Creator Spotlight: Hannes Hummel (Friday, May 12th) (BTN)
The latest entry in the Creator Spotlight Series
This week’s Behind-the-Network takes a look at a creator’s journey from academia to web-3 and the Render Network. Hannes Hummel has taken his rich, layered personal history and translated that into a palpable depth that is felt within his pieces. Outside of personal success, Hannes has also strived to build out a collective for himself and other artists, which has seen more success as the years have gone by. Without further ado, let’s dive into this week’s Render Network Creator Spotlight:
Unconventional Origins
Often throughout creator spotlights we’ve highlighted individuals rise either through art schools as a student, or outside of them as a professional, but rarely have we had a chance to feature someone from the teaching track and a professional background. But Hannes Hummel, based out of Cologne, Germany, has never been one to shy away from a shift in perspective. Working as a lecturer in experimental VR design will lend itself to an evolving sense of perspective. Hannes took this experience with him to his next career step as a multidisciplinary designer and 3D artist for various studios.
Around 2021 is when he began the leap that would catapult him to where he is today. Transitioning to more independent art work, the rise of NFTs allowed for Hannes to more easily distribute and monetize his personal work, helping to showcase his style to a broader audience and support his creativity.
“With the advent of NFTs as a digital distribution format, I have been able to showcase my work to a broader global audience, and my art has been featured in galleries, art expos, and festivals worldwide.”
Drawing from Nature
When observing a Hannes Hummel piece, the level of craftsmanship at play is evident. The level of detail in each creation is astounding, but this extends beyond the finished product, permeating every step of the creative process. As he describes it, his process is akin to a “digital collage” of various technologies, including 3D scanning for objects such as the flowers, traditional modeling techniques, and most recently the use of AI tools in order to craft seamless textures and background elements and assets.
“A considerable amount of time is devoted to asset creation for my scenes, which frequently consist of hundreds of small details. Assembling these components into a cohesive scene is the most enjoyable aspect of the process for me, and it has a meditative quality to it.”
Perhaps one of the most interesting elements of Hannes work that may go under the radar to the viewer is the relationship between two spheres of the natural world: botany and mathematics.
“Approximately five years ago, while creating my first “digital flower” arrangement, I spent a considerable amount of time just observing and immersing myself in nature. This experience sparked a profound fascination with the relationship between botany and mathematical shapes & patterns. Although nature may seem chaotic at first glance, closer inspection reveals underlying “rules” like the Fibonacci sequence.”
Like the Flemish oil painting masters and Japanese woodblock artisans of centuries past, Hannes saw in the natural world a controlled chaos, a beauty that, like the creation of digital pieces themselves, could be translated into numerical sequences in order to be more understood. Keeping a level head and keen eye amongst turbulent elements has served Hannes well in his creative process, and since his transition into the web3 world, it’s served him even better.
Render Network and the Bloom Collective
Incorporating AI generative tools into his workflow has not been the only innovative tool that Hannes has added to his toolkit lately. Having seen many fellow creatives in the web3 space using the Render Network, Hannes became interested in the service and how it might aid him. Having seen the rapid rendering times available with minimal upfront cost, Hannes has been working on transitioning his workflow to one based around the Render Network, with a minimal hardware setup that allows him to work more remotely and efficiently, while delegating the resource-intensive rendering to the Network.
The Render Network has been excited to help with the creation pipeline for Hannes, and hopes to become a larger part of the pipeline for the “Bloom” collective as well. As Hannes puts it,
“Bloom is a global art collective consisting of eleven artists who specialize in various fields, including photography, traditional fine art, 3D, & AI art…. Unlike typical collectives that revolve around a shared artistic trait, the common denominator in our collective is rather intellectual than thematic. Each member operates independently but frequently collaborates to discuss art, processes, and ideas, as well as organize global events together.”
Operating as a kind of modern edition of the enlightenment age French Salon, “Bloom” members have had pieces featured in galleries around the world, exhibitions throughout the web3 space, and will surely become more integral to the Web3 evolution as it continues to progress. As an advocate of growth and innovation, we’re happy to hopefully become a backbone for the growing digital “second-family” of Hannes and his fellow Bloom members.
GPU Technology Conference (GTC) Keynote
As recapped in April, GTC 2023 was a landmark conference in the history of computing, marking the rise of consumer AI. Render Network Founder Jules Urbach gave a keynote talk exploring the future of GPU rendering and the intersections between AI and next generation holographic graphics. The video of the talk is now publicly available, so have highlighted important sections with updates on the future of the Render Network and AI in the section below.
Expanding the Ecosystem
Over the last year the Render Network has continued to expand its offerings and the overall potential of the network. Last year saw the announcement of a long-term working partnership with Maxon to bring C4D and Redshift to the Render Network. Since then, work has continued and has started to bear fruit, with tests running C4D and Redshift natively on the Render Network now in a testing phase before a Beta rollout.
On top of the working additions of Redshift and C4D, work has been undertaken to bring NeRFs (previously covered in an earlier BTN) to the Render Network. In this case, NeRFs and Lightfields will be interacting with the Render Network on the backend, where they will be functionally created, while they will be editable in Octane on the frontend.
Keeping in line with modern additions, work on adding Stable Diffusion to the Render Network has been bearing fruit, with previews of the Web App interface for the Stable Diffusion jobs on Render Network below:
Stable Diffusion jobs will be able to be run off of previous rendered jobs in your account, as well as having the ability to edit and remix the stable diffusion elements through the in-app photoshop app through Photopea. These integrations are the first of potentially more involving AI, with the Render Network possibly expanding out to include Large Language Model programs like ChatGPT, or users allowing their work to be used in running large AI models and receive compensation in return directly through the Render Network interface.
In line with further expanding the remixability of the Render Network, the Render Network SDK has continued to be worked on, and under the purview of the Render Network Foundation, may come to fruition later in 2023. All of these updates are showcasing the continued efforts of the Render Network to stay up to date with current market trends, as well as continuing to evolve past those same trends and into what the future of the Metaverse demands.
Best of the Metaverse
- As part of the growing CryptoCubes ecosystem, many Render Network creators will be featured in the 7th installment of CryptoCubes & Creators on Nifty Gateway May, 17th.
- Early Render Network OG power user Rhett Mankind was featured in Fortune Magazine for creating a performance art token “TurboToad Token”, created entirely by using GPT-4 prompts, and which had surged to over a 150 million market capitalization. The token is now being used for NFT drops and exclusives, with a DAO in the process of formation. You can also see a video here where Rhett discusses the process, inspiration and personal story behind creating Turbo Toad Token and his artistic evolution.
- Render Network users David Ariew and Bloo Woods took part in the latest edition of Maxon’s Design and Animation Tour (DAT): DAT: Denver — which is sponsored by the Render Network — talking about scaling workflows from Octane to near unlimited GPUs on the Render Network.
- The Render Network Knowledge Base was updated to add a new section on the Render Network Foundation and the Render Network Proposal (RNP) process where community members can get involved in the network’s decentralized governance.
Join us in the Rendering Revolution at:
Website: https://render.x.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rendernetwork
Knowledge Base: https://know.rendernetwork.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/rendernetwork
Render Network Foundation: https://renderfoundation.com/
