Yesterday I was doing some work over at Red Cartel, as part of it I coded a new network render submission script for Blender 2.5 to Autodesk Backburner – the default queue manager that comes with Max and Maya. I’d previously already made a similar exporter for Blender 2.4 which has been in use there for a while, allowing managing and prioritising Blender jobs alongside Max/vray jobs on the same farm.

I’ve packaged it up as a Blender 2.5 addon, it might be useful to any of you wanting to render Blender jobs in an Autodesk-centric environment. Get it here: http://mke3.net/projects/bpy/render_backburner.py

powerhouse, cockatoo island
lack of colour from underdeveloping seems to suit this

cockatoo island, biennale of sydney 2010

near brunswick st, mebourne
developed with naniwa color kit n

in camperdown
developed with naniwa color kit n

As of last week, I’ve decided it’s time to finish up with my full time Blender development contract and move on to new things. It’s been 8 months now since I started with this, pretty close to the first 9 month target/budget, so it’s not too unexpected. I’m happy to have done my part in bringing Blender 2.5 closer up to production ready status over the last several months, and this decision doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll cease contributing, but it will be the end of it for now in this professional capacity. It’s been an interesting time, I’ve had some new experiences, but it’s not what I really want to be doing with myself in the long term – I’m itching to get back into more regular creative production work!

I think what I’ve learned from this is that while some people are happy programming for programming’s sake, It’s really most interesting for me when it’s directly in service of some artistic goal or creative problem to solve. While I’ve done the work to the best of my professional ability, the last several months of report management and bug fixing (I estimate about ~350 fixed since the start) has been a bit motivationally draining, so it’s a good time for change.

So, what next? I’m looking forward to getting stuck into more freelance work again
(hire me! ;) as well as developing some new skills in other areas and working on some personal projects. Hopefully more interesting times ahead!

christchurch art gallery

Janet Laurence
A Medicinal Garden for Ailing Plants
installation, royal botanic gardens, biennale of sydney 2010

Janet Laurence
A Medicinal Garden for Ailing Plants
installation, royal botanic gardens, biennale of sydney 2010

Recent jobs – quick lighting/setup on a couple more Bridgestone Gecko TVCs in blender 2.5:

In Japan I bought issue 25 of otona no kagaku (loose translation ‘science for adults’), a very cool magazine that comes with a DIY project attached to each issue. Issue 25 features a 35mm TLR camera, in parts, to be constructed from the shutter mechanism and lens assembly all the way up.

It’s basic and fully manual – fixed shutter speed (determined by the strength of the internal springs, around ~1/150 apparently) and fixed aperture, though you can change it by disassembling the lens and rearranging some elements. It’s lots of fun though, much lighter than the mamiya c330 ;), and at around AUD$30 was a decent price for a plastic toy, compared to the ridiculously expensive hipster ‘blackbird fly’ which doesn’t even have live focusing through the viewing lens.

Some first shots on bw:

For a little while now I’ve been working in my own time on a renderman connection for Blender 2.5. The new render API, while not fully complete and stable, makes it much easier to connect Blender’s scene data to external renderers, via python.

I’m aware that other people are interested in this topic too, but so far I’ve been doing this for my own use – to get more familiar and experienced with renderman in practice (by diving deeper in head first), and to develop something I’d like to use myself as a lighting/shading artist. I’m also concentrating on the 3Delight renderer at the moment, since it interests me most and provides a free single license.

It’s still quite a work-in-progress, and by no means provides exhaustive support at this point. I’m tackling this from a pragmatic angle, with the priority of implementing things I want to use myself first and making that easy to use rather than trying to supporting the entire rispec from the start. I’ll probably release the code very soon, but I would like to clean it up a little bit first.

Here’s a test I rendered out last night, with a model by my mate Tristan Lock:

Anyway, currently it supports: polygon mesh, subdivision surfaces, uv coordinates, depth of field blur, motion blur, surface/displacement/lightsource shaders with parameters available in blender material properties, simple conversion from blender’s lamps to renderman lightsources, shadow maps, raytraced shadows, built-in indirect lighting and environment lighting using 3Delight’s ‘indirectlight’ and ‘envlight2′ shaders, and shader editing and compilation from the blender text editor.

One of my favourite souvenirs from japan – cuts of actual 16mm filmstrips from the ghibli museum in mitaka. In this collection: spirited away, ponyo, and howl’s moving castle.
(check full size on flickr!)

Finally after a long time sorting scanning and cleaning, I’ve finished putting up my shots from Japan. The full set is here.

ghibli museum, mitaka

national art center, tokyo

takayama

bamboo grove, kyoto

kyoto