ANOTHER DELAYED UPDATE

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!

As part of the project, alongside the many hours of artistic work, we’ve also done some development work. A few of the shots required an ocean environment, and since the existing methods of displacing clouds textures weren’t really adequate, we contracted Hamed Zaghaghi to develop ocean simulation tools in Blender. He’s done an excellent job, integrating a new ‘ocean’ procedural texture, which can be used not only as a displacement height map, but also with various shading modes for layers such as foam masks. We plan to get a patch out early net week.

Another sequence of shots involved an old, thick lighthouse lens. In many of the reference photos we looked at, they showed quite strong chromatic dispersion, so as a side project I started to work on raytraced dispersion rendering in Blender’s internal renderer. After getting a bit stuck mid-way, I had a look through yafray’s source code, and found some spectrum code that was just what I needed, and it integrated nicely. Thankyou yafray, and thankyou open source! I’ll try and get a patch for this together soon enough, too.