James Lee’s New Workflow Without Adobe

January 4, 2025
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James Lee, a popular YouTube animator, posted a new video today about the tools he uses in his new workflow. After using Adobe for over a decade, he finally pulled the trigger and switched completely away from all Adobe products.

If you are not familiar with James Lee’s work, his satirical YouTube videos are from the point of view of Nox, his alter-ego. The clips of Nox speaking to the viewer are highly stylized video footage, intermixed with short 2D animations, motion graphics, 3D animations, and occasional stock footage.

A year or two ago, he released a video titled “Breaking up with Adobe” (caution: nsfw), which ended with Nox crawling back to Adobe while lamenting the unhealthy relationship. A couple months ago, he released “When OneDrive Ruins Your Day” (caution: swearing), which revealed that the video was made without any Adobe tools.

In his newest video, “How I Broke up with Adobe” (caution: more swearing), he goes into a little more detail about his new pipeline.

And as a final reveal, he explains how he switched his operating system from Windows to Mint, a variant of Linux. He acknowledges that there is a learning curve, but I appreciate his explanation of the benefits of switching and his enthusiasm of the technology.

I need to switch to Linux on my secondary computer sometime this year, before Windows 10 support runs out in October. I am also looking forward to experimenting with Linux as a desktop OS, because it has been years since I used it that way (and even then, it was only for software development at work). I still don’t know if I will use Mint, Arch, or some other distribution, but it’s good to hear how well Linux is working for other people.

The Future of Blender NPR

December 22, 2024
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I have written about non-photo-realistic (NPR) rendering in Blender before, but typically the techniques rely on some hacks in the node editor and still require a lot of attention to look passable.

But I learned that there is an independent animation studio that uses Blender to create shorts with a style inspired by anime: DillonGoo Studios. Even more interesting, that studio has created their own custom build of Blender, GooEngine, which is how the studio creates their own shorts.

GooEngine adds new shader nodes to Blender that greatly improve its NPR abilities. For a full overview of the nodes and examples of how they are used, DillonGoo has an excellent introduction video. The first few minutes of the video also show the problems with the built-in “Toon Shader” node of Blender.

What is most exciting is that the custom features of GooEngine are now slated to be added to the main Blender source code! The DillonGoo studio developers are now official code contributors to Blender, and have even contributed valuable code to v4.3 (light-linking, something Blender has always lacked).

Take a look at the official announcement (video below) and some of DillonGoo’s anime-style shorts! Or if you’re feeling adventurous, download and try out the prototype build of Blender!

New Pen Tablet

November 22, 2024
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I have been focusing on improving my drawing skills recently, using a two-in-one laptop as a drawing tablet. I enjoy the digital experience for drawing and painting, but working on a laptop is not ideal for learning.

With the laptop, I still need a separate keyboard for shortcut keys in Clip Studio Paint. So either I need a space next to me wherever I am sitting (if the laptop is in my lap while drawing) or enough space on my desk for another keyboard (if drawing on a desk). Since the latter requires me to clear space on my desk (which I use every day for work and has a wired keyboard and mouse taking up space), this adds a significant obstacle to using my desk each night. Therefore, I typically fall back to drawing on the couch with the tablet in my lap.

In either case, I still only have one 16-inch screen for Clip Studio Paint, reference images, and tutorials, which is very limiting. I have a good layout for having reference on the side of my screen and CSP taking up two-thirds of the rest, but I do not have a good way of following along with tutorials on the same screen of my laptop.

Finally, since I am drawing on my couch, I also usually have the television on while drawing. This is great for making it easy to find motivation to get started, but not so great for focus and actual learning.

To improve this situation, to reduce daily obstacles to drawing and improve my focus, I decided to upgrade my home desk setup to include a pen display. I decided to get the Huion Kamvas Pro 24 4k:

I replaced my existing 1080p monitor with the new pen display, and kept my existing 4K monitor as my primary display. I also added a nice monitor arm, so I can easily use the pen display as either a normal monitor or pull it down for drawing.

I can use my other monitor for reference and tutorials. And my desk is in a separate room from our televisions, so I can better focus on learning.

My laptop is still a great portable alternative for traveling. But I am excited to see how my new home setup will help with improving my drawing skills.

Ian Hubert’s 3D Compositing Workflow

September 9, 2024
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Ian Hubert released another episode of Dynamo Dream last week. Dynamo Dream is his passion project, an on-going story set in a science fiction universe.

Remarkably, in addition to writing and directing the episodes, he also does all the visual effects. And if you watch the episodes, you quickly realize that nearly every shot involves significant VFX!

Ian Hubert is also known for his “Lazy Tutorials” from a few years ago, which were short (about one minute), entertaining YouTube videos that explained specific Blender tasks using “lazy” techniques that took very little time to complete. That same philosophy is used in his pipeline so he can accomplish so much work on Dynamo Dream in such a relatively short time.

One of the hallmarks of his process is compositing directly in the 3D viewport of Blender, using camera tracking and projection mapping of the original footage to recreate the scene. Then he can fill out the scene with new set pieces, set extensions, green-screen replacements, etc.

Another clever shortcut in this compositing process is to “de-light” the projection-mapped footage. Recently, InLightVFX released a video explaining the process, and dived into the technical detail of Ian’s process in Blender. The first eight minutes are a great introduction to the concepts, while the later part of the video has the technical Blender steps.

De-lighting a scene with this process seems to work well for footage of locations, as in the InLightVFX example. But I don’t see how it would work well for scenes with actual characters in the footage. Because the process relies on recreated lighting information in the 3D scene against the simplified set geometry (which does not move), I do not think it would work with a moving person.

But for establishing shots and virtual sets that match the lighting of a green-screened actor, this process works really well. You can see for yourself in Ian Hubert’s Dynamo Dream.

If you haven’t seen episodes yet, he recommends starting with Episode 1 Part 1 (Salad Mug), and then the most recently released episode, Episode 1 Part 2. He has a couple other episodes, as well, but they are tangential to the main story and can be watched in any order.

New Venture Bros Movie

September 6, 2023
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It took another five years since the last season premiered, but the Venture Bros. finally released a new chapter, this time in the form of a direct-to-digital movie. The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart has actually been available in digital and Blu-ray formats since late July, but I just heard about it. The movie aired on Adult Swim last weekend and is currently featured on the Max streaming service.

I have not watched the movie yet, so I cannot provide any opinion on it. But I will add this to my ever-growing queue of television to watch, and probably prioritize it in the near future.

Genndy Talks Animation

May 12, 2023
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The Wired YouTube channel has a series where guests answer questions from Twitter about their profession. One of their most recent guests is the legendary animator Genndy Tartakovsky, answering animation questions.

The video is an interesting and entertaining 15 minutes where Genndy explains some basic animation concepts, shares his enthusiasm about animation, and even does some quick off-the-cuff drawings to illustrate some points.

In addition to mentioning some of his past projects, such as Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, and Primal, there is also a peek at a few storyboard thumbnails from his newest animation, Unicorn: Warriors Eternal.

His new series started airing last week on Adult Swim (Cartoon Network). I have not had a chance to watch the episodes yet, but they are definitely on my list to watch very soon!

Anime vs. Hollywood Analysis

January 15, 2023
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The founders of the Corridor Digital studio created an interesting video on their Corridor Crew YouTube channel (their second, behind-the-scenes channel) discussing the differences between anime and Hollywood live-action adaptations. They cover the reasons that anime succeeds at visual storytelling, and how the Hollywood versions succeed or (more often) fail with those same principles.

They specifically discuss Cowbob Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, Death Note, and even some quick mentions of The Matrix!

As mentioned in the video, this discussion was spurred by their current production, a new “live-action anime” short. They have a few previous shorts with that same concept: Anime Baseball, Anime Fidget Spinners, and Anime Self Driving Cars.

But the new, in-production short they are creating will use a brand new pipeline: after filming the live-action scenes on a green-screen, they will run the footage through some AI image tools (for example, Stable Diffusion) to end up with a final anime style.

I enjoyed the discussion and am looking forward to the new short!

Windows 11 Dark Patterns

December 3, 2022
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I recently had to set up a new Windows 11 device, and I was increasingly frustrated by how pervasively Microsoft has added dark patterns to their operating system. The end goals for Microsoft are to gather information on the end user and put relevant advertising on their screen. For those purposes, they keep adding new, buried options to try to sneak in new ways to accomplish both.

Give Us Your Email Address

Right out of the box, one of the first steps is to create a login for the device. In Windows 10, you could follow some obfuscated steps to create a local-only user, where you do not need to provide an email address or sign into a Microsoft account.

Windows 11 has completely removed that option during setup. If you want a local-only user, you first need to provide a Microsoft account during setup and then add the local user after the setup has completed, through the Settings application. Microsoft really wants you to use an online account, so they can easily collect data on your device usage and tie it to your centralized online account.

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Upcoming Rurouni Kenshin Anime

September 26, 2022
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Another classic anime is getting a fresh reboot; this time, it’s Rouroni Kenshin. A new anime version of Rurouni Kenshin was announced, slated for 2023, and a trailer was recently released to promote the new show.

The trailer’s visual style looks great, and hopefully the new series lives up to the quality of the original!

Disable Bing Search From Windows Start Menu

August 25, 2022
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Note: this is more of a reminder to my future self when I need to configure any new Windows 11 devices. There are plenty of other resources online for details about this fix, or the Group Policy change for other editions of Windows.

On my new high-end gaming computer, the Start Menu in Windows 11 runs awfully slow when I type in simple strings, like “c:” to open up my File Explorer. I see a bunch of irrelevant Internet results show up in the Start Menu after a couple of seconds, before it gives me the option to select anything from my local computer.

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