Man, it is so weird to watch this scene with a laugh track & those whimsical mouth sounds:
Monthly Archives: January 2023
Amazing drone footage from Argentina
Check out this eye-popping capture of the World Cup celebration in Buenos Aires, and see pilot Ale Petra’s Instagram feed for lots more FPV goodness:
Lego Sky Lion
If I had just upsetting amounts of disposable income, I might have to get this for my son. 🙃
Playground AI enables editing via text
Playground has gotten a jump on implementing some emerging research that enables making changes to an image simply by describing them:
In my very limited testing I’ve found the results to be a bit hit (“add a mustache”)…
…and miss (“give him a mohawk”) 😜:
“The Last Of Us” Main Titles
Beautiful, haunting mutations, envisioned by Elastic:
“This Is America,” beautiful Cubist nightmare edition
Applying generative stylization to video is getting better & better, especially as artists like Temple Cache show how to play to its strengths:
Here’s the full-length piece (highly recommended in fullscreen mode):
“The impossibilities are endless”: Yet more NeRF magic
Last month Paul Trillo shared some wild visualizations he made by walking around Michelangelo’s David, then synthesizing 3D NeRF data. Now he’s upped the ante with captures from the Louvre:
Over in Japan, Tommy Oshima used the tech to fly around, through, and somehow under a playground, recording footage via a DJI Osmo + iPhone:
Me talk generative imaging one day
I got my professional start at AGENCY.COM, a big dotcom-era startup co-founded by creative whirlwind Kyle Shannon. Kyle has been exploring AI imaging like mad, and recently he’s organized an AI Artists Salon that anyone is welcome to join in person (Denver) or online:
The AI Artists Salon is a collaborative group of creatively-minded people and we welcome anyone curious about the tsunami of inspiring generative technologies already rocking our our world. See Community Links & Resources.
On Tuesday evening I had the chance to present some ideas & progress that has inspired me—nothing confidential about Adobe work, of course, but hopefully illuminating nonetheless. If you’re interested, check it out (and pro tip: if you set playback to 1.5x speed or higher, I sound a lot sharper & funnier!).
Luma enables embedding of interactive NeRF captures
Pretty cool!
Here’s an example made from a quick capture I did of my friend (nothing special, but amazing what one can get simply by walking in a circle while recording video):
The world’s first (?) NeRF-powered commercial
Karen X. Cheng, back with another 3D/AI banger:
As luck (?) would have it, the commercial dropped on the third anniversary of my former teammate Jon Barron & collaborators bringing NeRFs into existence:
Photoshop Stable Diffusion plugin gets presets, outpainting
Thank God for the vibrant developer community—esp. Adobe vet Christian Cantrell (who somehow finds time to rev his plugin while serving as VP of product for Stability.ai):
In addition to presets, dedicated outpainting is now live in the @StableDiffusion #Photoshop plugin! pic.twitter.com/3RjlyHaOjb
— Christian Cantrell (@cantrell) January 14, 2023
The Chainsmokers meet Stable Diffusion
“HEY MAN, you ever drop acid?? No? Well I do, and it looks *just like this*!!” — an excitable Googler when someone wallpapered a big meeting room in giant DeepDream renderings
In a similar vein, have fun tripping balls with AI, courtesy of Remi Molettee:
Bonus: Journey gets the treatment:
NVIDIA Canvas goes 360º
The company has announced a new mode for their Canvas painting app that turns simple brushstrokes into 360 environment maps for use in 3D apps or Omniverse. Check out this quick preview:
2023 Design Trends
“I strongly believe that animation skills are going to be the next big thing in UI design,” says designer Michal Malewicz. Check out his full set of predictions for the year ahead:
“PERSEVERE”: A giant statement of encouragement
The ongoing California storms have beaten the hell out of beloved little communities like Capitola, where the pier & cute seaside bungalows have gotten trashed. I found this effort by local artist Brighton Denevan rather moving:
@brighton.denevan PERSEVERE 💙 • 1-6-2023 • 3-5:30 • 8 Miles
The Santa Cruz Sentinel writes,
In the wake of the recent devastating storm damage to businesses in Capitola Village, local artist Brighton Denevan spent a few hours Friday on Capitola Beach sculpting the word “persevere” repeatedly in the sand to highlight a message of resilience and toughness that is a hallmark of our community. “The idea came spontaneously a few hours before low tide,” Denevan said. “After seeing all the destruction, it seemed like the right message for the moment.” Denevan has been drawing on paper since the age of 5 and picked up the rake and went out to the beach canvas in 2020 and each year I’ve done more projects. Last year, he created more than 200 works in the sand locally and across the globe.
CGI: Primordial soup for you!
Check out these gloriously detailed renderings from Markos Kay. I just wish the pacing were a little more chill so I could stare longer at each composition!
Colossal notes,
Kay has focused on the intersection of art and science in his practice, utilizing digital tools to visualize biological or primordial phenomena. “aBiogenesis” focuses a microscopic lens on imagined protocells, vesicles, and primordial foam that twists and oscillates in various forms.
The artist has prints available for sale in his shop, and you can find more work on his website and Behance.
Use Stable Diffusion img2img from any website
My teammate CJ Gammon has released a handy new Chrome extension that lets you select any image, then use it as the seed for new image generation. Check it out:
AI-painted animation: “Help Changes Everything”
In this beautiful work from Paul Trillo & co., AI extends—instead of replaces—human creativity & effort:
Here’s a peek behind the scenes:
This project would have never existed without the use of AI. A variety of tools were used from #dalle2 and #stablediffusion to generate the background assets Automatic1111 #img2img and @runwayml to process the video along with @AdobeAE to create the camera moves and transitions pic.twitter.com/FwqwWto966
— Paul Trillo (@paultrillo) December 29, 2022
AI: From dollhouse to photograph
Check out Karen X. Cheng’s clever use of simple wooden props + depth-to-image synthesis to create 3D renderings:
She writes,
1. Take reference photo (you can use any photo – e.g. your real house, it doesn’t have to be dollhouse furniture)
2. Set up Stable Diffusion Depth-to-Image (google “Install Stable Diffusion Depth to Image YouTube”)
3. Upload your photo and then type in your prompts to remix the imageWe recommend starting with simple prompts, and then progressively adding extra adjectives to get the desired look and feel. Using this method, @justinlv generated hundreds of options, and then we went through and cherrypicked our favorites for this video
A vector high-wire act: Illustrator icon speed run
Heh—I can’t quite say why I found this quick demo from developer & illustrator Marc Edwards both gripping & slightly nerve-racking, but his accuracy is amazing:
“Twitter ads through the ages”
Check out this fun thread of Midjourney-made illustrations:
“For All Mankind”
Hey friends—Happy New Year! I hope you’ve been able to get a little restful downtime, as I’ve done. I thought it’d be nice to ease back into things with these lovely titles from For All Mankind, which I’ve belatedly started watching & which I’m quite enjoying. The work is by Imaginary Forces, whom I’ve admired ever since seeing founder Kyle Cooper speak in the 90’s:
From the creators:
Lines deviate and converge in a graphic, tactile world that pays homage to the past while hinting at the “what if?” future explored throughout the series. Like the show logo itself, these lines weave and merge to create stylised representations of human exploration—badges, almost— ultimately reminding us of the common thread we share.