I’m still waiting to get some chemistry to process the 18 or so rolls of 120 film I took in Turkey last November. Until then, I’ve uploaded a collection of street art I saw and shot on digital around the Beyoglu area in Istanbul. It was a beautiful place to be hanging out, and I was impressed by the amount of burgeoning creativity.
beyoglu street art
January 14th, 2012 . 0 comments
Tile necklace
December 28th, 2011 . 1 comment
I made another piece of jewelry for Kat‘s birthday last week – I thought I’d experiment with making a necklace rather than a ring like last time. It’s 3D printed and cast in sterling silver, and sits in three parts. Originally the idea was to have the arrangement customisable so they could be re-positioned along the chain, but in the end only a few combinations hang well in practice. Doing it this way, as opposed to a pendant, is much more complicated than I imagined and will require a bit more experimentation and prototyping if I attempt it again in the future.
The design is inspired by an islamic tile pattern that we saw recently while travelling in Turkey. I modelled it in Houdini by first procedurally re-creating the tiling pattern, then randomly breaking it up and distorting the pieces with some final detailing and bevelling. The final form was chosen by spending a while experimenting with different random seeds and noise offsets to find something that worked aesthetically. I then brought it into Blender for final tweaks, cleaned up the geometry to be watertight, added sprues for ease of casting, and exported the STL file for the print service.
Update and reel 2011
December 22nd, 2011 . 4 comments
It’s been a while since I posted anything here – the last few months for me involved being locked away at work and subsequently getting away for a well deserved holiday afterwards. Since February this year I was working as a VFX TD on Happy Feet Two at Dr. D Studios in Sydney, specialising in volumetrics. Production was very tough, but I’m lucky to have worked alongside some amazing artists and technicians, and great friends.
I’ve re-cut my demo reel including a few of the Happy Feet Two shots I worked on, below, and will be available for work again between January and April 2012.
Breakdown and HD version on vimeo
3Delight/Blender 0.7.0
September 15th, 2011 . 22 comments
After fixing some cross-platform issues that people were having with the last few versions, here’s a new release of 3Delight/Blender. As well as the fixes, I’ve included some new stuff that’s been on the backburner for a while – a new point cloud global illumination method. When enabled, the addon will automatically generate a point cloud, and then use it in the render for indirect lighting and environment lighting.
It’s just doing one bounce of indirect lighting, in the future it should be reasonably easy to add more bounces via photon mapping in the point cloud generation stage. Eventually I’d like to make this a bit more advanced, with a more modern design for the lighting/shading pipeline and more control over baking pre-passes, but for now (especially since I’m quite short on time ) I’d rather get it out and working in a simple, automatic way so people can use it.
I’ve tested this on my mac, and in both Linux and Windows XP VMs, but as always, if you have any problems on your system please let me know. Download the new addon here: render_3delight_0.7.0.zip
sternenfall/shevirath ha kelim
August 23rd, 2011 . 0 comments
by anselm kiefer
museum of old and new art
3Delight/Blender 0.6.2
August 9th, 2011 . 42 comments
Everyone else releases software at siggraph, so why not join in the fun. In ever-diminishing free time, I’ve made some small updates to 3Delight/blender.
There’s a few bug fixes since the last version (thanks Janne Heikkinen for reporting) and using some new features in Blender 2.58′s python API (thanks Campbell Barton), it’s now been possible to improve the shader UI significantly, removing the necessity to click ‘Initialise Shader Parameters’ each time, and now dynamically presenting all shaders in your shader path in a list to select from. Scanning the shaders is done in a background thread and cached – it’s only regenerated when a folder in the shader path is modified, and no more frequently than every 2 seconds.
Download the new addon here: render_3delight_0.6.2.zip
3Delight/Blender 0.6
July 5th, 2011 . 7 comments
After continuous small incremental improvements, it’s time to release a new version of the 3Delight/Blender render engine exporter. This version now requires blender 2.58 and adds a few new features, continuing to round out support for getting geometry data out of Blender. The main additions include:
- Exporting geometry to RIB archives, either manually (File → Export → RIB Archive) or at render time, automatically. Animated RIB archive file sequences can be exported to disk too, and rendered appropriately.
- Rendering blender objects as procedural geometry (Object Properties → Renderman Geometry panel). There’s basic support for DynamicLoad DSOs, RunProgram procedurals, Archives and DelayedReadArchives.
- Instancing blender objects on particles – full deformation and transformation motion blur is supported
- Exporting primitive variables from custom mesh data (such as vertex groups, vertex colors, and uv sets), with some convenient options for default UV sets and colors. Particles can also have primitive variables too, exporting per-point data such as particle age, velocity, lifetime, etc.
- Exporting blender fluid with motion blur
- Exporting blender curve objects as either renderman curve primitives (no animation supported yet due to limitations in the blender API), or as tessellated polygon mesh or subdivision mesh objects (animation supported).
Download the new addon here: render_3delight_0.6.0.zip
As always, feedback and questions are welcome in the comments here.
3Delight/Blender 0.5.4
May 5th, 2011 . 14 comments
I’ve now updated the 3Delight/Blender exporter to be compatible with Blender 2.57. Hopefully now there’s a ‘stable’ release, the Python API will fluctuate less and I can spend whatever spare time I have on developing this further, rather than fixing it to make it work! :)
The bpy API has changed recently to be stricter about where and when it will allow modifying scene data. This has had the effect of preventing some things happening as automatically as I would like, and I’ve had to make some things a bit more manual. Now, before using shaders for the first time, you need to click a button ‘Initialise Shader Parameters’ will will read the data from the shader file on disk and generate the UI inside Blender for it. This only needs to be done once on blender startup, and once when you use a new shader. It will automatically initialise all shaders correctly at render time, so it should still work rendering from the command line. I’d like this to happen all automatically behind the scenes but until there are new features added to Blender to support this, it’ll have to do.
As well as fixes, there are couple of new features. It now supports motion blurred dynamic hair (strands), deep shadow maps, and motion blurred shadows/ray tracing via the samplemotion attribute. The last two were contributed by Magnus Löfgren – thanks!
Get the new package here: render_3delight_0.5.4b.zip
edit 10/05/2011: Released a 0.5.4b version, with path handling fixes for Windows – download above
vop pathtracer bsdfs
April 15th, 2011 . 5 comments
Added some different bsdfs to my fun little houdini vopsop pathtracer, trying to see how far I can push things. Now supports perfect specular mirror and fresnel dielectrics – more info on the vimeo page.
Pathtracer vopsop
March 25th, 2011 . 2 comments
So I ended up taking my previous silly Houdini VOPs experiment another step further, and upgraded it to a pathtracer supporting indirect diffuse illumination. More info and hip file are at the vimeo page.