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 others had done a few similar ads with the gecko in Max before I started working here, but since our animator is becoming more familiar with Blender, especially due to the nice animation tools we have now, we decided to have a go doing this one in Blender (everything except modelling, which came out of Max). I was responsible for the lighting/shading/rendering.

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.

At the studio we might possibly be doing a project that would involve vfx/image based lighting. It’s Christmas soon and there are plenty of shiny balls around, so I got a nice one and we’ve started making some HDRI light probes. Blender’s brute force method of doing image based lighting by evenly sampling the hemisphere in AO gives reasonable results, but it’s too slow for animation.

I’ve been looking into a technique originally devised for realtime graphics, based on the paper An Efficient Representation for Irradiance Environment Maps. It works by storing the irradiance in the map in spherical harmonics coefficients and only supports lambert diffuse shading, but it’s extremely fast, and can give quite nice results especially combined with it in an AO source, or even just humble buffer shadows. I’ve done some tests so far with Paul Debevec’s free light probes

• Beach
• Campus
• Grace Cathedral
• and the stairwell at work ;)

Rather than shoehorning it into AO, I’ve so far got a separate Image Based Lighting panel with this in it, and perhaps some other kinds of importance sampling methods later on.

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.

Blender’s linked library / group / scene / action system has been great, and much easier than they were doing previously for similar projects in Max. I’m keeping a master scene file that contains everything, however most of the models/rigs in there are coming in from linked groups in external files, that any of the others can add to and update. Not only does this keep things easy to modify and ripple through, but it allows us to distribute the workload well between all of us by segmenting the files finely. I’m afraid I can’t give much more detailed info at this moment, perhaps some time in the future.

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!

This has been quite an interesting (though sometimes frustrating) learning experience for me, diving into a new area of Blender’s source code for me, and learning about many concepts I was previously unfamiliar with. What I’ve got so far probably isn’t perfect, but I’m very happy with the progress made so far. I’ll post again soon about some of the process and things I’ve learned so far, hopefully in a way that people not used to reading technical SIGGRAPH papers will get some value from. But for now, here are some pretty pictures, and a patch! There’s also a bit of discussion in this thread on blenderartists.org, too.

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.

Work has been going quite well, with bursts of very busy periods interspersed with down-time. I’ve barely needed to touch Max and have been working in Blender just about all day every day, with some compositing in Fusion every now and then.

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.

Wavefront OBJ is supposed to support curves as part of the spec, but functionality is extremely limited, and it’s so rarely used that I can’t find any apps or plugins that actually bother to support this area of the spec. I read somewhere that Autodesk’s flagship format FBX is supposed to include curve data, but in my tests, neither Max or Maya would export curves to FBX anyway, so it looked like they just didn’t bother support it. This makes it a no-go regardless of whether the up-and-coming FBX exporter for Blender supports it or not.

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.

It’s just a simple tree, based on the design of a ring of hers. I traced the shape, making sure it was kept in two flat halves, unwrapped it, and sculpted on a bark-like surface. Then, I added a plane with a dirt texture, added some grass, and set up some lights. From there it was just a matter of doing a full render bake to texture, leaving me with a grass image from above, and the unfolded, textured tree. I saved out the baked textures, printed them on to card, cut them out with a scalpel and wrote a message. I had no idea if it would work or not, but I think it came out all right in the end.

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.

Basically, you need to create a dummy object that you will animate in a simple manner just so you have an editable Ipo animation curve. From there, use a scriptlink set to onFrameChange to read that Ipo and manually set the modifier paramater you’re interested in to the curve’s value at that point in time. You can download my demo .blend file to see how this works (remember to enable script links in the scripts button tab), or check the demo video below to see an animated Decimate modifier.

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.

The issue of being able to see and tweak the effects of what you’re doing is one of the things that frustrates me most in Blender and I had a bit of a rant about it at last year’s Blender Conference. The topic came up on the bf-funboard list today, so I might as well share it here too:

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.

Luckily, with the baking tools now in Blender, this is simple. Just set up your unwrapped model so it’s rendering as usual [1], give it a new image texture and do a Bake Render Meshes → Full Render, to get a baked image of that lighting information [2]. When you do this, it’s important to set the baking bleed margin high [3], so when you blur this image later, you don’t get the black background spilling back into the visible area.

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.

They’re using mainly 3DS Max with Vray, which I’ve used before a while ago and will also be using too, however one of the reasons I’m there is because the director is interested in Blender, and would like to learn it and to start using it more and more in the studio.

I’m going to help with this, showing him what Blender can do and how, and finding ways to integrate it into the workflow. I predict UV unwrapping, fluid sim, and perhaps compositing might be good first candidates for this, though I was already using Blender today on my own for a quick illustration project. Looks like there will be some interesting times and experiences ahead!

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.

The release provided as good an incentive as any to get the site ready, and thankfully this time with the new hardware, the website was pretty solid, despite it being thoroughly barraged by visitors via various news outlets around the web. There’s still a fair bit to do though, there are plenty of stale old pages in need of a refresh, and the forums and wiki design still needs to be integrated.

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.

I’ve got the film back from processing and scanning now and uploaded to flickr. Interesting to see how things have changed from the last photos I took in 2005…