The Forgotten Pixel's Lament

Since graduating university I have held down a semi-steady turned steady job in the animation industry, been a member of a panel on "starting a career in animation" at an animation festival, completed a title sequence for a student documentary, attended a game jam, moved to a flat in Bristol, and started running regularly (ish).

This is a list of very positive things, and myself and society look on them as achievements. Except perhaps the game jam, society probably still thinks that's a bit of a joke.

Then there is another list. Its a bit longer, and contains items such as:

1. Upload Kernel to the internet for the world to see
2. Complete rhino character
3. Complete music ident
4. Make a new and up to date showreel
5. Cultivate new professional opportunities
6. Write about games I care about/make me think
7. Write about things I make/participate in
8. Have ideas and be creative again
9. Do that god damn tax return

Some of these are for myself, painfully some are for other people, some are interdependent on each other, all are either incomplete or have never been started. The first three are complete only in the shame they cause me. How, after over 12 months, have I failed to post our own animated short online? I wanted it to be perfect, I wanted people to care, I wanted it to be a co-ordinated release to all the right people and places to showcase me and my friends. Instead, Kernel will be released much as a crazed Leonard might, slipping out the back door hoping no one sees, except I'm going to yell and point as he does a hobbling sprint down the street, attracting as much attention as possible.

Loz uploaded some photos from Kernel's development which were hysterical to browse through, seeing our tired faces and long hair.

Can you believe I lit most of the film on an old laptop?! I'd totally forgotten.

This finally gave me the kick to fix that out of sync foley track, put the new credits in, and re-upload Kernel. Maximum bit depth, 2 pass VBR compression, super high bit rate. Gorgeous.

Team Kernel

Maybe ticking that first thing off the list will help me move through the rest, maybe I should pledge to do so and re-ignite the blog. But I'm not going to pledge, because what's worse than not doing things is feeling guilty and ashamed for not doing things because you pledged to do them.

This looks too staged to be authentic.

Expect Kernel soon.

Directorial Legacy

Not long ago I was asked for some advice on making student films in the final year of university.

I thought I'd reproduce it here, with some considered editing. Here are the 8 arbitrarily chosen truths of student animated shorts.

• First off some background rendering knowledge, I wrote a tutorial on the linear lighting workflow and specifically using final gather to light your scenes, and about setting up for it, with exposures, colourspace, and stuff. A good grounding for rendering. Also This is a brilliant blog for mental ray rendering in general, a great resource for different techniques and tricks, and there are plenty of places to find out about linear workflow elsewhere on the internet.

• Start creating artwork soon, we were always short of design stuff, and the more you have the sooner you can start modelling, trick your artists into doing turn arounds if you can ;) Reference is so important, something I'm learning even now. If you have photographs or concepts to work to your art will shine shine shine. I'm not saying make everything photoreal, but faithfully recreating specific aspects of reality is vital- this lighting here, that material there, these shapes here, and these colours there.

• Make sure you know your stuff and have thought about the world, the characters, the practicalities of making the film, and anticipate the questions, then you'll be covered. Your team deserves a director that knows their story and can make decisions quickly based on a world that can hold up to scrutiny. You're going to be making hundreds of decisions, and fast, so if you have nothing to inform them you will struggle to keep up.

• No one seems to be able to avoid this but nail down the story as soon as possible, without compromising too much. People both above you and on your team will keep you making changes 'til the 11th hour and listen to what they have to say, but ignore the bits that don't feel right, or jeopardise the production. If you agree to things you don't feel comfortable with I guarantee you'll regret them later.

• If you're directing make sure its all working at a storyboard and animatic stage, and make sure your team is on board with it then, and NOT mutinying and demanding changes later. We kind of bodged our layout phase so I cant really advise much here, by this time the animatic was out of my hands so interpreting camera angles and timing was tricky, if you can, keep the storyboard artist and layout artist the same, someone with a cinematic eye to keep things consistent, if its done well these layout scenes can become the templates for every shot, incrementally becoming more complete with each pass.

• Finding a good file structure is essential and difficult. Breaking things down into folders of scenes and shots works, and organise props and characters separately. Nail this early. Make sure the team knows this early, and make sure they are fucking neat. Clean out scenes after they've been modelled etc, no spare shaders, textures, geometry etc, use the optimise scene tool, delete duplicate shading networks, merge texture files, cleanup meshes. Just the model alone. preferably unwrapped ;)

• Make sure your team talks to each other when they have a problem or they'll come straight to you and you won't be able to spend time fixing everything. Texture at a high resolution, you can always downsize later, you can never upsize. We thought we could get away with some small textures and then ended up having giant pixels everywhere,texture at 4k for large props, just to be safe, 2k for small props. Be efficient with UV space, while its not essential because memory is rarely an issue it makes texuring and shading much faster to only have one texture map to refresh. Don't use tiffs, theyre enormous, pngs are good, jpegs are only acceptable when very uncompressed. No ngons (polygons with more than 4 corners), try and unwrap neatly, one, maybe two textures per model. rather than a texture for each bit of the model. I recommend roadkill, free, effective, slightly buggy. If you don't clean up things like ngons mudbox and other software will reject the mesh outright.

• Learn nuke, it'll serve you well in the industry later. but if you don't feel confident or comfortable with it (like I didn't) after effects is still fantastic, just try and avoid the default stuff and customise the look as much as possible. While we're on look, don't just stick lamberts on everything, shaders make your look (aside from colour and form). They make it look clayey, or glossy, or fuzzy, or whatever. They define the overall feel the objects in your world have. For Kernel the key lookdev research was about translucency. See through surfaces of the green house, thin leaves absorbing light, and Leonard's skin doing the same. All those things took aaaaaaaaages of tweaking and experimenting to 'perfection'. Use the mia_material_x_passes and put fresnel on everything, even if its just a little bit.

With a good story, the most hard work you've ever done, and good people, you can make an awesome fillm, and you will never have been prouder in your life.



Here's a little nugget I found on my phone the other day, its reference for this shot.
I love my really unhelpful directing. "Now do this, and this, now this. Done." Functional I suppose.

Pixel Propaganda

A cool looking tool for designing game mechanics, quite in depth though.

Some fancy realtime(ish) rendering techniques using Maya's viewport 2.0.

A great look at the making of indie game Limbo, and its unusual development process and team.

The new Blender Foundation film incorporates live action and, as always, is extremely impressive considering its open source software.

Encounters

Kernel was recently screened at the Bristol animation festival "Animated Encounters" as part of the 'best of the south west' screenings. This is very cool, and I even attended the screening. Watching the film on a big screen again was great, it looks so good with all its revisions.

There was some drama leading up to the screening with problems surrounding the projection of the film in a special DCP (digital cinema package) file and frames being dropped, but I'm pretty sure what the projectionists were noticing was the duplicate frames that were already in Kernel to compensate for corrupted renders. The DCP format is now something I'm really interested in as the ideal way of showing a film, there are open source ways of encoding a film down from the highest quality possible (16bit TIFF 4K frames) onto special servers that stream the video into the projector. The only problem is unless you have one such fancy projector there's no way of testing what was just encoded I don't think.

I may, or may not, be working on something related to this...

I bumped into tutors Andy Wyatt and Derek Hayes at encounters, and caught up with how the course was expanding, how the London show went- which I unfortunately missed. I also saw Omari at the festival and he introduced me to some of his new producer friends, master networker that he is. Everyone seemed beyond impressed at my current position at Aardman so it was nice to revel in the incredibly humbling successes of the last few months. I'm now a graduate for god's sake, weird weird weird.

I'm missing being able to talk about my work on the blog, I'm guessing I will only be able to resume real posting once a project I've been involved with becomes complete and is finally released, then I can expose its inner workings! Everything I create at Aardman seems to be better than the last thing, I'm constantly improving with new tools and fewer technological boundaries, it feels great and I'm dying to share it. So until then, or something else of note happens, The Pixel Crush will be transitioning in and out of hibernation.

Komplete

Lots to tell, lots to share.

New Life

Kernel. That film we were making. We finished it! We finished it in time, in style, and in a way that makes me very proud. It is an enormous achievement and I hope the final film reflects that, though I fear anyone outside of animation may not quite grasp the scale of the undertaking.

Unfortunately it won't be available online in the near future as we want to enter it to festivals, and festivals like exclusivity sometimes, so if its publicly available they get upset.
I can however send anyone who wants to see it a private link, so just send me an email or something.

Death Beckons

It wouldn't have felt right if it wasn't all right up to the wire, and so I was still compositing all through the night til 7am, and then again at 2pm, and then it was just a question of staying awake while the 8 DVDs worth of frames burnt. We even had an emergency render of a missing 8 frame stretch which Nigel had to plug. This wouldn't have been possible had we not discovered what was slowing down everyone's computers except mine, turns out, it was the hotfix. You can update Maya (and assume Mental Ray too) but downloading and installing hotfixes from the autodesk website, for both Nigel and Ryan this shortened their renders by 26 minutes per frame. Extraordinary. So, everyone go install the hotfixes right now, just in case.

Title Shot

A special thanks to Gabriel Nathan who recorded and mixed all the foley and sound effects for us, he not only did a great job at helping us tell the story and bring the world to a new level of believability, but also was in the studio with us right up til the last, syncing up the final bits and pieces.

The best a beards ever looked

More renders...

Rallying the plants.

We had a single celebratory drink in the stannery and then crashed. Thanks to everyone involved, really, you were amazing. Leonard is just relaxing now until the sequel, maybe it'll have backstory this time?

King Kernel

Also, for the press pack we recorded some bios and interview materials with the team, here it is edited down. Funny and informative ;)



Since then its been a little less full on but not a lot, if you are reading this via email or a feed reader you should go to The Pixel Crush proper and check out the fancy redesign, there's even a faux home page. Also I made business cards, and a showreel for the professional practice module:



The other part of the professional practice module was to research and write a presentation about a potential role in industry. I of course tried to find out more about the job of the lighting artist and started this thread in the hope that it'd get some answers. Amazingly it seems there are just professionals hovering around this site waiting to help out and converse with anyone, so I got some great answers from some fairly prestigious people.

The other project that needed doing was "innovations", which I'm going to save for another post, and maybe do something special involving some other people's innovations project.

Pixel Propaganda

Doublefine pulled off some amazing crowd funding showing that people will support games that they would love to see even before they've been made.

Some cool and hilariously detailed technology for creating the weave of a jersey out of geometry.

This was a film I saw at two separate animation events and it continues to be one of my favourite films of all time, I want everyone to see it its very beautiful and has a fascinating way of presenting life and its perception.


Some great lighting stuff on the HDR bubbles in speed racer, hard to summarise but from a shading and rendering stand point very worthwhile.

Far Cry 3 is a game that has looked progressively less interesting until now! An interview with one of the writers has some genuinely interesting things to say about the game which may just save some of the more questionable elements shown, though if they're just narrative justification for stupid gameplay I will not be happy.

Neil Gaimen had a great deal of quality advice to give to some new graduates, I wonder if we'll have someone fancy at ours? hahahahaha...

The Closest You're Getting To A Teaser Trailer

 ONE

 LAST

PUSH.

 KERNEL.

COMING

 SOON.

Pixel Propaganda

Some videogames saved some kids.

But videogames are stupid, why don't we expect more from them?

Especially when they can communicate amazing things.

Perhaps the way the are currently made is central to their perceived stupidity.

Yet people seem to care about even the stupidestest of them so damn much, which is stupid.

----X----

A precursor to Leonard?

Kernel Condensed

Lets try something new:

I'mwaytoobusytowriteablogpostsoinsteadImgoingtouploadallmytestrendersforyoutoenjoywithminimalprose

I'd somehow forgotten about my awesome lambert lighting workflow, its so fast, I love it!

Plus it looks so gorgeous its almost a shame that all that colour gets absorbed by the textures in the final render.

The beauty of final gather, in this sequence the use is minimal and its almost more of a glorified and accurate ambient light. But much slower. Though I have started playing with the min and max radius settings which control the area and therefore speed of the final gather. Above is before, below is after.

These renders are from ages ago. I couldn't figure out how to make this exterior shot look better and you know what always makes things better?...

...rim lights, they emphasise outline and form. and help Leonard stand out from the background, these are special rim lights that only effect Leonard and nothing else in the scene.

Even from a distance they work well. (Enlarge to see them working well).

After referencing in all the props and sets this scene still look worringly bare, so we got our trusty 2nd year Sebastian to jump on it and conjure up some details for the top of Leonard's skyscraper, with limited time he managed to generate some models, and faithful Ryan completed the task admirably with textures, prop placement and cleanup.

 Just when I thought I was done with the greenhouse...

Another sneaky trick in lighting is to create a light that only emits specular (shiny) light rather than diffuse (soft) light, and then attach it to only the eyes of a character. This allows you to create lots of tight highlights that bring out that glistening, alive look, in a character's eyes. As seen below (enlarge to see below).

I was being useless with my feedback for a particularly tricky shot to comp so I made this as a template for the city composites, to communicate the visual style I had in mind. It still amazes me what you can do to a plain render with compositing. God rays, lens smut, and lens flare save the day.

That post was not as succinct as I originally planned, but I think thats a good thing.

Pixel Propaganda

Richard Lemarchand, a great game designer whose words made into into my dissertation, recently left Naughty Dog after working on the Uncharted games. He's gone to teach, travel, and make experimental games. I want to go with him.

The guys at Digital Domain made a making of for real steel and the use of Vray renderer in it. Its really cool, some great breakdowns, and a lot of talk about the est features of Vray, makes me wish mental ray had them.


Creative director at Irrational Games, Ken Levine always has interesting things to say about writing for games, mostly because they way he writes for them work so well with the medium, despite coming from a cinematic background.

I still can't quite believe several things about this trailer. Firstly its running on proprietary technology, secondly that its realtime, thirdly that it was made by 2 people, and lastly that the game its promoting actually sounds legitimately interesting. Very very exciting.


Also legitimately exciting: when people who write interesting things about games fling down their pen and exasperation and go and make them themselves. Nels Anderson wrote a great blog and now he's a gameplay designer at Klei working on Mark of the Ninja. Which looks like an awesome, intensional stealth game, where all the games systemic elements are visually represented to maximise player understanding and agency.

A Whole Lotta Len

Weekends are traps. You're powering along one second kicking keys and taking frames, then its friday evening and you go to bed. Now its Saturday morning, late morning, now its the afternoon, your heads so fuzzy you can't get out of bed. Its more like a weakend its so hard to do anything, I swear if you just looped back to Monday on Friday evening this would not be a problem. But I feel better now, and know Monday will be easier for it.

It was a big week with the presentation of the Edit In Progress that Charlie did a majestic job with. SO MUCH ANIMATION got done for it there's only a couple of blocks of scenes left to start, the rest is in hand or finished. We blew ourselves away, which was great for morale.

What I've been up to is scrambling to keep up with the rendering to be done as a consequence of this, its been great to have new environments to light as I am thoroughly sick of the greenhouse, its heavy, and slow, and gorgeous. But there are still some key shots left to do there as the dynamics are now ready for them.

These are two frames from shots Hugh has been working on.

I had a lot of fun lighting the airlock, its a small space with clearly defined sources of light in the two windows and HAL light. Its quick to render and gives a lot of control and definition to the lighting artist. I started by creating the base lights to work from and got some pleasing looks but were too hot looking, almost furnace like.

I experimented a lot with area lights for the windows as they fit the shape well and had a more realistic falloff in terms of shape. But they also had a tricky intensity different to the spotlights I used in the shed which made it had to get everything lit, hence the blow out furnace look. It wasn't until the second airlock shot I lit that I tried the CPU meltingly expensive area light with raytraced shadows. The area light with raytraced shadows is the most realistic lighting tool bar image based methods, and it is slow and stunning. I applied one to the outside of the door and it evenly lit Leonard's face, beard, and mask so realistically it made the old light look retarded. Its something mental ray is moving more and more towards as they refine and speed up their raytracing stuff.

Depthmap

While I love this shot, perhaps my favourite so far, the way the depth map area light illuminates the face, beard, and fur is very uneven and oddly exposed compared to the one below where, his beard in the correct shade of grey, looks soft and realistically lit, his skin shader is scattering correctly, and his mask has a nice rim lighting to it. Its hard to see the direct improvement when I don't have the render of how bad this second shot looked before, the mask was just a white blob.

Raytraced.

So now I'm on the last frontier of lighting. The exterior. I already have the city lights to work from but they are by far the weakest in my eyes and aren't much of a starting point. It also doesn't help that the top of Leonard's skyscraper is very barren looking, even the texture is low-res, so we've drafted in Sebastian again to pretty it up after the great stuff he did in the city.

Pixel Propaganda

Our own Tom wrote a good post about what he wants out of our final major projects. He even commends Jake on answering the call of the keyframes and stepping up to a task that he wasn't necessarily prepared for, like many of the Kernel team have had to.

And interesting announcement came from a studio formed by one of the writers at Rock Paper Shotgun about an open world game they are making about AI, autonomy, terrain generation, and not making the player the centre of the gameplay systems. Also it has an English aristocracy themed character aesthetic. Awesome.

Someone wrote a profile on Jonathan Blow, who I love, and there's a bit in the article where he's hanging out playing Littlebigplanet, which I love, with Tom Bissell, an author who I love. Never wanted to be somewhere so much in my life. Though on the whole the article takes a very negative stance on games in general which is a shame.

There's been some controversy due to the amount of bigotry towards EA due to the same sex relationships in their games. As a proud lesbian in Mass Effect 3 I think everyone should read Charlie Brooker's excellent response to these people, even Stephen Fry got involved. Says something about the cultural awareness games now have.

There's a lot of stuff I have to share thats piled up between posts, and this is an amazing interview from the creator of Journey.

Then there's some stuff on Peter Molyneux leaving Lionhead to make 'great' things. I love that attitude at this point in his career.

Painstaking Pixels

I don't know where to start.

When I'm writing these blogs I usually go through the images and renders I've saved over the week that I want to share and base the writing around them, I didn't used to do that, but they've become so long and sprawling and infrequent that its the only way I can remember.

So if you'll please turn to figure 1.0

Mosscott

Here we have an image of Moss Scott, the mascot for Kernel during studio time. He partly exists due to the number of times I asked Ryan to cover everything in moss, partly as a nest for the rivet we found in the studio (I think) that matches Leonard's rivet perfectly, and partly to keep spirits up with his jokes.

Figure 2.0

This is the look of the final knowledge cloud and its thanks to Kai's fluid fanciness that it looks this detailed, I borrowed a combination of his and the script's lights to light it like this. He's also placed a particle system in the center which orbits the central light like a nucleus. This was the first time I'd properly used lights with a negative intensity before. Its great because you can actually subtract light from the surroundings and its what gives the cloud that deep red underside.

Figure 3.0

This is the shot that the mask was made for, to properly reveal Leonard, but that strap has been a complete bastard to simulate. Not only did it take forever to fix as it intersected with his head and face over and over again, when it came to render time Maya just ignored the cache and re-simulated it, managing to get the strap right through his nose and mouth for the last 50 or so frames. Why?
I love the red and blue colour palette of this shot's lighting. What was useful about this shot was it forced me to make some final tweaks to the fur and eye shaders so they held up to close scrutiny a little better.
Figure 3.1

Not what he signed up for.

Figure 4.0

I've taken to lighting Leonard alone at first in some scenes now as they are so heavy with geometry and dynamics that it takes half the render time just 'translating the frame' which essentially is it copying everything to the RAM I think, so it can render. This way it copies relatively little and I can start seeing what changes I need to make without have to wait 5 minutes.

Figure 4.1

I got carried away and starting compositing this one. Delicious. You can just see the beginning of Liam's lights and the animated shader I worked on with him. It should look spectacular in motion.

Figure 5.0

As Len's darkest moment where he realises his oxygen is broken, I figured it was time to take that darkness quite literally. And also time to break out the lens flare, but not too much, keep it classy.
Whats weird is this was rendered with final gather, which seems to have covered up the sub surface effect I was getting through his ear. I believe this is because the diffuse light is stronger than the scattered light, but I don't understand why there are such dark bits in his ear. I may have to fake the final gather to get that back, I'd turned it right down anyway so its only go to speed up render time.

We have around 5 weeks left. Its going to be interesting. I am still optimisitic.

Pixel Propaganda

I'm proud to say I understand 90% of what they're talking about in the new release of mental ray's update notes.

An article I'd been meaning to read for weeks turned out to be pretty interesting. Its on one of Pixar's cinematographers. She talks about how her painting allowed her make some observations that helped improve the atmospherics lighting in one of their films.

A good interview with the father of the Metal Gear games. he talks about why and how he innovates and some of his feelings about his own creative successes and failures.

We Built This City...

The Greenhouse, From The Outside

Final lighting for the greenhouse is complete  as seen above from both the exterior, and below from the interior:

This is one of those old blog posts, it sits in the drafts section getting a bit stale, its still tastes good but the texture isn't as fresh as it once was and you're not quite sure which tense to write it in now, two weeks since the last post.

Team Kernel made a city. It doesn't have a name but its in keeping with the Kernel visual style, conveys the oppressive and ubiquitous theme of ignorance, and the majority of it was in fact modelled and textured by our faithful second year Sebastian. Since he completed it I've been going through tweaking the textures very slightly, creating reflection maps for the windows, and applying shaders to it before I could light it.

Shiny Window Shaders

I started with the same workflow as the greenhouse with a final gather sphere, and this time a directional light. The colours from the sphere were overly green though, while I like the effect, its not contrasting enough to the greenhouse. Also its hard to tell anything for sure without the atmospherics and smog in the scene.

The Greenhouse Effect

I tweaked the final gather incandescence map  to create a more neutral colour palette but lost too much of the character of the environment so opted to create a more controlled incandescence map. I wanted to create a bright spot in the center for the sun and have that tail of into the darker edges of the city. What I ended up with is this bluer, smudgier, more focused lighting map:

Final Gather Incandescence Map

The city is really simply lit scene, by far the quickest I've made, but still pretty slow to render once I added the smog Alan made which has raytraced shadows through it. There are just some really simple point lights filling out the hollow buildings and a spot and point light combination illuminating the frame buildings to highlight the architecture.

...On Rock & Roll

I'd neutralised the colours of the final gather and sunlight at this point, but it just lost all sense of atmosphere. Getting the sunlight onto the smog was tricky because I had a mental ray physical sun shader on the directional light to create quicker soft shadows on the buildings, which worked great, but this meant that it would work with the fluid. So I separated out the smog onto a separate render layer and created a layer over-ride that made the directional light ignore the physical sun shader and just do a simple raytrace shadow. But this didn't create the correct shadows until I'd made a duplicate city, that was invisible, but still casted shadows. After this elaborate work around it turned out fine.

Billboards have they're own dedicated spot lights.

The Smog of Ignorance

Now that all the assets have been generated for Kernel, all the sets, props, dynamics most people have moved onto animation. This means that instead of our one man animation army we have at least 7 animators at the moment, progress as absolutely blitzing and I can barely keep up with lighting each shot, its fantastic! We have every shot accounted for by an animator for two thirds of the film. It just go to show that there comes a tipping point in every project where all the manufacturing of pretty things is completed, allowing the actual film making to start, the performance, lighting, and rendering of each shot. Morale seems to be up, productivity seems to be up, at this rate we're going to finish with something not only pretty, but quite substantial. Have a render, click to enlarge:

Leonard Enters The Greenhouse

Apparently I wrote a dissertation in my down time, no big deal. I even made a front cover for it which just reminds me of when I went to a Steiner school and there was a lot of emphasis in taking pride in your work and the presentation of it. I wanted to illustrate the main argument pictorially so I made a triangle of game mechanics (cogs), ideas (lightbulb), and the thoughts and feelings they generate (brain/heart). It would be awesome to get this published somewhere but I'm not sure how to go about doing that. Maybe I'll post it on the blog in chapters, or smaller installments, but I don't know that anyone would actually read it.

The Process of Meaning

Pixel Propaganda

Frictional games, creators of the excellent Amnesia: Dark Descent, often have interesting things to say about game design. Thomas Grip here talks about their approach to game design and how its unconventional, it seems like its most definitely the best direction games could be going in.

He crops again in this interesting gamasutra article on storytelling in games which also features the writers of Portal 2.

I love Braid, I love Jonathan Blow, and everyone should always listen to everything he says because hes always right. While that may not be true, its the feeling I get when I hear him speak, all his design philosophies come from the right places.

Autodesk released a bunch of talks on their youtube channel and this one was actually given by a student and some of the points he made were particularly familiar to our work on Kernel. Especially the emphasis on each team member filling multiple roles over the course of production.



There was another talk on the lighting in Killzone 3 and a part about the use of volume lights, something I'm not used to using which seemed to work really well and was very interesting.

Quantic Dream, the studio behind my favourite game of 2010 Heavy Rain recently released a short film which doubles as a tech demo for their new game engine. I'm excited for whatever they do next from a design perspective, but graphically, having moved to PC, this looks dated in comparison.




P.S. Happy 30,000 views to The Pixel Crush.