https://pixelsandai.com Five practitioners writing weekly about making pictures with machines. en https://pixelsandai.com/posts/siggraph-2026-wrap-up/ https://pixelsandai.com/posts/siggraph-2026-wrap-up/ Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Roberto SIGGRAPH The show floor finally stopped arguing about whether the tools work and started arguing about how to use them well. That is real progress. https://pixelsandai.com/posts/the-word-ai/ https://pixelsandai.com/posts/the-word-ai/ Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT David Essays Calling everything "AI" is like calling every tool a "computer." True in 1985, useless on set today. We need better words. https://pixelsandai.com/posts/path-tracers-hardware/ https://pixelsandai.com/posts/path-tracers-hardware/ Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Nomish Rendering Everyone benchmarks samples-per-second. Almost nobody benchmarks samples-per-watt, or how gracefully a renderer degrades when the scene will not fit in VRAM. https://pixelsandai.com/posts/houdini-solaris-lighting/ https://pixelsandai.com/posts/houdini-solaris-lighting/ Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Ernest Lighting It is not that Solaris is prettier. It is that USD-native, procedural lighting means my decisions are data — reviewable, reusable, and hard to lose. https://pixelsandai.com/posts/writing-your-own-agent/ https://pixelsandai.com/posts/writing-your-own-agent/ Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Brent Tyler Tools You do not need a framework or a billion-parameter dream. You need a loop, a few tools, and the discipline to keep a human in it. https://pixelsandai.com/posts/llm-race-for-cg-artists/ https://pixelsandai.com/posts/llm-race-for-cg-artists/ Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Roberto AI & LLMs Which model is best? Wrong question. The one that runs where your data lives, that you can steer, and that will still be here next quarter. https://pixelsandai.com/posts/usd-pipeline-hydra/ https://pixelsandai.com/posts/usd-pipeline-hydra/ Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Nomish Tools Two years of migration, one honest retrospective. What a render-delegate-first architecture actually bought us — and what it cost. https://pixelsandai.com/posts/what-juniors-should-learn/ https://pixelsandai.com/posts/what-juniors-should-learn/ Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT David Essays Not prompts. Not any single tool. The durable stuff: seeing, timing, and the stubborn habit of finishing things. https://pixelsandai.com/posts/denoisers-temporal-stability/ https://pixelsandai.com/posts/denoisers-temporal-stability/ Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Ernest Rendering A crisp still that boils in motion is a failure. The denoiser debate is really a debate about what the eye forgives. https://pixelsandai.com/posts/lora-on-my-own-art/ https://pixelsandai.com/posts/lora-on-my-own-art/ Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Brent Tyler AI & LLMs An honest experiment about authorship, style, and the strange feeling of a model that draws a little like me on its good days. https://pixelsandai.com/posts/return-of-hand-keyed/ https://pixelsandai.com/posts/return-of-hand-keyed/ Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Roberto Craft As the machine handles the tween, the hand is coming back to the pose — and the work is getting more personal, not less. https://pixelsandai.com/posts/procedural-cities/ https://pixelsandai.com/posts/procedural-cities/ Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Nomish Craft The problem with generated environments was never scale. It was rhythm — the human irregularity that says a place was lived in.