Oyonale - 3D art and graphic experiments

The mystery house (part 3)

2008-09-05T01:37:00.001+02:00

We went back to the corridor and tried to open the doors again. There was this big wooden one close to the entrance. This time we pulled hard.

Hurray, the door opened!

On the other side there was a landing, and a staircase. At least we could go down, even if carrying the luggage and the baby down four floors wasn't something we looked forward to.

The staircase went up too. There was a 5th floor after all.

There were doors on the 5th floor landing. All of them had a tag with a person's name on it: they were apartment doors. Unfortunately, none was our friend's. So where did he live?

At the end of the landing, there was yet another metal gate leading to yet another staircase, probably leading to the roof. I didn't have the key.

I went down to the 4th floor. We couldn't still figure out how to get to our friend's place. I left my family on the 4th floor landing and went downstairs to find a solution.

I got in the elevator again, and it dawned on me. There was this weird circular key on the keyring. I put it in the circular keyhole next to the "4" button, where the "5" button should have been.

The circular key was used only to get to the fifth floor! The elevator needed one key to call it when one was on the ground floor, another key to go down when one was on the 4th floor and yet another key to go up to (and down from) the 5th floor.

This time I was able to go to the 5th floor, where I found a little terrace identical to the one on the 4th floor, with a view on a roof covered with nice, varnished tiles.

There was also a dark corridor on the right.

At the end there was a door.

It was lit by a small roof window.

Next to this door was another one.

I had the key! This was our friend's home.

I still had to go back to pick up my family, who were still stranded on the 4th floor. I was going to take the elevator down, when I noticed a door similar to the one we had opened previously and that had led us from the elevator terrace to the 4th floor landing. It was closed, but I had the key this time.

And I found myself on the 5th floor landing, facing the staircase.

Then I realized that the door I had just opened had a tag with people names on it. These doors weren't apartment doors, but allowed passage from the staircase landing to the terrace and corridor on the other side. The names on the tag were the names of the people living in the apartments in the corridor!

So the mystery was solved. I took the elevator down to gather my family and we went up again to go to our friend's studio. Later, we had to struggle with the windows (that were controlled by a not-so-smart automatic system) and the main door of the building failed a couple of times to let us out (the mechanism got stuck at random), but otherwise we had a good week in Lyon.

The mystery house (part 2)

2008-09-04T23:55:00.000+02:00

The lift rose slowly to the 4th floor. When it arrived, a door opened on each side. We were on a little terrace over a deep well.

The side with the flower pots was promising, so we went there.

There was a door. It was closed. We didn't have the key.

We crossed the elevator cabin to the other side. There was a similar door there, also closed, but it opened when we turned the handle.

The door led to a long dark corridor. The light was broken so we couldn't see where it went. We tried to open several doors to no avail. There were no stairway up or down either.

We went back to the elevator. It was gone, and its door had closed automatically behind us. We tried the key that we had used previously on it when we were on the ground floor. It didn't work. The elevator needed different keys to go up and down.

We were trapped on the landing of the 4th floor, unable to go up or down. Did I say that we had a baby in a carriage and a few pieces of luggage? (To be continued...)

The mystery house (part 1)

2008-09-04T23:14:00.001+02:00

Last August, we were invited by a friend to spend a week at his little studio in Lyon while he was away on vacation. He emailed us a short list of instructions detailing how to get there and left his keys at the bar downstairs.

His flat is on the fifth floor of a 18th century, slightly decrepit building facing the Rhone river. Like all those houses, it has a beautiful front door with wooden carvings and a metal knocker.

We entered the long hallway. Like many old buildings in Lyon, this one has a second entrance on the other side. In the oldest parts of Lyon, these long passages are called traboules, and sometimes open into small, beautiful Renaissance yards. Our building was more recent though.

We had to find the lift. But where was it? There was a small, fenced off yard on the left.

Later we discovered that this was the concierge's private yard. His only outside view was the bottom of the pit. Here's a view from the first landing.

The way forward was the continuation of the passage, crossing through the building. There was a metal gate on the right side that looked like the door of an old lift.

On close inspection this was not an elevator shaft but the entrance of a deep, deep cave.

Later that week we found the gate opened. It looked like a torture chamber and we didn't get inside. We didn't have the key anyway.

Right after the cave door, there was a door and another yard.

There was a strange sign on the door. What's a "WC BAR"? We didn't have the key to this one either so we never found out.

There were two other doors after the WC BAR one.

The first door was the lift! And this time we had the key! We got in.

We had to go to the fifth floor, but the lift didn't go higher than the fourth.
We got out and tried the next door. It was open. Behind it, there were a small, very small yard.

It was the garbage area.

There were steps, and yet another door. We didn't have the key.

We had a last look at the garbage yard. There were windows and people behind it.

We entered the lift again. It was extremely small and smelled of wet dog hair. We pushed the "4" button, thinking that we'd figure out later how to get to the 5th floor. (To be continued...)

A silly image

2008-05-10T13:42:00.003+02:00

A quick (45 minutes for the model, another 45 minutes for the environment, everything done in Cinema 4D) silly image to celebrate the future of the French Navy, given the current indecision relative to the construction of a second aircraft carrier. Not that I care, really, but I liked the idea of a pedal boat named after the diminutive Sarkozy (thanks to Marc Jacquier for the inspiration).

Organic art

2008-05-08T12:26:00.003+02:00

1stAveMachine is a New York based computer graphics studio that specialises in photorealistic organic animations like these:

Wonderful stuff, but somehow it's something of a pity that such wild imagination has to be tamed and restrained by what ultimately foots the bill, in this case advertising.

Office animations

2008-05-07T16:22:00.004+02:00

A couple of years ago, we decided to reorganise our office space. Since it involved moving large pieces of furniture (including 3 libraries full of books and archives), I proposed to make a simulation first, to optimise the reorganisation. Finally we didn't change anything - it would have taken a good week - but I did a couple of animations with Cinema 4D and Advanced Renderer. Neither the models, texturing and the lighting are very elaborate: the models are just textured cubes (plus an iMac model I found on the French Cinema 4D website, even though we don't have Macs) and there's a lot of flickering due to the low radiosity parameters.

I planned to redo them with finalRender but this takes a lot of time and frankly it's not worth it. In any case, these videos were gathering dust on my hard disc, so they may as well be published here.

The first video is a time-lapse animation of the office from sunrise to sunset. You can see the time flying in the little corner in the bottom right corner. I used C4D's sky plugin to get the "true" light and sky colours from the lat/long coordinates of my office.

The second video is a fly-over of the office, as experienced by a (very sober) fly. It was just fun to do and wish I had the time to make it more realistic and detailed.

Handmade 3D

2008-04-27T10:15:00.003+02:00

The Freres Hueon (apparently a couple of brothers from Bordeaux, France, but little information is available about them) made a "sweded" remake of the light cycle race in Tron, using cardboard props instead of computer graphics. As a Tron fan, I find this mightily impressive.

Tron
by freres-hueon

I should have a special altar built for Tron, as it is the original source of my deep love for computer graphics. I saw it in 1982 and found it so extraordinary and visually groundbreaking at that time that I sat through two consecutive showings. As we know, Tron was a commercial failure, and CG didn't really made it in the movies until Jurassic Park, 11 years later.

Still, Tron remains interesting in the way the authors took advantage of the limitations of the available technology. More recent movies overestimate the ability of 3D technology, so visual effects that look fantastic when the movie is released look fake and awkward after a few years (if not a few days), with characters deep into the uncanny valley and flat lighting. Tron has some cheesy parts (it was a mainstream Disney movie made in the 80s after all), but the effects, simple as they are, are still very pretty.

The Tron DVD also contains the following tidbit: as 3D was still largely experimental, the companies hired to create the computer graphics used very different technologies. Basically, one used polygons (for the Solar Sailer for instance) while the other used primitives (notably for the Light Cycles). The latter technology gave better, shinier results but with a price: in the DVD, we can hear Syd Mead, the designer hired to create the Cycles, lament the fact that his original smooth, curvy, organic-looking design had to be dumbed down into a bunch of spheres and cylinders... It is amusing that this debate still exists today in the POV-Ray community, where some users make a point of using only script and primitives while others have embraced polygon modelers.

Welcome to my lonely Chinese visitor

2008-04-01T22:44:00.005+02:00

I've subscribed to Google Analytics for some time now, and until yesterday, the visitors map for Oyonale looked like this.

133 countries (light and dark green on the map) have sent visitors so far. In one month, there were 20 people from Saudi Arabia, 1 from Iraq, 1 from Afghanistan, 134 from Hungary and 9267 from the USA (hello to all of you, dear visitors). So who's missing? Turkmenistan, Burman, Yemen, Oman, Mali, Niger, Chad, Nigeria (which is strange, with all the dead billionaires' wives hailing from Lagos) and a few other African countries. And China. 1.3 billion chinese people can't see my images or read my silly stories. Only people from Hong Kong are free to do so, thanks perhaps to the "one country, two systems" policy. You can verify this using Websitepulse, a site that tests an URL from Shanghai, Beijing or Hong Kong.
Not that the Chinese government really objects to Oyonale. The Great Firewall of China actually blocks my host's entire IP range. I have other sites hosted by the same ISP that are also invisible to Chinese internet users. It's impossible to know the cause for the ban, of course. Perhaps the Chinese government will relax the Firewall for the Olympics, I don't know.

And yesterday, someone from Beijing broke through the Firewall, my first Chinese visitor. That person visited one page and spent 0 second reading it, so I fear this wasn't a real person. In fact it was probably a bot. Websitepulse still reports that Oyonale is blocked in Beijing and Shanghai. But, whoever you are, Chinese visitor, I salute you.

Reach for the stars: the story that never was

2008-03-27T14:18:00.005+01:00

In 2002, I was invited by Chris Cason, the leader of the POV-Ray development team, to work on a very special project: the creation of a computer-generated image that would be rendered on board of the International Space Station. With fellow POV-Ray artist Jaime Vives Piqueres, we designed the image according to a drastic set of specifications, then the image script and 3D models were sent to internet entrepreneur and astronaut Mark Shuttleworth (who would create the Ubuntu Linux distribution two years later) who loaded it on a laptop, turned it into a big-size image while floating in zero-gravity, and came back to Earth. The entire story is told here and there's not much more to say about the image itself.

The strangest thing, however, is that we completely failed to make that story interesting to other people. We naively believed that the concept of two (unknown) geeks managing to smuggle artwork on the ISS thanks to a "space tourist" was, if not newsworthy, at least cool enough for people to notice it, particularly in the computer graphics and open source communities. The simple fact that Chris Cason had to modify POV-Ray to accommodate zero-gravity was an interesting tidbit: how many popular software, let alone open source popular software, include special code to go to space. And of course this image remains the first one rendered in orbit.

Some folks did like the story: Zazzle, the poster company, created a special page for it. There's a page about the image in the Polish Wikipedia and once in a while a teacher wants to use the image for a school project. But otherwise, the story was lost in the flow. We submitted it several times to Slashdot, the popular "news for nerds" website that caters to open source enthusiasts, to no avail. DAZ, the company that had created the child model used in the picture, turned us down because they believed that our story was critical of the model (it wasn't). I posted it to a forum dedicated to space flight and astronomy news: no answer. I wrote to people who had a special interest in space-related artwork: no answer. Outside the POV-Ray community, where a few people at least reacted to it, the story fell completely flat and wasn't picked up: it made a brief appearance in a French CG website, and, some years later, it resurfaced in a couple of posts in the Ubuntu forums when people discovered it in Mark Shuttleworth's resume, but by far and large our story was ignored by bloggers and on-line forums.

Now there are many reasons for the failure. The timing was terrible because we couldn't use the short window that was the space flight itself: the laptop with the image on it came back months later, once the flight was completely forgotten. Also, we didn't really push the story: we thought that it had legs, that it would run by itself and sort of snowball once released in the internet but, unlike the most braindead LOLCAT, it didn't. We could have spammed every open source, computer graphics, art or aerospace forum out there, but we had obvious ethical reasons for not doing so and forum users don't like being spammed in any case. Another reason is that space flights are no longer newsworthy: people don't care much about the space shuttle, the ISS or astronauts unless they end up in big fireballs. Another is that the whole concept of "rendering" a 3D image is lost on the immense majority of people who, rightfully, couldn't understand what had been done in the first place.

I don't have any regret of course. Mark got home safely, and while the image isn't the best computer rendering ever, we had fun doing it, it was an exciting project and it's still a good story to tell. It's just that we would have liked to share it with more people.

Hacking a cheap Canon camera

2008-03-22T23:12:00.005+01:00

My cheap Canon IXUS 950 (Powershot SD800 IS in other countries) is a good little camera. Sure, I'd prefer a serious SLR with better lenses and more sophisticated light metering, but digicam quality is good enough for what I do, i.e. mostly family pictures and tourist shots. It's also extremely light (150g!) which makes it ideal to carry around in my pocket, unlike a SLR weighing one kilo and more. However, the manual controls are extremely limited: ISO, exposure, white balance, image size and some (largely useless) color tweaking. There's no way to override autofocus, shutter speed or aperture. Also, there's no battery gauge except the one that starts flashing 2 minutes or so before the battery is finished, which is completely stupid... except for Canon, who probably sells more backup batteries that way.

Now it turns that some very clever folks have developed a firmware enhancement called CHDK (Wiki pages and download area) (I guess it stands for Canon Hack Development Kit) that adds interesting features to several cheap Canon digicams, including RAW file support, battery indicator, ISO control, shutter speed control, focus control (didn't work for me though), histogram (RGB/luminance), zebra mode (areas of over-/underexposure), DOF calculator, scripts (in BASIC!), focus bracketing, exposure bracketing and more. Exposure bracketing is particularly interesting for creating high-dynamic range images, both as 8-bit images for display (see image below) or 32-bit true HDR images for use as environment textures in 3D computer graphics.

The CHDK wiki describes the firmware in detail and provide links to download pages and utilities (like RAW conversion and processing software). Installation is simple, just copy a couple of files in the root directory of the SD card and load the firmware according to the instructions. The firmware is not stored in the camera itself, so it's always possible to revert to the original firmware. Whether using CHKD voids the warranty isn't clear from a legal point of view, but then wiping the SD card should work ;)

This kind of hack is also a clear demonstration that these cameras are actually crippled for pure marketing reasons. There's absolutely no technical rationale for selling them without a proper battery indicator and the ability to override automatic settings. These practices are common for software, but it's a little unsettling to see them in hardware too.

3D before 3D

2008-03-21T15:49:00.005+01:00

We're so used to seeing computer graphics everywhere that we no longer notice them, except when they're really awful. But lots of visuals that are now made with CG used to be done the hard way with bits of wood, metal and plastic. The video below is a Behind the scenes 10-minute featurette from 1983 that shows how the HBO Introduction was created. While the use of miniatures isn't surprising (it's still widely used today in special effects), I really liked the fact that a flying, shiny metallic logo at that time was actually built in chrome-plated brass that "flew" over a black table. Also notable are the star blast effect (two sheets of semi-transparent plastic moving on top of each other) and the meteor shower effects (a bunch of rotating, colored optic fibers).

Today, a trained 3D artist could do all that, and possibly faster, on a comparatively cheap desktop machine, but the practical ingenuity displayed by the HBO effects crew is still amazing.

Adblock

New Mini Cooper model

2008-03-19T13:57:00.004+01:00

I have a backlog of models created in Rhino and Wings during my POV-Ray days that I'm slowly converting to Cinema 4D and finalRender. I wish I could do new stuff instead but that's still faster than creating new images...
So my old Mini Cooper from 2004 is now a Cinema (and OBJ) model that people can download here. There was a lot of cleanup to do and it allowed me to learn more about Bodypaint (the original model had horrible uv mapping). Making the Cinema 4D / Advanced Render image was extremely straightforward. The finalRender version (left) was tougher: I wanted a completely sunless lighting, correct reflections and a visible cloudy sky at the same time and it was much harder than I thought. Also, I couldn't manage to create a proper "raindrop" texture for the car so it's strangely dry in a wet environment.
Next models to be done: the numerous plants I did with Xfrog in 2002-2003.