battlewraith

Yeah in theory. In practice it doesn't necessarily work out that way. Especially with different types of media.

Very cool! It's not an obvious color combo to me, but that blue looks good against the tan.

My understanding is that the Wachowski's didn't even want to do the fourth movie but had to in order to keep some sort of creative control over the series. I think their goal for it was to basically undo the heroic arc of the first film so that the studio wouldn't keep making more. Very disappointing that it didn't work out that way.

I've been playing with Midjourney for about a year. It's ridiculous how much more advanced it's gotten in a year. They now have a function for consistent characters that works pretty well. I don't know where things will lead with the technology, but it would not be implausible to think that within 5 years ALL digital art production involves AI and that some things like traditional polygonal modeling and rendering become niche if not outright obsolete. I think what's difficult for people to get at this stage is that this technology produces great results very quickly and very cheaply (in terms of skill required). We're still in a stage were it makes noticeable mistakes, but that should go away relatively soon. So you will have a technology that can produce professional quality results at lightning speed. Any user will be able to produce more content in a month than a conventional artist would be able to in a year. There's speculation in AI circles that when things reach this state there will be a general shift away from digital work being perceived as art. "Artists" will be people making things by hand.

Thanks! Glad to hear it!

Here's another experiment with mixed media. Again with water soluble graphite, white charcoal, and ink. I'm wondering if rapid rise in AI will make people more or less interested in hand-crafted art.

That's the crux of the issue right? These stories are utterly ridiculous in general. The only one that approaches any degree of realism is Watchmen. If you are not a child, most of these older stories are going to be lacking. Recent superhero movies get around this issue by making comedies, psychologizing the characters, and/or making it some sort of vehicle for social commentary. All of which are played out imo.

I went to Sweet Baby Inc.'s website and there is no reference to them being involved in this project. It's not listed anywhere. What's your source for this? As a side note, there was some controversy when MachineGames released Wolfenstein The New Order. Apparently a game where you violently mangle nazis, in a franchise devoted to stomping out nazis, upset some gamers who were.....I dunno...sympathetic to nazis?

Thanks! It's called making a comparison.

It's not really about using your emotions, unless you think all valuation is based on using emotions. In real life you have the majority of the people that actually make life livable making very little money because of the way the market works. The market is not a meritocracy, it is not a moral system, and yet people are willing to accept the most bizarre outcomes and write of other perspectives as feelings or opinions. That doesn't hold up under the most gentle scrutiny. It's even weird in this thread. People intuitively seeing the wrongness of some of these outcomes (i.e. actors being wildly overpaid) but discrediting themselves because it's opinion (and the whole philosophy behind the market is not).

Well first of all, nobody as far as I know is forcing you to engage with or respond to my comments, none of which were directed towards you. If you want to get pissy over it fine, but don't whine to me about arguing.... again, when you are butting in and getting pointlessly emotive.... again. Nonetheless, I will try to break this down for you in simple terms: Excraft said this: "That and I agree with those who've said Hollywood way overspends in general, specifically way, way, way too much on actors. It's insane the amount of money being paid to some of them, especially when you have SAG/AFTRA going on strike over wages and such. " Do they get paid too much or not? From what perspective. With respect to the actual history and economics of the industry the answer is no. Promoting and hanging the success of films on bankable stars is the default business model of Hollywood. That's not a matter of opinion. THAT is the factual aspect of this conversation. You're tying yourself in knots over this fact vs. opinion nonsense, in response to me criticizing someone's opinion based on the facts of how the industry has historically operated. And yes, I added the heart surgeon example to indicate a different way of looking at things. Should I send a written request to your office first before I add things to the conversation? It is deeply troubling how much that throws you.

Sorry "horrible evil monster" is a competitive position and you don't make the cut. As I indicated, there are metrics where Tom Cruise deserves more than what the heart surgeon makes. Tom is going to bring in money for the studio, far more than the heart surgeon as an individual will for the hospital. But it shouldn't take a great deal of imagination to see how perverted and stupid that is as a compass for what people are worth. The person who is literally saving lives is worth less than the actor who is making Top Gun movies a financial success. Regardless, this is in response to the comment that some actors are paid way too much. With regards to how the industry works--no. The actors that are paid that much money are brought in because they have a fanbase and a track record of success with audiences.

Ummm no. Let me quote this for you again: Does Tom Cruise deserve to make more money for a day's work than say a heart surgeon? According to the market yes, because Tom Cruise will bring in an audience of fans that will significantly increase the odds of a film making a lot of profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_system_(filmmaking) "The phenomenon of stardom has remained essential to Hollywood because of its ability to lure spectators into the theater. Following the demise of the studio system in the 1950s and '60s, the star system became the most important stabilizing feature of the movie industry. This is because stars provide film makers with built-in audiences who regularly watch films in which their favorite actors and actresses appear.[7] Contemporary Hollywood talent agencies must now be licensed under the California Labor Code, which defines an agent as any "person or corporation who engages in the occupation of procuring, offering, promising, or attempting to procure employment for artist or artists."[8]: 167  Talent agencies such as William Morris Agency (WMA), International Creative Management (ICM), Creative Artists Agency (CAA), and many more started to arise in the mid-1970s. CAA created new ways of marketing talent by packaging actors, agencies are able to influence production schedules, budgeting of the film, and which talent will be playing each particular character. Packaging gained notoriety in the 1980s and 1990s with films such as Ghostbusters, Tootsie, Stripes, and A League of Their Own (three of which star Bill Murray). This practice continues to be prominent in films today such as Big Daddy, Happy Gilmore, The Waterboy, and Billy Madison (all of which star Adam Sandler). The ease of selling a packaged group of actors to a particular film ensures that certain fan groups will see that movie, reducing risk of failure and increasing profits."

That's an interesting perspective. Here's mine: I think that the previous thread probably got locked because it had more or less fizzled out in terms of making any actual points. It was dormant for a period of time, and then somebody started it up again, at which point some mod decided to put a stake into it. Then hilariously it was picked again here in a more toned down version that's more or less people aggrieved by studios pissing away money on bad projects. Oh the humanity. I don't see a group of crybullies trying to control what you want to discuss. What I see primarily are an aging cohort of liberals (which makes sense for an old superhero MMO). I don't mean liberal in a political sense, as in liberal Democrat. I mean it more in the philosophical sense--as someone who takes the individual as the point of departure for viewing life in general. The liberals on the right complain about wokeness. The liberals that are more moderate or even left leaning complain about quotas, people checking boxes, etc. That is more typical of the posters here. A lot of people in general try to cite things and yes a lot of it is just garbage (i.e. opinion pieces by youtubers).

Recently I started dabbling in traditional media. I've been experimenting a lot with water soluble graphite. Here is a variation of the with piece done with water soluble graphite pencil, white charcoal pencil, and some brush pen.

Horrible person. Living absolutely rent free in so many people's heads for so long. lol.

MachineGames did the most recent series of Wolfenstein Games, which features tons of nazis and different time periods. I think they would be a logical pick based on those games which were really well done except for the last installment which featured some very unpopular gameplay mechanics (I didn't actually play that one myself).

It looks like most of the people here using Microsoft's (?) AI generator. These results look pretty good, honestly a lot better than I expected. I've been subscribed to Midjourney for almost a year now. There are some features that are pretty essential to me in that application. I don't know which of these features are part of other applications, but it would be a good idea to look for them. 1. Image weights. So when I'm looking for a certain kind of result in MJ, usually I link images at the start of the prompt to help guide it towards what I want. So if I wanted something like Batman exploring a dark warehouse, I might have a link to an image of Batman and a link to an image of a dark warehouse in the style I like. The AI will then take cues from the linked images and the prompt. MJ uses tags at the end of prompts to vary parameters. In this case there is an --iw (image weight) tag that tells the prompt how heavily to weight the influence of the linked images. The tag is capped at 2 to prevent people from making revenge porn, etc. from images of real people. So that prompt might look like: /imagine [picture of Batman] [picture of dark warehouse] Batman exploring a dark warehouse, pen and ink comic book style illustration --c 35 --iw 2 "--c 35" stands for chaos 35. The purpose is to guarantee some variety in the output so that you don't get 4 super similar results when it processes the prompt. I think it goes up to a hundred but most people use something around 35. 2. Style ref. This is a new feature. It's very similar to image weights, but it's meant to take direction from the formal characteristics of an image but not the actual content of the linked image. So if I use an image weight of Batman and the picture has a coffee cup in the background, coffee cups will probably start showing up in my generations. If I use a text prompt that says "Batman in the style of John Singer Sargent", it will give me Batman in something like that style--but it will also start to throw in content related to Sargent's work. You might get a picture of Batman with a period hat for example. If I link an image of one of Sargent's paintings as a style ref, in theory it should only give me the influence of Sargent's style without bringing in associated content. The --sw tag tells the prompt how much weight to give the sref, all the way up to 1000. You can also use multiple images in the style ref (e.g. Norman Rockwell, Jack Kirby, H.R. Giger all in one ref). 3. Inpainting. MJ has a function called "vary region." So in many cases you do a prompt and it gives you a result that's great but there is one small detail that's wrong. Or a limb is posed the wrong way or something. You do a vary region, which allows you to select the problem area and then do the command. You get a text box that allows you to add or change information relating to the original prompt (only in the selected area, it doesn't change anything else). It's not perfect, and might take several tries to get a good result but people do routinely use it to fix things in their generations. I'm not trying to be a shill for Midjourney here. I think these are going to eventually standard features of any AI image generator. If your using something else, or are just new to this type of software, check to see if the application you're using has a version of these commands.

You ignored what I actually said. I mentioned foundational aspects of a character. What are the important traits they embody? Nick Fury is the director of SHIELD, not a cook. He has an eye patch, not a sombrero. Does it matter that the character was originally white? Apparently not, most people seem comfortable with the dark skinned version, who seems to behave more or less the same way as the light skinned variation. If the creator of Northstar specified that he was the first gay superhero--I would take that as a defining trait. Along with his superspeed and being Canadian. Does everything else have to stay the same? Does Reed Richards have to be living in a 1960s New York and married to a woman 10 years younger than him? Are those essential characteristics that must be communicated in order to do Reed Richards?

White supremacy is an ideological foundation of nazism. So it's weird to cast a black actor as a nazi for that reason. Maybe it can be done for satirical reasons or something, but it would need to be reasoned out. When you complain about Heimdall or Reed Richards being race swapped, you're implying that whiteness is a foundational aspect of their character. Which is silly and wouldn't fly for Nick Fury either. The ancient one is an even worse example. The character is an old, exotic mysterious sage. How is maleness as a characteristic important to the character?

No. Jackson was cast because Mark Millar decided to change the character in the comics and based it on the actor (without getting any permission to use his likeness). Apparently this was inspired by Colin Powell. I don't see this as substantially different from any other switch that goes on in movie casting. Why did comics fans not care? Probably because Nick Fury was a rather obscure character who was popular when Steranko was drawing the book in the 60s? And/or people just didn't care? "Current Year Ideology" is not a thing, other than an indication that you are deep in an information silo. Movie and comic fans embody a range of political beliefs. Scandals happen, people get accused of something and then individuals clutch their pearls about the fans getting criticized--when it's really just them getting criticized. They don't represent the fandom.

Um excuse me? No one had a problem? I can think of someone who probably had a problem with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Fury:_Agent_of_S.H.I.E.L.D._(film)

No, as I've said, I am criticizing people who reject such practices in principle. Lol. I did. I just read the whole thing on the academy's website. There are four standards. For a film to be considered for one type of award--Best Picture--it has to check a box in two of the standards. Each of the standards has several individual criteria that can be met. Two of those standards don't even involve actors or characters in the film, they're behind the scenes jobs, training opportunities, or marketing. The ones that do involve performances are trivially easy to satisfy. For example, "At least 30% of all actors in secondary and more minor roles are from at least two of the following underrepresented groups." One of the underrepresented groups is women--half the population of the planet! You have got to be shitting me. This is a concern for you? Most contemporary films are just going to fit within these guidelines. You would have to go out of your way to disqualify yourself by only involving straight white men. And the fallout would just be not getting a best picture award. That's it. Wait, is this intended to be some sort of rebuttal? Because that's exactly what I do. If something doesn't appeal to me, I do go watch something else. Disney princesses were all white. Then the company decided they could make money by changing the formula. I'm not the one crying about it. Right so Poitier says that he's the only black actor consistently getting work in the industry. But it's all good because he got an award. Sounds exactly like what someone on the Daily Wire would say. If you can't see that, maybe take a step back. You can go back and read what I said from the beginning. It's already all been spelled out. You just keep circling back to financial success--which it not the point. And you just gloss over counter examples. Pornographic films make a lot of money. Does this mean that they are well written and well produced? I'm not asking you if they are financially successful, that's already assumed. Can I say that they are poor quality films, despite the fact that they make a lot of money? Or are we simply stuck with "the facts"?

I already have. I quoted him. The standard of inclusiveness on the part of the industry back in his day was NOT to include minorities. People like him were trailblazers. They were struggling to get representations of minorities on the big screen. And even someone like Poitier who was immensely talented and successful, admitted to being severely constrained by what types of characterizations they could present to the white audience for fear of how those characterization would impact other black performers. Did you even read it? Here in 2024, you have your panties in a wad over progressives in the entertainment industry lecturing to you--so you wipe away the actual significance of Poitier's achievements and say "See! Talented black actors were getting awards and didn't need these politics!" Utterly reductive. Utterly wrong. My previous post addresses (again) your conflation of commerce with quality. If you don't get it by now I can't help you.