No time to linger in Southern California as it’s time to return to Arizona so we can all get back to work. Just a quick run into L.A., mostly for those VR business purposes.
Between Two Places
Five of us are in Los Angeles for a virtual reality conference. Caroline, not wanting to be left out, has come along but has her own plans. Before we each go our separate ways, there’s the matter of needing to share at least a bit of time of just her and me, and so it was that we left our motel early and headed down to the Santa Monica pier.
You may not have known it, but yesterday was Caroline’s birthday, and keeping with tradition, we did absolutely nothing out of the ordinary to not celebrate it, just another day in the cascade of every day being worthy of celebration.
After dropping Caroline off at a secret location in downtown Los Angeles, I’m returning to our motel to pick up my crew to start our day immersed in tech.
This is Ariana Alexander checking out someone else’s idea of how we might enter virtual worlds. This is the first-ever VRLA conference being held on a couple of small soundstages this weekend.
Meanwhile, Caroline is divulging her location by sending out these images. She’s over in Little Tokyo for an afternoon of browsing and shopping.
It never fails to surprise Caroline that the Japanese took such a liking to this German treat called Baumkuchen, even keeping its original name. Tree cake would be a reasonable translation, and while it’s been popular in Japan for more than 100 years, it never caught on in the United States. But John, it’s right here in Los Angeles? Sure, here at Marukai Grocery, which specializes in all things Hawaiian and Japanese.
Back in the realm of the virtual, Rainy Heath is trying on a full-body tracking setup that demonstrates how to bring realism to motion in reality to VR.
Seriously Caroline? You have a day to yourself and you are geeking out on Spam? [I had no idea there were so many kinds! Caroline]
Brett Leonard, director of the film The Lawnmower Man back in 1992, was maybe one of the most obvious people to be on hand, considering his defining piece of film using some of the earliest computer graphics. A year after his movie (which cost $10 million to make) came out, Caroline and I over in Germany produced a short 3D animated music video that earned us about $8000. While the graphics of both works are highly dated, I better understand what he was up against trying to use state-of-the-art tools that were, in actuality, quite primitive for what we were trying to accomplish.
Brandon Laatsch (center) with his girlfriend, along with Luis Chavez of TimefireVR. Brandon got his start with Freddie Wong at Corridor Digital before they went off to do their own thing. Like myself, Luis was a big fan.
With both of our middle-of-the-day adventures coming to an end, Caroline stopped to take a pause after grabbing an Imagawayaki – red bean stuffed pancake and a coffee next door and then patiently worked on knitting my next pair of socks until we picked her up. Actually, if I’m not mistaken, we all dipped into a nearby ramen shop before my side of the group had the opportunity to explore Little Tokyo.
Out to Los Angeles
Caroline is in the passenger seat, and we must have rented a larger vehicle because there are four other people with us on our way into Los Angeles, California. Why they are with us and what the plan is will be shared in tomorrow’s post.
Note – this trip to L.A. was long neglected and only brought together in mid-2023.
Under The Weather
This is not a photo I would have thought to post, but when Caroline saw me napping in my chair with my favorite orange caterpillar neck pillow, the knitted beany she made me, and a blanket she had tucked around me because I was freezing due to being under the weather like the title says, she thought that I, “Looked so cute” and took the photo. She snapped a couple without me noticing but the one where I looked up to offer her a soft smile made her heart swoon and so, with some reluctance, I offer you a vulnerable and a bit sick version of me you’ll rarely see.
Substance Designer – TimefireVR
I’ve been spending more than a few days in Allegorithmic’s Substance Designer, working over a massive amount of textures I’ve downloaded from GameTextures. The process is tedious, especially the Metal PBR workflow, but after more than a few days grinding through a directory with more than 250 base materials, I’m kind of addicted. At night, I go home and work on some simple stuff, assembling my horde of images from CG textures. These are easy as it’s just a single bitmap I have to wrangle. The glue that is making all of this possible is Allegorithmic’s new tool found in Bitmap2Material 3.0. It’s a “Node” that works as a kind of plugin for Designer. Feed the node the images you want to be converted for use in a PBR workflow, and the node does the heavy lifting. But of course, nothing is ever totally easy, and so I wrestle with Masks, Emissive textures, Blend nodes, Levels, and the adjustment of Normals in order to get the Substances just right for our shared library. Between Allegorithmic’s Database of procedural textures (about 850 of them), the 1000 CGTextures, and the 1000 GameTextures files I’m working with, I could be at this for quite a while. In the end, I think this will prove to be an invaluable asset to our team, though I might have a momentum that will demand I just keep going exploring the possibilities this amazing software offers us.
Sverchok to Unreal Engine – TimefireVR
There was a series of tutorials that accompanied this entry, but I need to make a better effort to recover them from the Wayback Machine.