Last week, Lighthouse was released online, a short film project that our studio had been working on for the last couple of months. The full details about the project, with the movie itself viewable online, high res stills, and production breakdown video are available in the post we made at CGTalk, so please do go and check it out there. The response so far has been great, we got featured on the front page of said website, and have had several thousand views with very encouraging comments.

Although it was a bit tricky for me, being the bottleneck responsible for the texturing, shading, lighting, comping, with a couple of weeks of late nights towards the end of the project, it was quite enjoyable overall. Exopolis, our clients in LA, were fun guys to work with and gave us a lot of room to work without being micromanaged. It’s interesting that Liberty Mutual (the insurance firm who commissioned the work, in the form of the ‘responsibility project‘) are now spending their marketing dollars on producing themed art, rather than usual commercials. It’s certainly the kind of work I’d love to be doing more of.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A couple of days ago, I was experimenting with unsharp masks in Blender’s compositor when I came across an interesting paper by Thomas Luft, Carsten Colditz, and Oliver Deussen, Image Enhancement by Unsharp Masking the Depth Buffer. The paper describes a number of image manipulations that can be done by finding areas where there are sharp discontinuities in depth, one of which is quite useful as a way to fake an ambient occlusion effect in post.

Unsharp mask is a popular way of sharpening images, which generally gives much better results and flexibility than simple convolution filters. It may not be widely known, but it’s actually a wet darkroom technique, and is very easy to recreate with some simple blurring and blending. Unsharp mask finds areas of high local contrast by comparing the original image to a blurred version of itself, checks where it differs the most, then uses this mask to enhance constrast in those areas, usually in the luminance channel. The blur radius determines the size, or frequency of features that will be found.

I finished a new image today. I came upon this idea while sketching a week and a bit ago, and it was a good excuse to do some sculpting.

Here’s another experiment with my game engine tablet support patch, now trying to do something a bit more practical with the virtual pen. I’m using the new rigid body constraints in the game engine to construct a brush tip out of ball joints - I have very little experience with them so it’s a bit rough. I wish I knew how to make the motion more damped and swing less loosely, but it works to an extent, and the main thing, it’s all good fun!

I actually find it interesting, since the swinging back and forth of the tip adds another dimension to it, you have to get the angle and timing just right, to get the mark where you want it on the canvas. Although it’s not anything that’s of immediate practical value, it does at least provide an additional level of depth of ‘analogue’ input that could potentially be exploited in fun ways.

Of course this isn’t anything too amazing, being just a poor remediation of ink painting, but it’s a small step along the way to something that I’m interested in investigating, developing more simple, yet flexible tools.

Yesterday I added a new node to Blender’s compositor: Displace. It works very similarly to Shake’s iDisplace node, pushing pixels around based on an input vector mask, and is useful for all sorts of things like doing hot air distortion, quick and dirty refraction effects in post, and so on. The full documentation is in the commit log, I guess I’ll have to tidy it up for the release notes.

One curiousity of this one is the technique used to code it. Most of the code logic was done using Blender’s Python Image API, as a means of quickly testing and prototyping. Python is a lot slower at the actual processing, but it’s a heck of a lot quicker to test than having to compile Blender each time. I recommend it!

You can download the prototype script/.blend file if you’re curious (just press Alt P). I then ported to C, which is relatively easy to do for simple image processing code like this, and changed a few things around. Previously in the Python version I had to try and come up with my own not-too-bad antialiasing code, though I’m sure what I came up with has been done before and has a nice technical name or something ;) In the C version I was able to use some nicer image sampling code that Ton used for the awesome Map UV node. Incidentally, I also used the same Python prototyping technique for the UV test grid option when creating new images in Blender (.blend file).

When I worked on adding tablet support to GHOST, Blender’s low-level input system (alongside Nicholas Bishop and Andrea Weikert who did the X11 and Windows versions), one thing I had in mind was the possibilities not only in the obvious painting and sculpting, but in other more experimental areas too. I’ve got a few ideas sketched down about potential uses in the interface, for example imagine sliders that changed in precision depending on tablet pressure, or a radial menu that uses the tablet tilt information to bias what option is selected.

A tablet, especially one that supports tilt sensitivity like the Wacom Intuos, is almost a poor man’s 3d input device. With X/Y location, pressure and tilt, you can derive a lot of information about the pen’s situation in 3D space. This is interesting to me, because unlike real 3D input devices like spaceballs (which I don’t own), many CG artists have tablets, so input methods involving a tablet can involve a much larger audience than the more obscure devices, and so investigating it doesn’t feel like such a waste of time :).