BREAKING NEWS
LATEST POSTS
-
ComfyDock – The Easiest (Free) Way to Safely Run ComfyUI Sessions in a Boxed Container
https://www.reddit.com/r/comfyui/comments/1j2x4qv/comfydock_the_easiest_free_way_to_run_comfyui_in/
ComfyDock is a tool that allows you to easily manage your ComfyUI environments via Docker.
Common Challenges with ComfyUI
- Custom Node Installation Issues: Installing new custom nodes can inadvertently change settings across the whole installation, potentially breaking the environment.
- Workflow Compatibility: Workflows are often tested with specific custom nodes and ComfyUI versions. Running these workflows on different setups can lead to errors and frustration.
- Security Risks: Installing custom nodes directly on your host machine increases the risk of malicious code execution.
How ComfyDock Helps
- Environment Duplication: Easily duplicate your current environment before installing custom nodes. If something breaks, revert to the original environment effortlessly.
- Deployment and Sharing: Workflow developers can commit their environments to a Docker image, which can be shared with others and run on cloud GPUs to ensure compatibility.
- Enhanced Security: Containers help to isolate the environment, reducing the risk of malicious code impacting your host machine.
-
Why the Solar Maximum means peak Northern Lights in 2025
https://northernlightscanada.com/explore/solar-maximum
Every 11 years the Sun’s magnetic pole flips. Leading up to this event, there is a period of increased solar activity — from sunspots and solar flares to spectacular northern and southern lights. The current solar cycle began in 2019 and scientists predict it will peak sometime in 2024 or 2025 before the Sun returns to a lower level of activity in the early 2030s.
The most dramatic events produced by the solar photosphere (the “surface” of the Sun) are coronal mass ejections. When these occur and solar particles get spewed out into space, they can wash over the Earth and interact with our magnetic field. This interaction funnels the charged particles towards Earth’s own North and South magnetic poles — where the particles interact with molecules in Earth’s ionosphere and cause them to fluoresce — phenomena known as aurora borealis (northern lights) and aurora australis (southern lights).
In 2019, it was predicted that the solar maximum would likely occur sometime around July 2025. However, Nature does not have to conform with our predictions, and seems to be giving us the maximum earlier than expected.
Very strong solar activity — especially the coronal mass ejections — can indeed wreak some havoc on our satellite and communication electronics. Most often, it is fairly minor — we get what is known as a “radio blackout” that interferes with some of our radio communications. Once in a while, though, a major solar event occurs. The last of these was in 1859 in what is now known as the Carrington Event, which knocked out telegraph communications across Europe and North America. Should a similar solar storm happen today it would be fairly devastating, affecting major aspects of our infrastructure including our power grid and, (gasp), the internet itself.
-
Mike Seymour – Amid Industry Collapses, with guest panelist Scott Ross (ex ILM and DD)
Beyond Technicolor’s specific challenges, the broader VFX industry continues to grapple with systemic issues, including cost-cutting pressures, exploitative working conditions, and an unsustainable business model. VFX houses often operate on razor-thin margins, competing in a race to the bottom due to studios’ demand for cheaper and faster work. This results in a cycle of overwork, burnout, and, in many cases, eventual bankruptcy, as seen with Rhythm & Hues in 2013 and now at Technicolor. The reliance on tax incentives and outsourcing further complicates matters, making VFX work highly unstable. With major vendors collapsing and industry workers facing continued uncertainty, many are calling for structural changes, including better contracts, collective bargaining, and a more sustainable production pipeline. Without meaningful reform, the industry risks seeing more historic names disappear and countless skilled artists move to other fields.
-
Niels Cautaerts – Python dependency management is a dumpster fire
https://nielscautaerts.xyz/python-dependency-management-is-a-dumpster-fire.html
For many modern programming languages, the associated tooling has the lock-file based dependency management mechanism baked in. For a great example, consider Rust’s Cargo.
(more…)
Not so with Python.
The default package manager for Python is pip. The default instruction to install a package is to runpip install package. Unfortunately, this imperative approach for creating your environment is entirely divorced from the versioning of your code. You very quickly end up in a situation where you have 100’s of packages installed. You no longer know which packages you explicitly asked to install, and which packages got installed because they were a transitive dependency. You no longer know which version of the code worked in which environment, and there is no way to roll back to an earlier version of your environment. Installing any new package could break your environment.
… -
Meta Avat3r – Large Animatable Gaussian Reconstruction Model for High-fidelity 3D Head Avatars
https://tobias-kirschstein.github.io/avat3r
Avat3r takes 4 input images of a person’s face and generates an animatable 3D head avatar in a single forward pass. The resulting 3D head representation can be animated at interactive rates. The entire creation process of the 3D avatar, from taking 4 smartphone pictures to the final result, can be executed within minutes.
https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-researchers-generate-photorealistic-avatars-from-just-four-selfies
-
Shadow of Mordor’s brilliant Nemesis system is locked away by a Warner Bros patent until 2036, despite studio shutdown
The Nemesis system, for those unfamiliar, is a clever in-game mechanic which tracks a player’s actions to create enemies that feel capable of remembering past encounters. In the studio’s Middle-earth games, this allowed foes to rise through the ranks and enact revenge.
The patent itself – which you can view here – was originally filed back in 2016, before it was granted in 2021. It is dubbed “Nemesis characters, nemesis forts, social vendettas and followers in computer games”. As it stands, the patent has an expiration date of 11th August, 2036.
-
Crypto Mining Attack via ComfyUI/Ultralytics in 2024
https://github.com/ultralytics/ultralytics/issues/18037
zopieux on Dec 5, 2024 : Ultralytics was attacked (or did it on purpose, waiting for a post mortem there), 8.3.41 contains nefarious code downloading and running a crypto miner hosted as a GitHub blob.
FEATURED POSTS
-
Paul Debevec, Chloe LeGendre, Lukas Lepicovsky – Jointly Optimizing Color Rendition and In-Camera Backgrounds in an RGB Virtual Production Stage
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.12403.pdf
RGB LEDs vs RGBWP (RGB + lime + phospor converted amber) LEDs
Local copy:
-
Photography basics: Lumens vs Candelas (candle) vs Lux vs FootCandle vs Watts vs Irradiance vs Illuminance
https://www.translatorscafe.com/unit-converter/en-US/illumination/1-11/
The power output of a light source is measured using the unit of watts W. This is a direct measure to calculate how much power the light is going to drain from your socket and it is not relatable to the light brightness itself.
The amount of energy emitted from it per second. That energy comes out in a form of photons which we can crudely represent with rays of light coming out of the source. The higher the power the more rays emitted from the source in a unit of time.
Not all energy emitted is visible to the human eye, so we often rely on photometric measurements, which takes in account the sensitivity of human eye to different wavelenghts
Details in the post
(more…)
