ANOTHER DELAYED UPDATE

2008.05.22 @ 15:47

(12)

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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Code, Miscellaneous Debris. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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Reader Comments

Alex / 2008.05.23 @ 07:40

Thank’s for sharing your experience.
I’m wait for the ocean’s material, since it seem really good.
i’d like to see the work you,ve done!
great job!
ibkanat / 2008.05.23 @ 09:14

Wow great Matt…. Looking forward to using the ocean sim. Is it possible to create curling waves now?
Pablo Vazquez / 2008.05.23 @ 13:50

hey matt, sorry to hear what happened to your place, is admirable that you could do all that work and development after that, i hope everything is going well now.

best
UncleZeiv / 2008.05.23 @ 18:20

Can’t wait to see the finished project! Congratulations for your amazing work.
wayne / 2008.05.24 @ 00:53

chromatic dispersion… YAY!!!!!
you are awesome matt!
mattie / 2008.05.27 @ 09:25

_WOW_!
Mal / 2008.05.29 @ 07:29

Sorry to hear about the break in.

It’s great to hear that you’ll be feeding the changes you made back into the trunk, I’m amazed at the quality of that water!

Keep up the great work, and hopefully some of your UI work will appear in Blender 2.5!
Matt / 2008.05.29 @ 14:33

Thanks for the kind words, folks! Hopefully you guys can play with something soon.

ibkanat: not curling waves, but it does to horizontal displacement instead of just straight up, so the wave surface shifts side to side as well, as it should.
Virgilio / 2008.05.30 @ 21:54

Hey, Matt. =)

I’m also very sorry for what happened to your place. I hope all things get back to normal soon.

And thank you very much for all those cool things you share to us.

Cheers
andy / 2008.05.31 @ 02:08

wow! the ocean procedual looks amazing. great to hear from you again, way to go mate! ;)

take care,
.andy
Paul Caggegi / 2008.06.01 @ 22:46

Hey Matt! Been looking forward to a new blogpost for ages. Good to hear you’re still around and working hard.
grafixsuz / 2008.06.08 @ 20:37

Dude that is bad news about your place getting broken into, as a suggestion, don’t replace everything straight away, they will most definitely break in again to get your new stuff… happened to a good friend of mine. 3 times in as little as 6 months.

Anyway, I checked out that ocean shader and wow, that is just awesome stuff. Give a big thanks to your company for investing in blenders development.

Take care man. Don’t burn yourself out now o.k.!