Hi.
Welcome to my blog. I document my adventures in travel, style, and food. Hope you have a nice stay!
Welcome to my blog. I document my adventures in travel, style, and food. Hope you have a nice stay!
Welcome to the first pixelfondue newsletter. We started pixelfondue with the goal of capturing the community spirit that developed alongside MODO many years ago. We enjoy sharing experiences, tips, training and content with our fellow creators and spreading the message that we are all in this together. After roughly 5 months we've posted over 150 blogs on pixelfondue.com and have added nearly 150 videos with over 130,000 views to our YouTube channel. We've had a tremendously positive response from the community and quite a few of you have volunteered to join us as pixelfondue contributors. We want to continue to build upon what we've started and branch out into other areas of content creation (see the survey at the bottom of the page). As for the newsletter? This is a bit of an experiment and we will see if we can gain some momentum. Where there's people and energy there's opportunity and with enough momentum I think the pixelfondue community will stand out and be noticed by the tool providers in our world. Perhaps that will allow us to bring some special deals via the newsletter (it's a pretty small world after all.) Like I said, it's an experiment - and we're glad that you're part of it.
We have some new Pixel Chefs here at pixelfondue. We are always looking for new contributors (and we will be going on a search rather soon after we get the results of the survey at the bottom of the page). Wes, Chris and Pascal will help us to continue expanding our range beyond MODO with pipeline programs like Substance Designer and Painter, zBrush and Marvelous Designer. Head on over to The Crew page to view their bios and connect to their pages.
Chef Wes McDermott
Chef Chris Provine
Chef Pascal Nocquet
Image created by Chris O'Riley using the Polystein Kit for MODO.
The Pushing Points Polystein Kit is a MODO KIT consisting of an array of custom character feature presets that can be seamlessly added to an organic model with a single click of the mouse, making character creation incredibly easy. After just being released a week ago, already has a massive update. This is a free update to existing customers.
Material samples created in MODO by Richard Yot.
In anticipation of a new product visualization material kit created by Richard Yot and Adam OHern we are giving away four free materials from the pack to give you a taste of what's in store.
You can download the kit from here, and keep an eye out on Pixel Fondue for the release of VizPak: Products later this month.
V-Ray for MODO render created by Greg Leuenberger
Ok...not so much a 'versus' as an overview of how Octane and V-Ray translate a variety of MODO materials 'on-the-fly' in additon to creating those materials with Octane and V-Ray specific nodes. There's a little GPU vs CPU in this series along with some MODO vs. V-Ray CPU and Octane vs. V-Ray GPU. I'm will cover plastic, metallic, sub-surface and glass materials...along with a few render settings to make sure you can get even (or close to even) results across all 3 renderers.
I'll be releasing these in series. Take a sneak peak here.
AI created synthetic cat via image-to-image
The deadline for this newsletter was hitting me like a runaway train. Greg said: "Put something up, even if it's a photo of your cat." I don't have a cat! I'm allergic to cats. I actually don't even like cats.
But a light bulb did turn on in my head. Recently in the news I saw a blurb about this AI algorithm that can grab a sketch & automagically turn it into a (frankensteined synthetic) image. In this case, a cat. Image-to-Image is the implementation based on the pix2pix paper from Cornell University. I think this is truly ground breaking even if the implementation is simple & cute(sy). This lays the ground work for computers to understand artistic/design intent, not just execution.
So the picture you see above is my hypoallergenic AI CG cat! Check out the site Image-to-Image & post your creations. Tag if you like @pixelfondue #pixelfonduecats
Robot guy created by AI cat next door..
Both Modo With Ellery and Project Nurnie have new editions coming very soon. There will be 5 kits of various sci-fi nurnie goodness in the upcoming days. Kits 1 and 2 are available now on Gumroad and via Patreon and 3 through 5 will be up over the next week. Once those kits are completed there will also be a version up on the Unreal Marketplace including materials and normal maps! Over the next couple of weeks Modo With Ellery will be tackling some interesting subjects including: Maxmizing your sculpting, Adobe Fuse character pipeline, Modo to Unreal Engine, Better materials, and more! As an added bonus I will be giving away a bunch of Steam codes at random to Patreon and Gumroad customers... who doesn't like free games?!
Keep up to date by following on Gumroad at:
Gumroad.com/ellery
And Patreon at:
Patreon.com/ellery
Alexander Kucera during a Nuke training group session
If you enjoyed our pixelfondue compositing videos, you might also be interested in some one on one training. As luck would have it, we do have our resident compositing teacher Alex on hand. He recently has been labeled "the Rosetta stone of compositing" and he still is not sure if that was a compliment or if he just looks like an old stone. Nevertheless, he still has some compositing wisdom to share. So be sure to watch out for new compositing videos on our YouTube channel or go ahead and book a one on one training session with him for bespoke training that is sure to elevate your game.
This is a little teaser for my next video. More fun with Modo and Marvelous Designer, without headaches. It's like a day at the beach.
I'm just getting started here :-)
I'll be posting a series of videos covering the creation of the "Alien Bug Head". We start in MODO then go into ZBrush, then back to MODO to make it all pretty. I'll look at some basics and some more advanced things in both applications.
I'll be creating a series of videos covering the basics of Mesh Fusion. What are Fusion Strips? How do I convert my Fusion Items into standard geometry? Why is Mesh Fusion so Amazing? Stay tuned and discover the answers to these questions and so much more!
The 'fondue' images at the top and bottom of the newsletter were rendered in V-Ray and Octane respectively.
