About
Hi, I'm Scott, and I'm the author of the content on this site. I currently write about Octane Render and AI to help creators.
Part I: Driving Force|Driving Force
I'm very curious about things. I want to know how they work, why they fail, and how to work with them to get the best results. I learn best when I'm exploring and documenting processes, and I'm willing to dig deep and fall down rabbit holes to figure out how to limit frustration. I want to make my findings available to as many people as possible.
I also have an idealistic streak, so I'm not going to put anything on this site that I personally wouldn't want to see, use, or be subjected to.
Part II: My Stance on AI|AI Stance
I'm a big fan of the concept of AI. Wait, don't leave :)
I'm not a fan of all the noise surrounding it. It's marketed poorly, vastly misunderstood and misrepresented (intentionally or otherwise), and causing all manner of chaos and harm as it gets its footing in our culture.
I intend to fix that.
I wish. No, I intend to understand it and document my findings because despite all that, it's incredibly useful to creators. I spent two weeks building the theme for this site using the $20/mo Claude subscription, and learned a massive amount in the process.
The most important thing to me here is that the writing is mine. These are my words, mistakes and all. AI can help with research, content suggestions or pointing out inconsistencies, but it's not putting pen to paper in my name.
So what is that I find so appealing about it? Well, while I'm comfortable writing and designing...
I'm not a coder. I've tried - my brain just isn't wired that way. The way it is wired is to keep asking why and iterate and iterate and iterate, and that makes human developers want to slug me. I have some experience with web design, so I was able to build a design system, layouts, and site graphics, but until now that was about as far as I could go. I was curious if I could use Claude (mostly Opus) to build and troubleshoot a custom-tailored Ghost theme for my guides from scratch, and you're looking at the result. Would a good coder be impressed? I seriously doubt it. Did Claude get pissed at me when I told it to make 50,000 CSS changes in a row and asked it to bear with me while I learned how to best work with it? nope.
I'm not a sculptor. I know basic tenets of topology and what makes a good mesh, but I can't sit down with Zbrush and knock out a nice looking elephant, octopus, frog, guinea pig, or especially a bird from scratch. What I can do is use Octane to make stuff look nice based on the things I've learned writing about it over the last four years. So instead of spending a few weeks making 5 not-so-great mascots for the site, I used text-to-image, and then image-to-3D to build trash geo with diffuse and normal maps. I then went in and cleaned up the mesh and had Claude write me a script to extract the maps from the .glb files so I could weave them into my Octane materials. From there it was just about getting the right look with the lighting and backdrop, and the results are what you see at the top of all the first-level nav pages here. That took maybe a few hours start-to-finish.
I don't have enough time in my life to become an expert in everything I'm interested in (I absolutely would if I could), so I'm going to use the tools at my disposal to achieve the things I'm not willing to put the 10,000 hours into mastering. Used appropriately, AI's good for that, and I'm documenting what I find to create the set of AI guides found on this site so you can use these workflows too.
Part III: About the name|The Name
For a long time, my guides were just called "Octane Guides". Straight to the point, nothing cute.
As my interests expanded, I needed a broader name for the project. I wanted to keep "Guides" in the name, but also wanted it to be flexible enough to cover whatever I end up getting into.
While researching LLMs, I was hit with the term "context" over and over and realized that since my guides can sometimes get up to (or over) 10,000 words, that was kind of what I was doing - providing enough context so the concepts made sense.
Hence, Contextual Guides.