Symfony is a great framework for medium sized projects, especially if you have a small team working together the various parts of a site. If you are alone though, the advantages are not so clear. Having said that, the auto-generated admin pages were really helpful to get the site going very quickly. And I will miss some of the features I coded for the old site like download support for multiple resolutions and preview for different aspect ratio monitors.

One good thing about Wordpress is the active community and many plugins and themes. Although I haven’t found any plugins for displaying wallpapers, I’m sure I will try my hand at building one similar to the old cubemine. The current theme ” Atahualpa” was a great find since its very clean and keeps with the old site’s overall look.

And starting with the new site, I’ve changed the license terms for the wallpapers posted here. Actually, there’s no real license and, unless otherwise stated in the page, my work is now under the Creative Commons CC0. Why? Well, given that some of my images have appeared all over the Internet without any attribution given, it will not make much of a difference now. Besides, any money I get to make of this site is through commissions and any decent person that uses my images already links back without having to be asked.

And this reminds me: no more adds on this site. It just didn’t make any sense. If you however find my work useful and want to give something back or just want to help with the hosting fees, I’m setting up a shiny new donate button on the License page.

Hopefully, now I will get more organized to post some new stuff and get back to help the awesome LuxRender team. They are approaching the 0.6 release and things are looking great now that Indigo and Kerkythea are going commercial.

One last thing, I want to send a BIG thanks to Thomas from Pixel Partner for sending me an OpenKMQ kit some time ago. It’s a very interesting stereoscopic system with acrylic glasses which does not give headaches, like colored glasses, or dims the image, like shutter glasses. I’ve been meaning to write a head tracker with a webcam so I could do cool things like this:

Anyways, first things first!

Cheers,

—Ratow

I know I’ve been very inactive lately. The last wallpaper I posted here was almost a year ago! To compensate this and to commemorate the soon-to-be-released YoFrankie open game, I just posted four wallpapers I’ve been slowly creating since the Big Buck Bunny movie DVD arrived here.

Here they are:

Big Buccaneer

My Precious

Pink And The Brain

Forest Edge

I just want to make this clear:  all those images were created thanks to the generous people at the Blender Foundation who made all the movie assets freely available under a Creative Commons license. I think the least I can do to thank them is to also release the .blend files for the wallpapers under my usual Creative Commons license:

• Big Buck Bonanza – Source pack

If you do use those files, please tell me about it! Instructions are inside the zip file but remember that you’ll still need the Big Buck Movie production files!

—Ratow

Forest Edge

The whole gang is here, ready to wage war perhaps?

—

This one is especially dedicated to those lucky few who have dual 30 inch displays.

Done with Blender and the freely available Big Buck Bunny movie files.

For more information, please read my blog post.

Original material (models, textures, etc.) is

(c) copyright 2008, Blender Foundation | peach.blender.org

Some Rights Reserved. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Pinky And The Brain?

I guess Frankie is upset about something Rinky did.

—

Done with Blender and the freely available Big Buck Bunny movie files.

For more information, please read my blog post.

Original material (models, textures, etc.) is

(c) copyright 2008, Blender Foundation | peach.blender.org

Some Rights Reserved. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

My Precious

Yessss, somebody loves nuts way too much.

—

Done with Blender and the freely available Big Buck Bunny movie files.

For more information, please read my blog post.

Original material (models, textures, etc.) is

(c) copyright 2008, Blender Foundation | peach.blender.org

Some Rights Reserved. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Big Buccaneer

It’s Big Buck and a … parrot?

—

Done with Blender and the freely available Big Buck Bunny movie files.

For more information, please read my blog post.

Original material (models, textures, etc.) is

(c) copyright 2008, Blender Foundation | peach.blender.org

Some Rights Reserved. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

• Big Buck Bunny

My DVDs arrived last week and I’ve been playing with the content since and I must say that its fun! For those that don’t have a clue, Big Buck Bunny is the second open movie by the Blender Foundation which is not only really cool but also makes all the source files available for free, since it’s licensed as Creative Commons. You can also order the DVDs, as I did, to help them make the next movie and to show off to your friends too.
Making custom scenes is a breeze since everything is neatly packed into libraries and the characters are very well rigged. The only problem is that they recommend 4GB of memory since fur/grass is really memory intensive. I’m planning on making a nice dual-screen wallpaper featuring all characters but for now here’s Big Buck:

• LuxRender v0.5

Slightly old news but LuxRender v0.5 was released last week too! There are many, many new features and bug fixes over the previous officially released version (0.1) but, most importantly, I think this marks the beginning of a more constant release schedule. Lately, most of my free time goes to helping develop Lux but it’s not always that I manage to do a proper render with it so I decided to reuse an old scene I rendered with yafray some years ago and render it with Lux:

V2 Comparison

Lighting is not the same, neither are the materials but it’s cool to see the “evolution”. I used the new procedural textures to render this and it’s really flexible since it can mix many types of textures to create some really unique stuff like Radiance’s Voronite® .

• Symfony 1.1

In another bit of old news, Symfony 1.1 is out. I took this opportunity to upgrade the site  and fix the comment system which now uses reCaptcha to authethicate humans. It’s kind of hard to read sometimes but at least you help digitize books.

There’s not much difference between Symfony version 1.0 and 1.1, especially if you leave the compatibility mode on but things are stricter, especially regarding routing, and some changes were necessary. I’m planning on adding support for the upcoming dual-screen wallpapers, so stay tuned.

—Ratow

When I first developed the current comment system I thought that spammers wouldn’t bother with this site since it does not use any common interface (like Wordpress) and it’s relatively low ranked. Sure, a few spammy comments appeared but they were usually from a single IP address, so it was easy to ban they.

But a week ago things started getting ugly. About ten comments per day, from cheap car insurance to free casino games, were posted from various IP addresses, much more than I can keep up with.

I love how they carefully put an ID in each of their comments. Has somebody ever though of google bombing these IDs to mess up with then?

In other news, I haven’t forgot about Cube Mine! I have been busy (more than usual!) helping the LuxRender project. Yes, now I’m an official coordinator there! But I will return soon, with cool wallpapers.

—Ratow

Stalemate

“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?”

–WOPR computer system in WarGames

—

After discovering the new LuxRender, I decided to test it more to get familiar with it and to see its capabilities and limitations (and possibly help the development too). This is my first real scene made specifically for this renderer and tries to show off its nice materials and depth of field.

Tech specs:

• Chess pieces mostly done with Blender’s spin tool
• Renderer “baked” this for about 35 hour straight
• Qtpfsgui used for tonemapping
• Gimp used to remove some noise that was still present on the final image

• Physically correct, unbiased renderings
• Optional high-dynamic range output using OpenEXR
• Multi-thread support, with dynamic adding/removing threads
• Cross-platform, well written code (Windows, Linux and Mac OS X)
• Philosophy and goals (!)

Most open-source renderers end up as being just toys and get abandoned after some time, but LuxRender Goals clearly estates that they want to create a robust and high-end production renderer. Only time will tell, but it’s clearly a step in the right direction.

Also, Metropolis Light Transport (MLT) is going to be available on the next release candidate and is probably the only open-source render to offer this. MLT is the latest trend in ultra-realistic rendering and is used on the Maxwell Render and Indigo Renderer. It can speed up rendering quite drastically on certain types of scenes by sampling important light paths more frequently.

LuxRender’s gallery already shows some quite impressive renders:

And here’s a quick test I did with the Cube Fields wallpaper scene, after changing a bit the materials:

It still is a very young software, with bugs and not optimized, especially under the Linux and Mac OS X platforms, but if development continues at the current pace, I bet LuxRender with substitute the rather dormant Yafray as the default external renderer in Blender very soon.

—Ratow