A couple of nice things have come up lately that I’m quite proud to be able to mention. I was at the Museum of Contemporary Art on the weekend checking out part of the 2008 Biennale of Sydney. Browsing in the museum shop afterwards, I came across a book with a familiar sounding title - Design and the Elastic Mind, published by MoMA (that’s right, the Museum of Modern Art in New York). I knew Elephants Dream had been featured in the web component of this exhibition a little while back, but had no idea there was a book. So, I took a look inside and there it was, published art, with our names in the index too!

Last week, Lighthouse was released online, a short film project that our studio had been working on for the last couple of months. The full details about the project, with the movie itself viewable online, high res stills, and production breakdown video are available in the post we made at CGTalk, so please do go and check it out there. The response so far has been great, we got featured on the front page of said website, and have had several thousand views with very encouraging comments.

Since there’s no analogue built in to Blender at the present, during our last animation project, I knocked together a very simple PyConstraint: Noise. It’s made to fulfill similar tasks as the Noise controller in 3DS Max, giving random (yet deterministic) animation to an object. We used it for things like like applying it to a lamp for randomised shadow flicker from a candle flame, or on a large scale, subtle swaying movements of a ship on the ocean.

Things have been busy lately. There have been plenty of ‘real life’ things to take my attention from this site - some of them fun, like moving into a new place with Kat, some of them not very fun at all like having the place broken into and robbed a month later.

Work’s been spread on thick. Last weekend, we reached the finish line of a project we’ve had on over the last 2-3 months, a 2 1/2 minute short film that we’ve been creating for a production studio in the US. The work has been very fun and artistically interesting, the clients have been great, and we’ve all learnt a lot in the process. The only down side for me personally has been the amount of overtime I’ve put in to try to keep it looking nice, after shouldering most of the responsibility for the texturing, shading, lighting, comping, some of which has been kinda complicated. I really can’t complain at all though, it’s definitely my favourite kind of work. The public release should be quite soon, so keep an eye out!

I’ve just updated the website for the studio where I work and put a bunch of somewhat recent work up, so I thought I might show a few of the commercial projects I’ve been working on lately. A lot of the interesting work has been illustrations, but recently we’ve just finished an animated TVC for Bridgestone which has just gone to air here in Australia.

The final animation (3MB QuickTime).

Here’s some other recent work that I’ve been involved in, too:

• Magazine cover
• Rugby league concept (I did lighting/shading/background set)
• Brushed steel shader test (using the same model)
• Print advertisement (rock sculpted from scratch in sculpt mode)
• Outback pub set, for internal project
• Internal R&D animation project, to teach the other guys Blender. Three of us made this 30sec pseudo-commercial in about a week and a half (I did teaching/lighting/shading/sets)
• Raccoon Illustration (I did the background set, the raccoon was done in Max/Photoshop)
]]> http://mke3.net/weblog/baked-card-2/feed/ http://mke3.net/weblog/baked-card-2/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/mke3net/~3/193333875/mattebbSat, 01 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0600http://del.icio.us/mattebb#2007-11-30
• zap's mental ray tips: Stuff you never even knew about mental ray 3.5
  interesting notes about using spherical harmonics to store FG info with directions

Had some r&d time lately, at work and at home. Here’s what I’m up to:

I’d like to get the node system hooked up to raytracing, allowing one to do advanced shading techniques but without being forced to do it with the dodgy ‘mixing materials’ method. As a starting point, I’ve made a reflection node - the bonus is that the node system makes it a lot easier to texturise inputs. Thanks to some hints from Alfredo de Greef, I’ve added an additional input to rotate the anisotropic direction (with black being 0° and white being 360°). This can give some nice effects:

• Radial blend texture (node setup)
• Spun-brushed steel (node setup same as above but using this texture instead)
• Carbon fibre (node setup)
• Weird sphere (using a clouds texture for aniso rotation)

I’d also like to include a refract node, an AO node, and/or also a general purpose raytrace node that takes a •vector and •solid angle as input, and gives as output: •whether it intersected something (average of samples in solid angle) •distance to intersection, •shaded colour of intersected face, etc.

Three months since the last post here, I think that deserves either an award or a slap on the wrist. Things have been busy, and I’m sorry to say I’ve been much more inclined to spend my free time in other ways than writing here.

Work has been through alternating bursts of slow r&d time and busy projects, the latter being where I find myself at the moment. We’re using Blender more and more, currently we’re doing an immensely complex animation of around 12,000 frames, without much time to do it in. It’s the first project of this scale that we’ve done in Blender as a team, and although it’s a lot to manage and keep track of, it’s been pretty good.

The work I was doing on glossy reflections/refractions was finished a while ago, the end product being much more robust and advanced than in that last post, and also including all sorts of extra nice things like using QMC sampling for ray shadows and ambient occlusion. These changes are now officially in Blender’s SVN repository and will be in the next major release, however I’ve already been making use of it extensively. This not overly interesting illustration I did for a magazine cover made it into the Australian Creative magazine gallery and uses a lot of anisotropic blurry reflection.

I made some nice docs online here: Glossy Reflection/Refraction / Raytraced Soft Shadows / QMC Sampling. Thanks again to Brecht van Lommel and Alfredo de Greef who both gave me some great guidance and help along the way, and I look forward to doing more work in this area in the future. A few other changes I’ve made recently have been extra lamp falloff options, including custom curve, enabling different curve tilt interpolation types, and I’ve also committed a bunch of ex-tuhopuu UI related work to the ‘imagebrowser’ branch, to work on separately in there until I can find the time to finish it up and bring to the main Blender SVN trunk.

But life goes on…

Previously, I’ve grumpily complained that there aren’t enough people interested in working on Blender’s internal renderer, and so it was only fair that I put my money where my mouth is. I mentioned I’d been doing some coding recently, and this is one of the products of that time: blurry/glossy reflections and refractions in Blender’s internal raytracer. It works similarly in concept to yafray’s ‘conetrace’, sampling a cone of rays around the current pixel to get an averaged, blurry result. The sampling is using a quasi-monte carlo Halton sequence, which Brecht van Lommel previously converted into C code in an old experiment of his, and which he gave me a lot of valuable help with - thanks a bunch, Brecht!

It’s been a while since my last post here, I’ve had a few things going on that took priority. Kat’s been very sick and I’ve been spending most of my available time over the last four weeks at the hospital with her. It’s been exhausting for all of us, but she’s now recovering well and going home in a matter of days, which is a great relief.

The others have been learning Blender too, and getting great results very quickly. Unfortunately there seems to be very little educational material that’s really suitable for experienced artists who already know what they are doing, so it’s been very helpful to have me on hand to point things out, translate terminology, show where things are and point out the inevitable stupid gotchas and idiosyncracies (which I’m always trying to eliminate).

Although I do nearly all my work in Blender, we’ve also tried doing one small commercial project using Blender as a team, which went very smoothly. We also had a lot more experience working in it together a short while ago, where in a week without much work scheduled, we made a short 30 second animation for fun and practise. I’m quite happy with the quality of it, especially considering the others had only been using Blender for two weeks and we only had a week to make it from scratch. There are still a few shots I’d like to re-render over the coming weeks when the render farm’s idle, so hopefully we can post it somewhere to show soon.

I wish I could post some of the things I’ve been working on lately, but I’m not sure what’s out in the open now or not. I can show one of the earlier things I contributed to though, which was the background/set for this raccoon illustration. The trees were lots of fun to sculpt from scratch in Blender, and the raccoon itself was made (not by me) in Max/VRay, with a fair bit of retouching in Photoshop. I’ve also been spending some time coding in r&d time at the studio, or while hanging around at the hospital, but this post is long enough already so I’ll try to show the results of that work soon.

Over the last few weeks at the studio I’ve been working in Blender alongside 3DS Max and I’ve needed to export 3D bézier curve (spline) data between the two apps. There were a few occasions, such as exporting a logo that I’d cleaned up in Blender from a 2D SVG, and also some 3D animation paths that I’d been working on. While there are a lot of options for exporting other data such as meshes, there’s very little around to facilitate transferring 3D curves between packages.

So with no ready made options, I tried an idea - I read up on MaxScript and made a Python script for Blender that takes the curve data and and uses it to generate a MaxScript, that when run inside 3DS Max will generate the same curve using the MaxScript API. There are a few advantages to this, there’s a very fine level of control and you can easily export every feature that’s supported by both Blender and Max, without worrying if an intermediary format supports those specific features too. However there are drawbacks - it’s a pain to use since you have to open up and run a MaxScript each time, rather than just importing a file. I’d rather support an existing standard format, so it’s more widely useful for other people than just me.

I’d been using the ColladaMax plugin (based on the open source FCollada library) previously to transfer meshes and cameras between Max and Blender, and after doing some more research it turns out that the COLLADA format supports 3D béziers, as does ColladaMax. Neither of Blender’s two COLLADA exporters do though, and they seemed too complex for me to add curve support to them, so I grabbed the spec and threw together my own simple exporter for curves only. One very annoying issue is that the ColladaMax plugin (and I presume the FCollada library) expects the data formatted in a way that’s incompatible with the spec. Since my goal here is practicality rather than technical purity, this means that rather than it being a generalised COLLADA format exporter, I have to tailor it to FCollada’s non-standard idiosyncracies. I hope the library is updated to conform to the standard in the future, but going by the devs’ response on their forum it doesn’t look like that will happen any time soon. On the positive side, there’s a good chance that my exported COLLADA curves will work with the ColladaMaya plugin as well, opening up another application to work with. If anyone can test this and confirm or deny, that would be very interesting information.

Anyway, the script is available here: export_curves_fcollada-1.1.py. It’s my first exporter and I didn’t use any fancy XML libraries, so it may be rough (although it gets the job done fine). If any Python gurus have ideas on how to improve it, I’d appreciate some hints! I hope this post might help anyone in the same situation as me, in the ever-perilous business of interoperability.

I thought I’d quickly share a less conventional usage of some of Blender’s newer features that’s been sitting around on my desktop for a while now. A few months ago, it was (my girlfriend) Kat’s birthday and I thought I’d have some fun and make a simple pop-up card, rather than just buying one. Of course after thinking about it for a little while, my curiosity got the better of me and I set about to make it in CG.

Unfortunately, ever since their inception, modifiers in Blender haven’t let you animate their settings. This is a real pain, and a motivational hurdle against people making lots of nice new modifiers like ‘bend’, ‘twist’, ‘taper’, etc. I really hope this gets addressed soon, but until then, here’s an ugly workaround which will let you animate modifiers using the bPython API.

A while ago, I did some experiments that I didn’t really show anyone, a proof of concept for generating non-destructive primitive objects through the modifier stack. One of the things I liked in recent dabblings with 3DS Max is having flexibility and realtime feedback when editing primitive objects, and I thought I’d see if I could make it work in some way in Blender.

It’s basically using a modifier at the bottom of the stack to create geometry, which you could then just apply to edit the mesh directly, though that’s not always necessary. This is a bit similar to how Max and Cinema 4D work. When you add an object, you can still manipulate dimensions, resolution, other parameters as a whole. Then if you want to edit it manually, you convert it to an editable mesh with a click.

Above are some screencasts of what I did in Blender. Obviously it’s simple and rough, and if developed further, one could do things to clean it up like disable those generator modifiers from appearing in the menu, change the add object code to apply the generator modifiers automatically, prevent them from being moved up and down the stack, and perhaps add some code that upon pressing Tab, would give you the option to apply that modifier and just convert it to a mesh so you can edit it. In any case, this could serve as some kind of inspiration for something nice in the future…

I came across an article yesterday which referenced a presentation at SIGGRAPH 2004 by ATI, talking about a quick method for faking subsurface scattering in skin and had to give it a try in Blender. It’s by no means accurate, but it’s very fast and easy to set up now in Blender. The technique is apparently what they used on the Matrix: Revolutions ’superpunch’ shot, it’s basically using UV information for finding pixel locations on the surface, by rendering a baked image of the lighting and blurring it.

[1] Basic render	[2] Baked UV map	[3] Margin settings

Now just load that image up as an image texture on your model’s material. You can do this without saving or packing the image since it’s still in memory, but if you don’t, it’ll be lost when you next load up that blend file, so you might as well save it. The next step is to blur this image, to fake the light scattering around under the surface. You can do this in Photoshop or something, but the easiest way is to just raise the ‘Filter’ value in the image texture [4]. This sets the width of the sampling area for when the pixels are looked up during texture mapping, and is pretty much the same as blurring the image. Switch on ‘Gauss’ to use Gaussian filtering instead of the box filter. Gaussian is much softer and doesn’t leave stepping artifaces with large filter sizes like Box does. It can also help to switch off MipMaps, though this will slow down the render as a tradeoff.

Finally, you’re going to be using this image texture to provide the lighting on your object, so first turn down your diffuse shader’s reflection value (usually ‘Ref’), give this texture a UV mapping, and turn up ‘Emit’ so the material is self illuminated by the texture. There are a few ways you could go about this such as mapping the texture to affect the ‘Ref’ channel, but what I’ve done in these examples is to turn down Ref to about 0.15, Emit up to about 0.85 and map the texture to the Color channel.

Render, and there you have it [5]! I gave it a try on my recent sculpt model, and it looks interesting there too [6]. For some situations, this works just fine, but it’s only really practical for things like skin, since it’s just blurring. It won’t handle real translucency, like light coming through a leaf.

[4] Filter settings	[5] Suzanne rendered with the effect	[6] Applied to a sculpt model

The good thing about this technique, unlike the toon shader/shadow buffer method, is that it lets you use a standard lighting and material setup. This technique isn’t view dependent, so it will be fine in animations like flyarounds, as long as the model or light sources aren’t moving. Perhaps it would be possible to get it working in animation by means of a script - i.e. for reach frame, do the bake render, and since you’re already using that image as a texture, it should go fine. Of course this is still a cheesy hack, so bring on the real thing!

Today I spent my first day working at a new full time job! I’m freelancing as a 3D artist at ProMotion studios in Sydney, helping out with visual work like concept design, modelling, texturing, lighting, rendering, etc.

It’s a small studio on the 8th floor of a building near Circular Quay, with 6 artists/animators including the director. I’ll be there for four weeks, and as long as we’re all happy with how things are going, I’ll most likely be staying on permanently after that.

I’m only about a week late, but I might as well do the customary ‘New version released!’ post, so here we go: Blender 2.43 is released! There, that’s better.

A challenge leading up to this release was getting the new website together. I’d pretty much finished the design last year, but it took a while for the admins to get the new server hardware ready, and for Bart to do the work integrating the templates with the CMS, Typo3.

As far as the release itself goes, here’s another little list of my favourite contributions this time around.

• Tapering 3D curves with radius per CV, with shrink/fatten tool
• Tablet pressure and tilt support in Mac OS X, and tilt support in Windows and X11
• New UV test grid generated image, designed to be easier on the eye and to show distortion clearly
• Proportional edit mode random falloff option
• Object level view/select/render restrictions in the outliner
• Upgraded the User Prefs OpenGL lights section to use nice modern vector and colour picker UI controls
• Dynamic icon fie loading and themability
• Compositor Displace node, Combine RGBA node

There’s one bit of disappointing news though. The next release was planned for a while to be a UI-centred Blender 2.5 release, for which Ton would do the huge and time consuming necessary internal upgrades that would allow features that I’ve been working on such as drag and drop in the outliner, a customisable toolbar, and radial menus to be implemented.

It seems now that once again, it has been decided for this work to be postponed in favour of a version 2.44 with smaller projects, meaning that it’s going to be at least May or June before any of these UI projects can be integrated. It’s a lot of difficult work for Ton to do, and it’s up to him to decide what he wants to work on, but it’s also frustrating and demotivating for me, because I’ve been waiting so long, being prevented from working on these sorts of improvements release after release. I offer my apologies to any of you who are waiting too.

Over the holiday break I spent a couple of days in Melbourne, and of course went on a graffiti spotting tour again to some of the excellent locations there. There are a few alleys that are pretty much outdoor art galleries, with art all over the walls that’s seemingly not only tolerated, but encouraged.

A couple of days ago, I was experimenting with unsharp masks in Blender’s compositor when I came across an interesting paper by Thomas Luft, Carsten Colditz, and Oliver Deussen, Image Enhancement by Unsharp Masking the Depth Buffer. The paper describes a number of image manipulations that can be done by finding areas where there are sharp discontinuities in depth, one of which is quite useful as a way to fake an ambient occlusion effect in post.

This is quite simple to rig up in the compositor, below is an example with a deliberately grainy and blurry render to clearly show the effect of the unsharp mask.

Now that I’ve got an unsharp mask, it’s easy enough to follow through and look at implementing some of the techniques mentioned in the paper. One that interests me the most is where they use the depth buffer to give a kind of ‘drop shadow’ behind foreground objects, using the unsharp mask to find discontinuities and and mask foreground/background. This can be used like a fake, post-process ambient occlusion. With a low radius, it can be used to act like a dirt shader, darkening cracks and wrinkles, and with a higher radius it can act more subtly on larger features.

Below is an example of using this fake AO technique. I didn’t actually use this on the Waiting in the Basement image, but the model is a nice test case. I start by finding the creases and corners from the depth channel using the unsharp mask, then I do some tweaks to the intensity since what comes out of the unsharp mask isn’t immediately useful by itself, and doesn’t cover all the areas I want to darken. Because it’s using a non-antialiased Z buffer, I do some small blurring to the mask at the end to make it a bit smoother, and then use that mask to darken the image slightly, giving the detail shadows.

Note that I’m using the Min and Max options on the Map Value nodes to clamp the channel to between 0.0 and 1.0 before blurring. Since the channels are all float values, giving a range greater than 0-1 can make the blur nodes work in strange ways. The effect is much clearer on the full size image, especially around the collar and folds in the face, so click to check it out. Here’s the .blend file (2.43 RC+ required)

I finished a new image today. I came upon this idea while sketching a week and a bit ago, and it was a good excuse to do some sculpting.

(click for full size)

As mentioned a few posts previously, I went to the linux.conf.au open day last week, representing Blender amongst all sorts of other projects.

Blender was one of the forty or so projects that were exhibiting at the Linux.conf.au open day, held at the University of New South Wales in a nice glass covered pavilion in a courtyard. With me was Hassan, a Blender user and BlenderNation reader who very kindly offered to help out on the day, and also fellow ex-Elephants Dream artist Lee, who made the trip up from Adelaide.

Armed with a Blender-logo-on-white cube for signage that I’d fashioned out of pasteboard that morning, we had two of our laptops out on the desk, which was quite popular, being the foremost one in the pavilion that everyone saw as they were entering. There was always a small crowd gathered around watching Elephants Dream on repeat play, which many of them had seen before or heard of, and a few gleefully trying out the upcoming Sculpt Mode, by defacing a work-in-progress head model of mine.

The day was lots of fun, and according to the official stats, over 700 people came along, with about 400 attendees from the general public (i.e. who weren’t already at the conference), ranging from little kids to grandparents. We chatted with a few interesting people throughout the day, including someone that Lee and Hassan talked with from the National Gallery of Victoria, who was interested in using Blender for their new media productions. Unfortunately I had to leave early, but Lee and Hassan stayed around until the end, running into blenderartists.org member ‘jumpy-monkey’ who also dropped by.

All in all it was a fun day, if only just to hang out with a couple of other blenderheads. Sydney’s a big city, but I’m not really aware of many Blender users that are living around here (though I suspect there are plenty more in hiding). Perhaps we’ll have to organise more events in the forms of social gatherings or a revived Australian Blender mini-conf to draw you all out of the woodwork!