20200930 How I Did The Ark Lockdown Promo Art
So I thought I was going to be doing a basic render for a lighting pass and then paint over it, but I quickly realised that my painting sucks too much to be able to execute that quickly.
This was a commission and normally you would do at least one thing you’d done before when delivering on a job, right? Not this time. This was my first complete Blender modelling project and my first Deep Dream thing.
Here’s how we did it:
Step Zero: Thumbnailing I new pretty quickly that I wanted to do an opposing perspective to the original card art. If they go low, I go high.
Step One: The Modelling (two and a half days work, three days of inhaling tutorials) I had used Blender briefly in 2011. It was rough entry and I bounced off it then. Earlier this year, some friend-animators from my workspace were extolling the joys of v2.8 and its accessibility. After getting across a bunch of Maciej Kucera and Onepixelbrush and Ash Thorp content about kit bashing and concept work last year I figured “worst case, I’ll just buy some cheap models and smoosh them together”.
Turns out, modelling the Gila Hands Arcology was the most exciting art-thing I’ve done in ages. And I did it badly! But fixing those mistakes and learning new techniques to solve problems as I went was the perfect way to go. I’ll bake my donut later.
The drones and city were pulled from free .obj files online. They were decimated (what a cool tool!) and remodelled and extended.
I’m keen to properly model a bunch of Android universe stuff so that people can get do this same thing themselves, if they like.
I love how hard and scientific 3D can be too. Finally, something that actively uses all of the parts of my brain! Good to be a polymath!
Step Two: The Collage & Dreaming (one day) So yeah, I couldn’t paint, but I knew that other Netrunner artists had, highly thematically, been working with Deep Dream tech. After dating around some different online neural network art tools, the Deep Dream Generator proved the most versatile and effective. I had to sign up to the Patreon to get a higher resolution output but that seems fair enough. I can imagine that being able to put a cap on the different supporters at each tier allows them to temper the demand on their robot art brain.
The texture and colour images were sourced from work on ArtStation of similar subjects in roughly similar lighting conditions. There’s a lot of scope to try hard here, and/or in the next step.
I figured what I did here was fair uses since you would have no idea what the source imagery was unless someone told you. It’s almost impossible to prove someone used your work in this sort of thing. Fully expect someone to make a copyright claim use of their original art in another AI art and have it go big in The Discourse for a minute or two before people go back to the rampant theft that typefies modern creative work.
Step Three: The Tweaking (one hour) So it turns out that cleaning up the quirks of DDG is very possible in Photoshop with distortion and retouching tools. I highly recommend it. Also, doing a few different colour DDG renders and overlaying heavily featered masks works nicely too.
Step Four: The Design (half day) The templating of the card was based off the FFG promo for another operation: BOOM!
NISEI don’t share their toys so I had to make my own graphic assets from scratch. The main points where this slowed me down were the faction logo and the card cost. We survived though.
The HB logo is just the faction acronym in Eurostile (font of the future!) and was originally supposed to just be a place holder. Turns out, like all things in Eurostile, it has a really nice carriage (in the general sense) to it and it matches the reference form closely enough that it plays as is.
As a filthy modernist, I stuck with a flatter and cleaner look than FFG used, and flatter still than NISEI. There is some skewmorphism on the card cost/credit portion of the card. To the familiar, it’d look kinda weird without it. I went with a diamond rather than a circle for the credit cost circle break because it leans closer to the FFG credit symbol. Otherwise, I like the way NISEI adapted the iconic FFG card cost form.
The faction cost gave me a headache at first. I was trying hard for some bevelling and sine on the influence pips but, in the end, the low scale of it that I was struggling with made it clear that clarity itself was the name of the game. Less is more. Especially with high contrast colour blocking.
Brushed metal textures over the text backgrounds because they’re the engineering and minufacturing faction.
Falvour text to be COVID relevant by yours truly also. Was tempted to go with “Now, more than ever…” or “We’re all staying at home, together, so we can stay together.” Or one of those nonsense pro-unity word jumbles (though I do honestly love some social unity).
Final Thoughts This would be much faster to do a second time, since all of this was very exploratory. I like the workflow. I like that being a Blender hero makes everything so many things possible. And I like my card template. Don;t be surprised if I do some more custom Netrunner art.
September 30, 2020
20200823 Links
Amazon and Union at Odds Over Firing of Staten Island Warehouse Worker
“Getting out customer orders is all they care about,” Mr. Long said in an interview. “They don’t care if you’re tired, if you’ve worked 60 hours. It’s irrelevant.”
The union’s filing says the safety violation cited as the reason for Mr. Long’s dismissal “was pretext for being outspoken against the working conditions at the facility.”
“Firing people silences other people,” said Molly Elkin, a labor lawyer at Woodley & McGillivary. “It becomes difficult to organize. But if the employee is successful getting his job back, you’re back at square one. It’s very, very important.”
Amazon’s Aggressive Anti-Union Tactics Revealed in Leaked 45-Minute Video
While warning managers that activities like threatening employees cross a line, giving personal opinions that accomplish nearly the same are within their rights. “Opinions can be mild, like, ‘I’d rather work with associates directly,’ or strong: ‘Unions are lying, cheating rats.’ The law protects both!”
“I think the parts in particular where it teaches team leaders how to subtly manipulate conversations with their team members is just really gross…”
Inside an Amazon Warehouse, Robots’ Ways Rub Off on Human
…underlying Mr. Long’s charge was the idea that Amazon treats workers as if they were something less than people — that its obsession with optimizing fulfillment centers for a world of one-day delivery requires a system of stifling routines, rules and metrics. That system can make workers feel patronized and spied on. It can crowd out personal initiative. There seemed to be something to the picture Mr. Long painted, though the problem may be less with Amazon than with technology itself.
At many warehouses, pickers walk miles each day in search of items, but algorithms provide them with the optimal route.
A picker named Shawn Chase said he motivated himself by competing with a friend in a different part of the warehouse to see who could earn the higher productivity ranking. “Last week I was 41st in the building,” he said. “This week I’m trying to be top 10.” The company has taken this logic even further in a handful of warehouses, The Washington Post has reported, creating video-game interfaces that allow workers to accumulate points and badges for completing these tasks.
“We try to eliminate any wasted movement,” LeVar Kellogg, a picker who trains other pickers at an Amazon facility near Chicago, told me. “If you have one second that’s adding to the process, it doesn’t seem like a lot. But if you do that 1,000 times a day, that’s when it starts adding up.”
This steady stripping of human judgment from work is one of the most widespread consequences of automation — not so much replacing people with robots as making them resemble robots. “The next pod comes, and a pod comes after that, and after that,” Mr. Long told me. “All day till you get off.”
The Grim Job Diary of an Amazon Worker at Christmas
When you arrive at the warehouse, the first thing you see are the words “Work Hard, Have Fun, and Make History” emblazoned on the wall. It’s like some kind of Orwellian nightmare. Every time I see it I want to fucking shoot myself. The days here are so long and dreary. You never see the sun.
He’s not the sort of person I’d normally be friends with — he’s a rugby lad, and I’m a leftie socialist — but he’s the only person I’ve met here who didn’t just want to talk about my rate. That’s the first thing anyone asks: “What’s your rate?” The level of self-surveillance is crazy. Because you know that people in the bottom 5 percent of rates are liable to get fired, everyone’s always trying to work out where their rate sits so they know where they stand.
Most of the time, you’re on your own. Every minute feels like an hour, because nothing interesting is happening. You start getting into your own head. You become weird. Words rotate around your head, and you start to feel like you’re going mad.
My manager came around today and asked me if I wanted to know my rate. I said no, but he told it me anyway! Fucker.
August 23, 2020
20200618 Links
More Than A Party
I have viewed my success over the last few years as a transgender DJ and producer as a sign of positive social change. While that might be true in some respects, I am struck by the fact that I might have been drawn to DJing because of its connection to a traditional social role held by people that had in some sense an experience like mine. It is important to note in this context that the healer is a marginalized character. (41) For some healers who are touched by femininity, Eliade coldly posits that they “chose […] suicide.” (42) According to him, the other option is “initiation.” For the manang bali, the “command” to—in some sense—transition gender roles is accepted after it is received in dreams. For the Chukchee, the “command” comes from a ké let (spirit) which speaks from the body during an ecstatic trance ritual. (43) Could my perception of the beat in the air conditioner as “Mother” (a feminine beat) have been connected to my experience as a transgender person?
#links
August 18, 2020
20200813 Links
The Last War in Albion, aka “A Four-Colour Psychochronography”
“The Last War in Albion is an ongoing feature of this site, currently running on Fridays. It is an ongoing critical history of the British comics industry focused primarily on the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Its primary narrative runs from the publication of Grant Morrison’s earliest professional comics work in 1979 through to the present day, although its style is characterized by frequent digressions both forwards and backwards in history.”
The last of the Zoroastrians
“My grandfather, Pestonjee Pader, was a gentle man with a raucous, childish sense of humour, but not far beneath the surface lurked a sense of tragedy. He liked to tell stories, but most of them ended in one of two ways: “… and then, unfortunately, we had to leave”, or “… and then, tragically, they passed away too soon”.”
Inside an Amazon Warehouse, Robots’ Ways Rub Off on Humans
The PR backflipping in this mein gott. Why on earth the NYT would pull their punches on Amazon, I don’t know. I’ll probably try and compile a bigger post about worker experiences in automated warehouses and Amazon specifically later since it’s research for Face Worker
“…underlying Mr. Long’s charge was the idea that Amazon treats workers as if they were something less than people — that its obsession with optimizing fulfillment centers for a world of one-day delivery requires a system of stifling routines, rules and metrics. That system can make workers feel patronized and spied on. It can crowd out personal initiative. There seemed to be something to the picture Mr. Long painted, though the problem may be less with Amazon than with technology itself.”
#links
August 13, 2020
