Yiming's News 2025/11/04

It's been two months again since my last update, how's everyone doing? I had quite a ride from bcon then back and got infected with some flu and got better etc etc. I hope everyone's healthy and doing their best!

IBC Visit

The second day I arrived in Amsterdam I went to see the International Broadcasting Convention which is pretty cool cause I like to see what cameras and lenses companies are doing.

Although, it's not that good to me personally first of all because it's broadcasting oriented so there will be fewer stuff that's for consumer. And secondly every camera companies are too video oriented and they are not quite video friendly either. They want you to use a DLSR/mirrorless styled body to do video work instead of coming out with better camcorders which is quite a bit more suitable for daily videoing and sometimes background blur too if you zoom all the way in. Nowadays all we got was big sensor mirrorless with a lens that doesn't have much zoom capabilities.

I'm waiting for canon to maybe come out with a G3X replacement 1-inch thing, or just go with the XA70 camcorder for video. Otherwise, I'll just get a GFX100RF for stills and that's gonna be good enough for me.

It's super cool to see a lot of chinese manufacturers coming to the show, DZO/Laowa/Viltrox/Sirui/Yongnuo etc all came and I tried their new lenses and stuff. It's so nice to see these developments from China that provides cheap but also quality + unique alternatives to other manufacturers.

BCon 2025

Then I attended Blender conference. Man this time the Blender conference has been quite nice! I have took quite a bit of pictures and talked to a lot of like minded people.

I did a small lighting talk about Our Paint^↗ this time, mainly to advertise Our Paint promote the mentality that artists and programmers can both use a bit of the thought process from each other and take a look at their problem from the perspective of the other side. This is what makes the project of Our Paint possible after all. And considering a lot of creative guys are also quite multi disciplinary, I think it's a nice thing to promote to people who use Blender and take advantage of the human creativity.

I did purchase a nice CWU-27P flight suit in the aviation mega store to the south of schiphol airport. It turns out to still be cheaper than to buy second hand form Chinese importers.

and Sweden trip

Sweden is nice. Still a bit expensive everything. Uppsala was such a nice town with rich history. Shout out to Teej and Gaia who showed me around and explained a lot of the stories behind things. We went to saw the silver bible, the church of course, and peter cat etc. It gives a very nice old European town feeling (well at least in the middle of the city I guess?)

I did art jam with Teej which is super nice! It's the first time we've seen each other in real life and it is such a fun experience. I gave one of my finished drawing book (with the helicopter comic) to Teej for souvenir and Teej gave me the OG Taji drawing she did which is super lovely!

In the end of the trip I made a photo book with my color laser printer and some nice thin paper. It looked quite awesome! I should print out more of my photos this way.

AND guess what I was too lazy to do anything afterwards with my photos, so I didn't upload any of them to the website yet. (Truth is, my website bandwidth is low and I don't know a better way to archive/present my pictures in a good way on line still, but I'll figure out a way)

New Art

Continuation of Fairy Tree series... But in a bit more simplified look... And some other pieces are all in my website gallery^↗

New Project...?

So I have always been thinking about making my designs into reality, or basically what my brain is always at making stuff and thinking about how a structure can be made. This leads me to always trying to find a way to do lo-fi manufacturing in my home and trying to source tooling and etc.

This leads me to the road of doing all sorts of 3d printing, because home machine shop is way over budget and space limit. Sad news is that consumer grade 3d printing machine isn't nearly as dependable. And it's way slow/stinky.

Eventually (like... now?) I find out that with the time and effort and electricity I spend on home manufacturing it's not really the most efficiently way of producing anything, even if you factor in the logistic timing and cost. So for now I've decided to create 3D prints of my designs by using a 3rd party service provider which can use much better processes and make much sturdier model.

So with this conclusion, I started thinking about what to make. Previously I did a paining of my gunner characters a little more than a month ago, and in there I drew a concept gun that I pretty like (mostly proportion), and then I started making structural drawings and refining them. Currently I'm in the process of splitting parts and figuring out all the plastic connection structures. The progress is show, but I think in the end I'm gonna be able to make a nylon print of the entire thing and assemble/spray paint. Fingers crossed, it should work reasonably well.

AND, now I have just updated a thread dedicated to this project^↗, hopefully I can slowly make progress on it!

Well...

I'll try to make updates to my website more consistent. I feel none of the social media really bring much nowadays. I've seen people finding out about stuff like Our Paint from RSS feeds and stuff, so I think that is still a valid option. And I like small communities formed around web rings and specialized forums.

I guess have a nice day everybody? :D That's it for my updates. See you guys next time!