#also my camera washes the colors out but they look really bright irl

[kingofthering-two]

Printed my 2024 MotoGP journal and it came in the mail today (photos featuring my home bedspread).

[dragonofyang]

why r u called dragon or yang if ur white? not trying to be aggressive but like if those r names u chose for urself u might wanna check that white privilege

I appreciate that you’re not trying to be aggressive, but I think you and I need to have a frank conversation about the assumptions made in this ask and nature of the question you are asking me.

My response is under the cut (sorry mobile peeps, I have a lot to say)

I think the biggest thing I have to address before I get into the history and semantics of my url is that first and foremost, I am not 100% white, anon. I’m white-passing, so I understand the confusion, especially since I’ve only recently taken to using my own face as my icon instead of art. I don’t fault you for that, since cameras historically have been machinated to function and read pale skin better and the lighting I have in my icon and the header image of my blog when you view it from the dashboard helps wash my skin out. Color and light theory work against showing my skin tone a lot of times, so unless I’m in direct sunlight wearing things that bring the color balance of a photo to black, I’ll look white, especially if it’s been a while since I’ve gotten any substantial sunlight. That said, I do experience a very conditional privilege as a white-passing person, but my passing is entirely dependent on how I as a person am read by other people. I have had everything from “hey you’re exotic [because of your race]” to “oh hello fellow person of my ethnicity” and been racially profiled by the police despite having security clearance at my place of work. Somewhere there’s two photos of me with my mom’s and dad’s sides of the family respectively and I’m either the darkest child in that photo or the lightest one. That holds true even now as a young adult, I’m almost always whiter than any Latinx people I know and at least have more saturated color in my skin than any white people I know. That’s all IRL, though. Online, I can easily just state my ethnicity if I choose to and people accept it, because the internet is a great equalizer in terms of first impressions. It’s not my skin or my voice or how my eyes are too light to belong to a Latina girl, it’s the words I use and I am judged by my character rather than the race somebody thinks I am. That said, this is the first time somebody’s assumed my ethnicity online, which is why I’m taking the time to reply to this the way that I am, anon, because I feel this could be a beneficial experience to you and to other mixed people out there who face the same questions and accusations and assumptions as I do. I am too white and too dark, I am commodified as exotic and therefore sexy to some, I’m “one of the good ones”, I have been asked if I wear color contacts (I don’t, but that’s a surprise to far too many people), I have a running list on countries/ethnicities people have guessed because they think they can pin down exactly where I am from (spoiler, I was born in the USA). Fundamentally, I am not white, but I can seem like it. I can be as affable as a proper Midwest-raised girl can be, but that doesn’t change that when people say “all the Mexicans should go back where they came from” they are speaking about me as well. They just don’t realize it. It’s not their fault that they don’t know my ethnicity, just as it’s not yours, but it doesn’t change the fact that assumptions can breed danger for me, because now if I don’t act correctly, I could become a target for racially-fueled vitriol or sexual harassment. Again, it’s not inherently your fault for assuming that you knew my ethnicity, but I strongly recommend you do not do this in the future to me or anybody in your life. If there is someone in your life who does not mind answering such questions, then speak with them, and my inbox/IM is always open to discuss things off anon if you have further questions.

Now that that’s out of the way, I’m going to address your primary question: “why r u dragon or yang”. I’m guessing that you meant to type “of” instead of “or”, but just in case you meant “or” that’s what this paragraph is going to address. Dragons are not culturally or ethnically closed mythical beasts the way that the Native American Thunderbird is or how Hinduism is a closed religion. Dragons and other great serpents have existed as a concept pretty much everywhere humans have, and I have a very close spiritual tie to dragons and commune with them whenever I partake in my witchcraft.

That said, “dragonofyang” is a username I’ve used for the past 10-ish years, originally stemming from when I joined DeviantART at the age of 13. I’ve since deactivated the account since I hadn’t touched it in over five years, but when I joined, I was taking my first forays into paganism and was absolutely blown away by the gods, the concept of the five elements, spells, how the yin and yang symbolized balance and how it wasn’t just a religious concept but a way of life. On that site I took my first forays into Wicca and spoke with many witches, all of whom encouraged me to explore my spirituality and taught me many things about safety in practice, stealthing to avoid judgment by closed-minded religious folks, and how enriching it is to have a personal or working relationship with a pantheon or single deity/spirit guide. If I’m being perfectly honest, it’s also a remnant of my edgy phase because I really wanted the username “DragonofDarkness” but that as you can guess was taken already, but in my research to find something that described my new phase in life I got very deep into the symbolism of yin and yang, at least as deep as a 13-year-old with limited internet knowledge could get. Yang is the bright, it’s the bold, it’s the daytime and it harbors a bit of cold, of dark, of nighttime within it, but that makes it richer. Ever since I was little I’ve always been fascinated by magic, and this was a new take on how the world worked that my little kid mind was just blown away. Naturally, being a bit of an edgelord, I misunderstood it as a principle and focused on how deep and dark I really was underneath, ya know, typical 3edgy5me shit, but as I’ve grown, I’ve come to accept that yeah there’s some shit in my life that hurt me or was bad, it doesn’t overshadow the good and I’ve stopped trying to be an asshole because that’s actually not as cool or deep as people try to make it. I look at my username and I see how I’ve grown as a person, from somebody who doesn’t understand the concept of balance very well or where my spiritual journey would take me and I look at myself now as somebody who’s made but a few steps further in the road to life. I look at my username and remember that yang means the sun, the light and that without the yin, growth would not have happened.

My username also has some ties to my current spiritual practice, though less overt, because my patron deity is the dragon god Quetzalcoatl. Dragons in Mexico represent the sun, and jaguars represent the night, and in my practice, both dragons and jaguars have made themselves apparent to me, and in a sense they balance each other out in a way similar to the yin-yang symbol. I felt the call to Quetzalcoatl about six years ago now and I have much to learn from him still, but he’s continued to teach me about balance, in the day and night, in the human and the animal, in the violent and the peaceful. I’ve come a long way from being some edgy 13-year-old kid, thankfully, but I know my journey isn’t over.

That being said, if my username is offensive and a misuse of a Taoist symbol (such as if it’s a closed religion and use of its symbols when you aren’t initiated is offensive), I’d like to speak with Taoists directly and learn how and why so that I might not offend in the future, especially since I’m unsure if Dao jiao/Dao jia are closed a religion/philosophy. But it’s also been my online name for 10 years now and I’d have to change it on many platforms in order to fully rescind my offense, and if possible I’d like that sort of change to be as unobtrusive as possible because many people know me primarily or exclusively by this username. So unless I come to a point personally where I feel my username no longer suits me, or my ignorance addressed by those more educated than I, I will be keeping it. I am not the most educated person on the internet, and my resources are sometimes limited in terms of educating myself properly, so if there is something I am to learn then I request that I be taught. I am always willing to learn and better myself as a person.

[media-mel]

VFX ARTISTS REACT EPISODE 2

EPISODE 2

Detective Pikachu

Bulbasaurs walking

Contrary to Sonic from Episode 1, the green on the CG Bulbasaurs match the green of the grass in the background, selling the realism. The eyes are pushing it a little, but even then, not that much.

Pikachu

The hairs on pikachu clumps up; it tuffs. It's not all evenly spaced apart. This is also realistic to IRL animals. 

Hair has a lot of ambient occlusion. Underneath the hair, near the roots, most of the hair above is blocking a lot of the light. And you can see the layers of the hairs on top of each other. Hair is not 100% opaque, it is actually slightly translucent. So the fringes of the hair on Pikachu's tail is still catching the light, creating an outline of lighter hair against the rest of his tail in shadow. So the little tips of the hair catches the light, then the light passes through it after being diffused a little.

specific 1-point, directional lighting helps a lot in creating cg scenes. 

Jurassic Park 1

T Rex in rain at night

Radiocity, global illumination = The way light bounces [ img: the "under highlights" on an egg when its on a white counter ]. If I shine a flashlight on my hand (which is near someone else's face), you can see the bounced light still appear on the other person's cheek. In CG, to get that, you have to simulate a ray coming out of the light, hitting a surface and scattering and bouncing off. But you have to do that many many times to get your scattering and get your environment.

So they couldn't do that in 1993, so they set their scene at night with a single source of light. Notice the rest of the T Rex (where the headlights of the cars aren't hitting) are just pitch black. So you don't have to worry about bounce light- great! But they also make it rain, so they can have specular lighting, make it feel like it's reflective, but all they have to reflect is a white spot. He's shiny on his hands, his toes, his thighs, but all it's reflecting is a blob of white (because of the singular direction of lighting).

Because of the animatronic T Rex, they had the perfect reference for lighting.

The museum scene

For one frame, the velociraptor that the T Rex picks up is completely missing. "What I think happened was that the actual files, the 3D models they sent to the cache to be rendered, for whatever reason on that 1 frame the velociraptor model disappeared." [ The way they talk about it, it's like it was a simple computer failure that could have happened at any point, at any frame through out the whole movie, and that they're lucky it failed then and not during a focused part on the T Rex or something ] "AAA we have to re render this and we have two weeks and it takes to months to render!"

Jurassic World 1

The effects here are technically better then they were in Jurassic park, so why do people think it looks worse?

In Park, when you see the raptors, they're real animatronic costumes, so that's what they're going up against. 

There's two things you get with real:    1. Motion looks a lot more realistic, because when you're animating CG by hand, it can go anywhere *waves hands around*    2. Acting. These kids are acting so much better with real pots and pans falling on them and real velociraptors chasing them VS J World which is "aight look at this man with the green tennis ball" Because no matter how good these dinosaurs look, our eye can still register it as fake. So, we will always recognize subconsciously that the actors are never in any real danger-- and your suspension of disbelief is a little shattered. 

J Park treated the dinosaurs as if they were real, they didn't make any shot last more then they need to. But because World is-- they can do whatever they want. So they're going artistic with it and creative-- but as they're being more artistic and creative, it's being less real. 

Aladdin ( 2019 )

Genie (bad shot)

There's a specific part of our brain that recognizes faces. All the checkmarks are there, that's not just a person-- that's clearly Will Smith. And it's not even the fact that he's blue. It's like his proportions. His face looks a little too small for that size of a head, his neck looks a little too thick, and I think a lot of that is driven by the actual camera focal point, length and placement, and what not.

Amazing CG body. The muscles on his back, they flex, and they move, and they indent, pull the skin with them. And from the front, the body still looks good.

But it feels like a face of a man who does not have that body was just pasted on there. It almost looks like the blue on his face doesn't match, it may be a color grading thing where they just put a mask there and brightened his face.  "Oh like a power window ?" "Yeah!" But now his face should be only as bright as his left peck, but it's brighter. 

Genie (good shot)

This looks great, cause it's lit well and you're not showing too much. And also because of the lower angle, the proportions are specifically thrown off. He looks super huge, so it's triggering our brains a little bit less.

A big thing is the lighting. In this shot, there's a nice edgelight, and there's a clear defined keylight, and it's giving his face volume and character. Versus the other shot, which is just this ambient wash, with just like this little bit of light from the side.

See and this once again comes back to very specific directional lighting.

Genie (desert)

Notice the discoloration on his abs, almost as if it was body paint. So a lot of we know about media's reality is not actually reality, but what we've seen in special effects. So for example, when people get shot in movies, we expect there to be a pop and dust and blood, and that's not actually what happens when people get shot. When you do visual effects, you're not always going for reality, you're going for a simulated special effect. And therefore you'd have slight discolorations like this, this actually makes it look more real, like makeup, as opposed to an actual blue person.

Terminator 2

Dogget's character blending backwards to forward

This is mostly a compositing thing. This isn't CG 3D modeling or anything, this is classic After Effects type stuff.

With this shot, ILM kind of pioneered morphing. And morphing is actually pretty simple, it's a distort while  doing a cross fade.

Michael Jackson's Black or White

You're not even really able to see the crossfade of these morphs, in fact they may have kicked it up a notch where they don't actually do a crossfade but rather a pixel color change. 

(Lady's hair grows from short to long) The use of practical shot to drop her hair to help the morph. They have enough of this choreographed where they know when they needed to drop her hair to help achieve the morph.

It's important to note they're not doing an overall crossfade uniformly, they're doing splotches and bits of crossfading though different intervals of time. First it was her hair coming down, then parts of her face, parts of her shoulders, it all flows consistently.