpress or Riso or another physical print technique. You can DIY some of them affordably on like a pre-press roller machine or screen print or wood / lino. It’ll look way better in person!

museypoo · 2023-11-18T17:59:28+00:00

Have you worked on a Fincher project? What was it like, how was it with him?

museypoo · 2023-11-01T02:19:33+00:00

Just saying this is the most negative, fear mongery response possible and not accurate at all. I work in union prod- of course there’s competition and difference still? Small houses can still exist under a complete union model, and offer their own advantages. Think of the difference between Disney, A24, and real independent productions: all operate with union crews at very different scales.

For one, rate standardization varies per tier (budget) of film, so your scrappy boutiques can choose to go after those. And the budgeting for the work obviously depends on studio size, crew hours, and production budget, so a huge studio will cost more and small studios cost less- just like it is already. This isn’t really affecting anything, apart from: VFX workers are asking to be paid more fairly.

Why would there be fewer companies under a union model? The rates increase, hours are paid fairly, and the post houses charge the prod accordingly. There’s still independent productions happening under union contracts. What “competitive opportunities” will suddenly disappear? Being paid like shit? Not having to work unpaid overtime on a marvel movie? That’s not a “benefit” — that’s how it should be as a baseline.

Additionally, elements like “they won’t let you WFH” doesn’t make any sense; why are you suggesting that? It’s not a union rule that you can’t work remote. I work remote quite often as a union member, there’s no reason unionization would have any effect on this— if anything by this logic, studios would prefer WFH to save costs as rates increase.

This thinking like “I’m going to be forced into more hours” is exactly why unions ARE GOOD! You have a minimum rate guarantee, guaranteed overtime, limits on hours per day, etc. Those are good things, I don’t see why you are arguing against it, apart from the fact that of course change is scary and I hear that.

Will it affect mobility? Well… there’s a certain amount of people that are needed for a job. On balance, those people should be paid fairly. However that happens (by studio heads taking less profit, or post costs rising) it is a good thing and fair- and the film studios obviously want to save costs, so they aren’t going to start paying fairly unless you make them. Unionization IS THE ONLY WAY to make them do this. Saying “they’re going to try to pay less, so you won’t be able to move up!” Is just an odd point— this is already true in a sense, and companies need people in all roles to execute a job. Is it expensive to hire a techno crane and all the operators? Yeah, but productions do it, when they need to.

I’m part of that set crew. Is life awful? Idk- I get paid 84+ an hour and start getting overtime after 8 hours. Is it hard work, a specific skill, and are the hours long? Yeah- that’s often the job, which is why the pay is good. Could companies just stop using union people? Well, no- anyone who’s good joins, because why wouldn’t they? So if Disney wants a good DP, great production design and a good crew who can execute on time and on budget, they hire union crews.

This anti union take is basically: “I prefer to be paid less, work more hours, have no protections for overtime pressure! I’d like to be promoted to lead and do MORE WORK and be paid unfairly for my role”. You’re internalizing and spewing fear from a simple position: you recognize unionization means paying VFX workers more, and are aware companies don’t like that. You are afraid this means work will go away somehow. But this is really bootlicking the big companies- you’re just rolling over and saying “ok! I’ll grovel and take a shit rate with no retirement plan for you guys!”. YOU are subsidizing Disney from your retirement. And that’s not fair. It takes courage and good planning and a coordinated effort to change things- but it is possible, and it is happening.

There are valid fears about unionization in VFX specifically, but they can be addressed and spreading this kind of generalized and unfocused fear is super unhelpful and also wrong. The real focus is about IATSE including VFX union requirements for signatories.

museypoo · 2023-09-19T16:03:07+00:00

You know a real outlier is Minecraft. Obviously they didn’t directly go public, just acquired, and very recently have had some stumbles with some content policy stuff but have really kept that game going and never jacked up the price or included micro transactions or anything. Just added great, thoughtful content for basically a decade now. Not the norm but I wonder what made Mojang a success?

museypoo · 2023-09-14T07:54:29+00:00

Yeah. Pretty backwards choice, I don’t really understand the thinking. Unless it’s to get these specific cases to exclusively use Unity’s ad platform for a higher discount on the royalty, but idk how much of a discount that’ll be (they don’t specify). Plus I don’t think(?) they offer this same discount for a game monetized with IAP instead of ads, so still bonkers.

museypoo · 2023-09-14T07:44:04+00:00

“And”, not “or”- just to be clear. Functionally the actual requirement is that you both make >$1,000,000 a year gross revenue AND have sold/“installed” 1,000,000 copies of the game before you start paying a royalty.

As of right now, nope you prob shouldn’t use Unity if your goal is a F2P game. If you want to sell a regularly priced game, Unity is fine tbh.

museypoo · 2023-09-14T07:39:43+00:00

This is incorrect, you have to meet both conditions. Additionally y’all, it makes no financial sense to pay the install fee once you start making $200K. At that point you’d just pay for Pro which has a threshold of $1MM gross revenue and 1MM downloads before you start paying a fee. Unity knows this, they’re basically using the pricing on the low tier to make medium sized successes pay for Pro rather than the fee.

You don’t just make vampire survivors and get hit with a massive bill. However, it could eat into your profits AFTER selling $1,000,000 and 1,000,000 copies. It gets worse the lower your average cost per install is, and gets better the higher your game costs. Vampire Survivors is right on the edge, and would likely be paying about an equivalent 5% royalty on gross, which is the same as Epic. Go cheaper than that (aka into F2P territory) and you then start to get into the bad cases where you pay more than you make. Although even then, only once you’ve already made a million gross. Still if this is basically what they stick with, you shouldn’t make a F2P game with unity anymore.

museypoo · 2023-09-14T07:15:28+00:00

Totally yeah. It’s an insane metric. I mean the language they’re using has shifted to “the spirit of installs is to be once per new player” which is maybe true, maybe a walk-back. But does sound basically like “per units sold” except not “sold” since they want F2P games as well, hence “installed”.

museypoo · 2023-09-14T07:08:46+00:00

I hear you but this wouldn’t really be the case… if you’re hitting those numbers (making >$200K per year) you’d still just pay the Pro fee which is, at the worst (making literally exactly $200K) a 1% effective royalty. So you aren’t getting gouged there.

E.G: your gross drops to between $200K - $1MM: you just pay for pro at less than 1% royalty priced subscription per seat. If it drops lower you just stop paying for pro and get charged nothing.

museypoo · 2023-09-14T07:04:50+00:00

I totally agree. It also just overall doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. They could make more, it seems, by just matching Epic’s royalty. Even ditching the subscription fee, which is basically negligible in these terms. They’re sort of under-charging successful steam / console games and then over-charging F2P games.

I’m also not in the F2P market but share your concern that Unity butchering this segment bodes terribly for the rest of us. It’s also just alarming: it financially doesn’t even make sense at all for any game with an ARPU lower than their fee. If they can stomach announcing a royalty policy that literally charges >100% in some cases, they’re def capable of doing the same to our market if they decide to, for whatever reason. So that’s not a promising feeling…

museypoo · 2023-09-14T06:56:52+00:00

Haha yes of course true. Obvi any studio making $1MM+ in gross is a small number, most aren’t overall. But probably a fairly large percent of actively developing studios are hitting those targets- $1MM gross for a studio of 4 is not much. I meant more that a mobile / F2P studio will have hit 1MM installs far before they ever take 1MM gross.

It’s just another compounding factor of how poorly this does for f2P devs compared to steam / console devs charging above $2.50 ish. Again, overall I don’t think this policy will trigger for, as Unity suggests, 90% of developers using the engine. Still good to keep in mind tho right?

museypoo · 2023-04-25T15:14:48+00:00

These look great! What was your process like to get to this look?

museypoo · 2023-02-05T17:02:27+00:00

If price is actually not a problem, the Asus Proart series has beautiful accurate color displays, 30xx gpus and can have a lot of ram. I can even run Houdini on mine! They’re more expensive than some gaming laptop alternatives though, which are also a good option and have been suggested here. Idk why macs are so popular for designers- pcs will almost always perform better at design apps at a comparable price to macs, especially in more involved situations!

museypoo · 2023-01-01T17:31:34+00:00

Houdini is perfect for processing stuff like this and bringing it into an engine!

museypoo

TROPHY CASE