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 :).

Yesterday I found out about a new website called CGSphere. The premise is simple, take a sphere on a grid background in a CG application and interpret it in some creative way. It reminds me of one of my uni projects called small square book, in which we had to make a square book with 50 pages, with each page having a different image based on the idea of a square, linked together in some consistent theme. I really enjoyed that project, and the fun of trying to be inventive within limitations, so I posted my first CGSphere today.

It’s an homage to El Lissitzky, one of the Russian Suprematists / Constructivists, and his famous image Beat the Whites with Red Wedge from 1919. I really love that kind of art, and luckily had the chance to see some of the originals by Malevich, Lissitzky and Rodchenko in the Russian museum a few years ago. Anyway, this is just my small tribute :)

Update: I made another one.

During the last disconnected weeks, I finished cleaning up and putting together some footage for my demo reel. Now, it’s online here at mke3.net/reel. Do go and check it out, I hope you’ll like it.

And yes, I am looking for work :)

It’s interesting how productive one can be without the constant distractions of the internet. I’m alive and well in my new place and enjoying it a lot, but thanks to incompetent phone companies I’ve been disconnected from the net for the 2 1/2 weeks I’ve been here. Hopefully I’ll be back online within the next couple of days, so sorry if I’ve been a bit out of contact, I’ve got a huge backlog of emails to get through.

Apart from cleaning up a demo reel, some coding and of course unpacking, the other day I did a little test of the in-development multi-res sculpting tools, currently being constructed by Nicholas Bishop, who’s doing a sterling job as part of Google’s Summer of Code. I’m using a build that’s about 3 or 4 weeks out of date, but even so, it works very nicely already.

Here’s another comp test in some of my experiments with cekuhnen in the blenderartists forums. It makes use of a simple Combine RGBA node, which I wrote the other day. It doesn’t exist in Blender but a patch is available in the tracker. Without that patch though, you can replicate the functionality using a slightly convoluted node network. This technique basically takes three different versions of the refracting material, with slightly different indexes of refraction, then adds them back together in the different R/G/B channels. I’ve blurred them slightly with a mask taken from the sphere on another render layer.

It doesn’t hold up too well in close up since you can see the three different layers quite sharply, rather than a smooth blend - for that you’d need more IOR layers. I also tried doing this in material nodes too, which would be a much better approach, however the way raytraced refractions is handled there seems to be a little bit weird, and it didn’t work out. Hopefully in the future this can be cleaned up, perhaps with specific raytracing nodes that output RGB or alpha or whatever.

  .blend file

While helping prepare the Release Notes for the impending release of Blender 2.42, I’ve made a few more demo files, including for stress maps, and put together some comp breakdowns from Elephants Dream. The most fun (and slow) though, was using Blender’s fluid simulator for the first time, to make a nice demo of the new motion blurred fluid rendering capabilities.

It took an evening to set up, light and texture and overnight to render on my poor little G4, but it looks kinda cool! Guess I need a faster computer though, to use higher fluid resolutions and get rid of the residue stuck on the bowl at the end.

  QuickTime H.264
  MPEG4
  .blend file

I did a bit of an experiment the other night as a proof of concept for a new node type that would be very nice. Although it’s unfinished and disabled for version 2.42, it’s planned that we’ll be able to extract an Ambient Occlusion pass into the compositor with Blender’s pass rendering system, which will make it much easier to manipulate, doing colour corrections, changing blend modes (screen/multiply/overlay are better blender modes than the built-in add/subtract/add+sub).

One very useful manipulation that could be done is to blur the AO pass along the surface of the geometry, to smooth out noisy sampling.

  test .blend file

Some of you may have seen the video tutorial I made a while ago demonstrating how to fake a layered car paint material using ramps. Now in the upcoming Blender 2.42, we have the new material node system, so there’s no need for fakery, and a lot more flexibility and control. As a proof of concept and a nice demo for the 2.42 release, I made up a node-based car paint material using a great VW beetle model by ‘pa-furijaz’ that I found on the Blender Model Repository.

The model and my material are freely available under the Blender Artistic License.

  MPEG4 (600 KB)
  XviD AVI (500 KB)
  .blend file

Today, Campbell ‘Ideasman’ Barton showed me a very cool .blend file he made to demonstrate Blender’s Array Modifier, new in the upcoming Blender version 2.42. I thought I’d light, comp and render it to make a nice demo movie to use in the 2.42 release documentation. The white 3D axes are the controller objects. Check it out:

  Small MPEG4 (3 MB)
  Large XviD AVI (16 MB)
  .blend file

After doing a fair bit of concept art for Elephants Dream, I’ve decided I need to get back into sketching more regularly not only because I’ve enjoyed it, but because its a very useful skill to have, and I’d like to practise and try and get my fundamentals more solid.

I signed up to conceptart.org and made myself a sketchbook to keep motivated and hopefully get some constructive feedback. Let’s see if I can make a habit of posting my updates here as well from time to time, starting with this.

Aaron tells me today that the Video Ezy site we worked on just got plugged in the news box of Australian In Front, one of the big cool dude design websites. Not bad!

After a long time in limbo, and quite a few changes since I left it, the new Video Ezy website is up. Video Ezy is one of the largest video rental chains in Australia, akin to Blockbuster, and it was quite interesting following the process through the dealings with the franchisees.

I worked on it with Aaron and Pete while at @www, doing the page layout/template design, and also the 3D-but-not-3D ’store browser’ thing on the front page, using Blender, Swift 3D (ugh) and Flash. Although the client has now put some questionable things in their free content areas and the e-shop backend was postponed, it’s not looking too bad.