But while you are here check out this forest find:

I’m going to be posting lots of photography, AI generated visual art, photogrammetry, and other sorts of eye candy. This is just a quick Neural Style Transfer filter job done in Photoshop. I photographed the actual safe with mushrooms spilling out last fall at Salt Point State Park in Sonoma–a place which is like a safe full of gold for mushroom hunters.

Special gear? A bit, but less than you might think. Just a full frame mirrorless camera with a nice lens, and a compact star tracking mount that offsets the earths motion by rotating the camera gradually and thus reducing star trails and allowing light from faint objects to home in on a pixel on the camera sensor.

I’ve only done a bit of this type of photography, focusing more on photogrammetry, landscape, and macro. My mounting and tracker alignment needs a bit of improvement, but I am already enraptured with the results.

Here are a couple faves from Sunday night:

This first shot shows the benefit of stacking raw photos, which can increase faint light signals.

The photo on the left features just some minimal exposure adjustments in Lightroom, the greatest being a large white balance drop. The photo on the right is the combined light received by eight 150 sec exposures stacked together in Sequator, along with 3 equal length exposures with the lens cap on.

Lens on?!? Yes, in addition to being able to aggregate light signals, Sequator can remove moving objects like the satellite you see above, as well as removing color noise caused by faulty pixels in your camera. To do this, it separates noise from signal by looking at what should be a completely black image (cap on) and selecting for the “hot” pixels to remove later.

The next gallery shows a few starry landscape shots that are all basic long exposures taken on the star tracking mount. No white balance adjustment on these ones (more red in the sky).

For the zooming:

Equipment:

• Sony A7ii camera
• Sony FE 24-105mm F4 G OSS lens
• Vixen Polarie star tracker

Software:

• Lightroom CC
• Photoshop
• Sequator

This was a 168 second single exposure at f4.0, iso 3200. Shot on Sony A7ii with FE 24-105mm F4 G OSS using a Vixen Polarie star tracker. Processed in Lightroom.

I need to find some dark skies soon!

My reality capture collection currently spans about 10 years of shooting, numbers about 30,000 photos and many many models. I’ve been putting my best models up on Sketchfab, and there are 40 up for your viewing now–including a dozen new ones and more to come.

You can view the model that I created for the Gods in Color exhibit at the Legion of Honor. Be sure to check out both the capture of the Parthenon panel plaster, as well as the colored version I created in Zbrush to project onto the plaster at the museum show.

There is also, of course, Storied Haven, which I turned into a short film last December. 

I’ll be posting more about these models in the upcoming days, so stay tuned! Better yet, Follow me on Sketchfab!

There are a number of online tools that take advantage of generative AI image processing algorithms, as well as a number of mobile apps. Wherever I start processing, I often end up taking it back through Photoshop for additional compositing and adjustments. I was excited then when Adobe decided to include some of these types of filters within Photoshop.

Many people are familiar with the strange and hallucinogenic images that come out the Deep Dream algorithm, which is trained to see things like animals and architecture in images where they may or may not be originally, and then to paint its own interpretation that focuses on the objects that it identifies. 

While I’m a fan of Deep Dream, I’ve always been more interested in style transfer algorithms that allow me more deliberate control over the final output. 

Besides Photoshop, I am a particular fan of Deep Dream Generator, which allows a user to explore a variety of ways to style their own images, including style transfer and Deep Dream. 

The real nitty gritty though happens in Python language programming. Python code is compiled in Jupyter notebooks, which can be run either in a local Python environment, or someplace in the cloud, like Google Colab, which makes it easy for someone like myself to start digging in to the nuts and bolts of these processes. 

Generally speaking, these algorithms all fall under the umbrella of TensorFlow, which is an open source machine learning platform developed by Google. TensorFlow features a number of pre-trained models which users can employ to process their own images. A great way to explore and run the code is through tutorials, where you can check out the basic Style Transfer and Deep Dream methods of processing as well as others, such as Pix2Pix. 

If all you need is a fun and easy way to play with a neural network, check out Wombo, which will let you make a picture from as little as a word.

I’ve been working on Storied Haven in different ways since 2015, when I helped Bree Hylkema and Five Ton Crane build it.  

At the time, my interest in photogrammetry was really taking off, and I determined that the boot would make an excellent subject.

I’ve had a few opportunities to take photos of it over the years, but it took until just recently where I had the combination of ample quality photos, suitable software, and some way that I could present my model with a bit of storytelling that is somehow in service of the larger project.

That has all resolved this year as something of a holiday video card and a love note to a boot, and the amazing community of artists that made it happen.

My previous post included a simple turntable video of the model that I created of Storied Haven by using a few hundred photos shot on my Sony A7ii and Reality Capture photogrammetry software. After that I took the project into Twinmotion, which is real-time architectural rendering software. Twinmotion is truly a dream for visualizing 3D models in beautiful fashion with ease.

I finished it all off with Adobe Premiere Rush. The hours involved were basically countless, as the model went through various renditions and got shelved while I waited for better software and photography. Ultimately I had to run it through ZBrush for some manual modeling on the toe, which wasn’t coming through clean with the photos that I had.

I may go elsewhere with this project, as it is just too fun to put down. It wanted to be off my desk and out in the world though, so I hope you all enjoy it, and to you all…

Good Tidings.

The contrast between nature and industry has always beguiled me. I’m particularly enchanted by scenes of nature taking over rusty and antiquated architecture and machinery. More on that later.

After honing my hand-craft and digital fabrication skills everywhere from my home studio to Mythbusters to the Digital Fabrication Lab at the U.C. Berkeley College of Environmental Design, I’ve landed a home at Model-No.

What is Model-No.? We make custom furniture with large-scale 3D printers! I have been enjoying the last year as the 3D printing lead on team of designers, engineers, and fabrications specialists.

Come check out our product configurator, where you can customize your furniture by shape, size, and color using a simple user-friendly web interface.  

Google Earth Captures by diffdaff on Sketchfab

In fact, I built six of them. I cut them out of 1/4″ birch plywood with a Mars 130 laser cutter and finished them off with hardware from diyroadcases.com. Design was a cinch with custom files created on makercase.com. I used the finger joints design option for extra strength. The box was glued together, trimmed with riveted ball-corners, and finished with multiple coats of black spray paint and acrylic caulk.

Is it a better box? Time will tell, but all signs point to yes.

Overall I am extremely impressed with the print quality of the Bean. At .050 mm layer height (50 microns), the layers are imperceptible–just smooth beautiful surfaces and crisp, sharp edges with fine detail. The rough edges at the bottom of the Rook are a result of my hasty removal of the support raft, which does not separate cleanly like I’m used to with an FDM printer. There was an uncured bubble of resin at the bottom of the print–apparently an error in preparing the print, which was pre-loaded on the machine. that I’m looking forward to printing some super hi quality reality capture models, jewelry prototypes, and even castable burn-out material.

Some people are fussing about the year-late delivery or what might have seemed the all-too-infrequent updates after the Kickstarter campaign, or because they company apparently wouldn’t return their emails, or because the Kudo moved from the U.S. to Taiwan and backers weren’t happy with the changes to their projected shipping bill. Add to that the fee to purchase their newly developed software and there are at least a handful of users ready to sell their machines.

Maybe it’s not a great way to build a company maybe but I’ll be happy to see what kind of detail I can get out of the machine. The novelty in the design is that it uses an lcd mask with a UV to selectively cure photo-polymer resin. Most previous resin printers cured the resin with either a laser, or a dlp projector (like for slides or movies), which could also selectively apply light to the bottom of the resin vat to cure one layer at a time. The beauty of the lcd mask technology is that it cuts costs while simultaneously upping the ante on feature size (resolution).

I’ll be back soon with prints of my own models. Stay tuned!

The cats out of the bag. It’s no secret anymore. I love photography. I’ve used it as a tool for a long time, but rarely put it forth as a solo medium to express myself.

I’ve always had a strong eye for composition, and as my photography skills catch up, I am amassing quite a collection of pictures. I’ve decided it’s time to start sharing them.

Visual storytelling is also a passion of mine. I shot all of these photos through a moving truck window, with an illustration filter. I shot quickly, as scenes flew by. I love the way that the ever-moving camera implies a narrative thread. Turning them into a comic book style collection was the natural next step.

How did I do it? With a Sony a7ii with an illustration filter. Layout with the Comic Book app (very labor intensive for this many photos). Need help with composition? Check out this method of composing your images and doing panel layout with the golden mean. I hope you liked the pictures. I’m working on some more graphics projects and will post those here when they are ready.

I got back on skis over the New Year holiday after several years of not skiing, and it was great on all counts. On the ephemeral level, I shredded powder. In pure data terms, gps said 46.9mph–also pleasing. I got to give a beginners lesson too, which was a good reminder of fundamentals. Here I make some quick turns:

I had a lot of fun photographing Montana out the car window–kind of like a combination between sports, portrait, and landscape. The composition is constantly changing and the challenge is to freeze the landscape in a pretty picture before it flies by. To focus on lines and colors and overcome motion blur and snowy windows I used an illustration filter on my Sony A7ii. It’s like speed painting:

The day after returning home we received a kitten into the household. Here is Cleopatra, 12 weeks old:

The next day I was relieved and excited to receive this new Kudo Bean 3D resin printer. It was due last February. I’m a patient person, so I’m glad to simply receive something solid at this point. I’ll let you know if it lives up to the promises of its maker to deliver high definition, convenience, reliable prints and easy maintenance. Kickstarter, I’ve learned, is a place where Campaign and Comments are often two very different sides of the (dollar) coin.

Not a bad start to the year for me, and I’m looking forward to keeping it on that track. I know life isn’t all fresh turns, but here’s to some for all in 2019! Cheers!

I have been hard at work polishing my skills with 3D capture and re-construction. This has been a part of my regular creative process for several years now, but beyond showing off my resulting 3D prints every year at Maker Faire, I haven’t done anything to publish or publicize my models. I decided it’s time to change that. These are too much fun to keep to myself and I think, too beautiful as well.

I’m grateful to the original artists’ skill and inspiration and hope I can do them justice by offering my best possible effort at capturing them accurately and portraying them respectfully. I’m glad that museums allow the public to photograph the work and hope to maintain that privilege. These models will vary somewhat in quality as I always just do the best with the time and conditions that I have. Likewise, my photography, equipment, software, skills and technique are improving over time and my newer models reflect that.

    Asian Art Museum, San Francisco
    by diffdaff
    on Sketchfab

Technically speaking, these models are fairly high resolution. Recently, I have computed models up to about 70 million polygons. Sharing them online requires decimating them to a fraction of that size. Some of these models were created with lower resolution photos from an older Canon 40D, others were created with much higher quality images from my Sony A7ii. Some have been decimated (the polygon mesh has been reduced to a lower quality for the sake of bandwidth), others have been shared in their full resolution. My aim is always to create archival quality models–a bar I don’t often achieve during my casual museum visits. In any case, towards that end, I will be sharing the highest resolution files possible–typically in the range of 3 million polygons each. If you aren’t used to thinking in 3D, this is roughly equivalent to counting the pixels in a 2D image. Roughly.

I’ll publish more here about technique as time goes on, but for now am focused on simply getting the captures online.

I hope you enjoy these models from my visits to the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. This is the first time for me to share them publicly. I’m in the midst of preparing many more from the past few years, so stay tuned, and don’t forget your VR goggles.

If you have followed me closely you know that I’m a big advocate for and user of photogrammetry. I love it in part for it’s utility in 3D printing and digital fabrication. I also appreciate it for the chance to view hi-res photo-textured 3D models on screen–and in VR.

Word is that Linden Lab used 3000 photos just to capture and re-create Duane Flatmo’s beautiful Tin Pan Dragon–with a resulting mesh of 1 billion polygons.

Incredibly high resolution is what it takes to give virtual visitors a 180 frame per second free-roaming tour of the exhibit. Combining photogrammetry with laser scan data and access to the original floor plans (also digital studio wizardry)–puts reality online.

Get a preview from Curator Nora Atkinson, who recently gave this TED talk about why she brought Burning Man to the museum:

View it yourself on Sansar–available on VR and desktop, and compatible with PC, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive.

Check it out :

See more here: https://www.youtube.com/user/ThomasSanladerer/videos

My original inspiration for the end-caps was from the Fox Theater in Spokane, another masterpiece of the era which eschewed fetischization of foreign cultural influences to a degree (not entirely) for a blend of natural (ocean) imagery and strict geometric forms.

Here is a shot of the Spokane Fox Theater seat end-cap:

Spokane Fox Theater seats

While the Capitol Theater features a facade that is largely streamline and geometric, the interior is inspired in many ways by Indian architecture and culture, in particular the scalloped arches found throughout Mughal design across Northern India. This theater’s proscenium arch can be seen in the Red Fort in Delhi for example. I was lucky to pick up this project from Clif Florio, who gave me the idea of a sun, moon, and stars theme. I added to that the arch curves, which the Capitol Theater features in several places, most prominently in the proscenium arch. In addition to layering them at the bottom of my design, I also carried them into the rooflines of the moon chair and the parapets of the sun chair–both ways in which the curve appears in traditional architecture. I’ve always been inspired by the desert, and in addition to having traveled the deserts of Rajasthan in Northern India, I am a lover of the desert of Southern Utah. The star chair includes the iconic profile of Factory Butte in the San Rafael Desert of Southern Utah.

Capitol Theater Seat End-Caps. Design by Grant Diffendaffer. Capitol Theater by Five Ton Crane

Capitol Theater. By Five Ton Crane. Theater seat end-cap design by Grant Diffendaffer. Photo Copyright Grant Diffendaffer

Capitol Theater by Five Ton Crane

It’s a challenge to credit a big job like this–please be patient as I document and attribute. I retain photo copyright but give permission to publish with the following attribution: “Capitol Theater: Five Ton Crane (or properly credited individual artist); Photography: Grant Diffendaffer.” Thank you.

Over 60 artists contributed to this project. Kudos to all. If there was something subversive about this show I’d have to say that one element is the exhibition of a collaborative work of art that makes no particular effort to call attention to the individual artists. There are no little number stickers with a matching placard on the wall. The answers you are looking for come out of the art itself. That became apparent to me looking at this display of film reels, which happened to be in a glass museum case outside of the theater.

Film reels

Extra special thanks goes to Lead Artists Bree Hylkema and Sean Orlando, Lead Fabricators Jay Kravitz, Clifford Florio and Stephanie Shipman, who put in hours daily for the 10 (short ?!?) weeks it took to build this. Multiple artists helmed major individual projects. To name a few of those: Mural painting and gold leaf–Tania Seabock; Marquis paintings of Crocodile and Swan–Imogen Speer; Concession Stand–Derrick Gomez; Candy–Mike Woolsen and Katie Keech; Movie Directore–Allen White; Choreography and Dance–Jody Power; Poster Design; Jay Kravitz and Becca Henry, Dashboard; Michael Sturtz; Hood Ornament–Jo Slota… It might not be possible to de-construct art like this by simply listing constituent elements and tying them to names, but there are names behind its construction and they all deserve to be in the Smithsonian.

The artists, as they have identified themselves:

Capitol Theater Crew List

As a team, we made everything right down to the black and white movies. I myself designed the decorative steel end-caps on the end of each row of theater seats. I also laid much of the tile floor and contributed with a few carpentry odds and ends. The seats are my pride and joy though–drafted in Rhino and laser cut from 1/8″ steel.

Enjoy the photos. If you can make it to D.C. by September, I highly recommend the show. It is free to visit and extends into the surrounding neighborhoods, helping make it the largest ever show put on by the museum. The museum itself is beautiful too, and has the distinction of being the first building in the country built for the purpose of art exhibition.

The article highlights pieces commissioned for the show, including that of Five Ton Crane. Read to the end to see two preview pictures of our creation, the Capitol Theater, an Art Deco movie house on the back of a big red bus. The photo of the theater seats is such a tease for me–I designed the decorative steel endcaps just out of view in the image. I’ll be looking forward to sharing images of those as well as more of the rest of this gorgeously detailed piece after the show opens next week.

Grateful for the opportunity and the hard work of many friends over many years to make this possible. Well done Five Ton Crane. See you in D.C.

If you are in the Washington D.C. area, be sure to check it out. If you aren’t, maybe you should get there. You’ll find the Renwick Gallery just across the street from the White House. The show will be up from March 30th 2018 until Jan 21st, 2019. The first floor, including the Capitol Theater, closes September 16th, 2018, so be sure to make it before then if you can.

Michael Garlington and Natalia Bertotti, Totem of Confessions, 2015, Photo by Daniel L. Hayes.

According to the Smithsonian,

Large-scale installations—the artistic hallmark of Burning Man—form the core of the exhibition. Individual artists and collectives featured in No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man include David Best, Candy Chang, Marco Cochrane, Duane Flatmo, Michael Garlington and Natalia Bertotti, Five Ton Crane Arts Collective, FoldHaus Art Collective, Scott Froschauer, HYBYCOZO (Yelena Filipchuk and Serge Beaulieu), Android Jones, Aaron Taylor Kuffner, Christopher Schardt, Richard Wilks, and Leo Villareal. Multiple installation sites have been selected throughout the neighborhood surrounding the museum for No Spectators: Beyond the Renwick, which will include works by Jack Champion, Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson, HYBYCOZO, Laura Kimpton, Mischell Riley, and Kate Raudenbush.

Here’s a look at some of the local art heading to the Renwick, including a peek at the Capitol Theater. I feel honored to have been able to design the theater seat end-caps, which I prototyped in plywood using a laser cutter, and which were cut in steel using another laser cutter, and then cleaned up, welded and painted by a crew of amazing people while I was busy crawling around laying tile on the theater floor. I’ll be sure to post photos of my handywork as well as the rest of this outpouring of creativity–after the show opens, March 30th.

Parthenon Panel. Without projection mapping.

A fact not known to all who have grown accustomed to seeing classical sculpture as pure white marble is that all of these sculptures were once actually painted in full color. It is not known exactly how everything appeared but research has revealed the natural pigments that were used and where they were applied to the marble. It is thought likely that the surfaces were finished in rather garish fashion to highlight them from afar.

Parthenon Panel. Projection mapping by Grant Diffendaffer

For the exhibit, I used a painting that was a historical representation done by Rebecca Levitan, as part of a project at Emory University. For my part, I began by photographing the panel to create a digital 3D photogrammetric representation of the panel. For that purpose, I used 250 high res photos, which I processed using Autodesk’s Recap Photo software. From there I used a process that moved back and forth between ZBrush and Photoshop to accurately project the lines of the painting to the surface of the digital model.

My hope was to use this process to correct and align the artwork so that it would accurately display when shown from a single projector onto the surface of the actual plaster panel. This was something that was somewhat easier said than done. While I had hoped to make the actual projection alignment a digital process, using either scanning or photogrammetry, it ended up being a more manual process.  It was still a useful and productive journey for me to pass through that digital space, and it was clear to me that this is a useful projection mapping workflow–one that will get easier as software and hardware options combine to basically let projectors “see” what they are projecting.

Many thanks to all who made the project possible–Renee Dreyfus, Rebecca Levitan, and Rich Rice, as well as the photography department of the DeYoung.

The works gained popularity for their ability to evoke the unique landscapes of the place that many in our Oakland based arts group call home, and for their unique way of providing an equal platform to so many artists at the same time, while showcasing a cohesive greater perspective at the same time. As a result, we were asked to create two new panels for permanent installation in the newly remodeled Moffitt Library at U.C. Berkeley.

Again working with the theme of scenes of the place we call home, these two new panels show views of the Berkeley campus, namely Sproul Plaza, home of the free speech movement and of the S.O.G.A. Gardens, land of the Student Organic Gardening Association.

It was a special honor for me to be involved with this project, as I had just become proudly employed in the U.C. Berkeley College of Environmental Design at the Digital Fabrication Lab, where they have bestowed upon me the title “Mechanician.” What that means is I was able to spend some time familiarizing myself with the tools of the lab, and in the process created a square composed of layers of material processed by laser cutting, laser engraving, and ZUND. Yes, ZUND. You know–ZUND, the all-powerful digital swiss army knife of industrial machinery. My 12″x12″ square is made of Acrylic, Wood, Paper, and Colored Pencil.

I’ll be showing my latest machine creation–a P3Steel. Whut’s that you say? It is an open source 3D printer–a derivative of the most famous such design, a Prusa I3. Come find out why I thought it was worth my time to go down this particular kit rabbit-hole (Mostly it is a Spanish thing).

The main reason I haven’t been posting here (besides being busy building aforementioned metal beast), is that I have been heavily occupied by my new job (since September 2016) working as a Mechanician in the Digital Fabrication Lab (DFL) at the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. There, we assist students in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning with the creation of models–an essential part of their process. What is digital about that? While students have been drawing with computers for quite some time, the fabrication side of things has taken a little longer to catch up. Now though, instead of primarily focusing on manually cutting and gluing everything, students also use computerized machinery. The lab has half a dozen laser cutters, 8 3D printers, a CNC router (with tool changer), a CNC mill and a Zund.

The latest addition in the DFL is a desktop 3D scanner. I have recently picked up a Sony A7 ii (full frame digital camera)–with the purpose of upping my photogrammetry game. Come on down to the DFL (sign up first) May 30th, 31st, and June 1st and I’ll teach you everything I know about reality capture and 3D printing.

What else has happened in the last year…let’s see… In my life, I have also done a short creative stint with the Mythbusters production team as they reboot the series after the great Adam and Jamie moved on to other things.

I got to go to Mexico this winter where the best three hours I spent were in the National Museum of Anthropology. Besides being an overwhelming presentation of incredible ancient monumental (and personal ornamental) artworks, representative of fantastically developed long lost civilizations, it is probably the best place I have ever been for photogramettry. I could have stayed there for days on end.

I don’t have enough fancy tools in my life so I bought into a huge and powerful laser cutter.

I witnessed the kinetic creations of the otherworldly famous Kinetic Sculpture Grand Challenge.

I delved into 3D stop motion filmaking (my secret dream job).

I spent months trying to build a complete photogrammetry model of the Storied Haven. Part of the work that I do with 5 Ton Crane, this site installation is headed to the Hermitage Museum in Virginia. One of our previous projects, the Raygun Gothic Rocketship, was just installed outside the Wings over the Rockies Museum in Denver. We also made permanent installations of our Oakland Squared project in the Latham Square Building in downtown Oakland and the Moffett Library at U.C. Berkeley.

I managed not to get washed off the hillside in this winter’s epic rains.

And now I am digging into an upcoming exhibition at the Legion of Honor Museum.

Oh, also, I’m teaching a workshop on Photogrammetry, 3D Scanning and 3D printing. May 30th, 31st, and June 1st. Spaces still available!

Steadcraft.com is down for the moment for repair, so stay tuned here for everything me, and come find me by the big door in the Expo Hall (Zone 2 by CCA) and I’ll tell you all about it in person!