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.

I’ve recently made a new website for ebivibe, a music video production collective in Sydney. Yesterday the final touches were applied and we launched it to www.ebivibe.com.

Big thanks to Kiku and the crew for putting up with all the tweaking and refines that took so long going back and forth around the globe while I’ve been here in Amsterdam. There’s some really cool work there, so go on and check it out.

Going through some old sketchbooks and uni notebooks recently I found a few quirky doodles and oddities from the past that I decided to scan.

Last Friday, I bought Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), and spent Saturday morning backing up and doing a nice fresh install on my Powerbook. After a few days using Tiger now, I’m really enjoying it, and it’s mainly the little things that make it so worthwhile (integrated slideshows in the Finder, great b/w photo desktop wallpaper, system-wide dictionary, and a bunch of other little details). One feature that I originally thought would be a lame gimmick, but now I’ve grown to love, is Dashboard.

Trawling through Apple’s dashboard widget directory, I found a great little applet called Feedr by Ben Levy, that displays photos from Flickr, either by tag, ID, or RSS feed, as a slideshow. The only thing that troubled me was that the graphics and icon weren’t nearly as attractive as the beautiful ones provided by Apple, so since the widgets are made with nice, simple JavaScript/CSS and Feedr was distributed under a Creative Commons license, I went ahead and made my own. Ben was quite happy with my changes, so now Feedr 1.1 has been released with my graphics and some cool new code from Ben, available from Apple’s web site.

Today I went to have a look at the Digital Imaging Exhibition (part of Digital Media World magazine’s Digital Media Festival at the Sydney Convention Centre. While I was there, I managed to have my first try of Apple’s relatively new compositing/motion graphics app, Motion. When the first images of Motion were released (roughly a year after Blender’s UI update in version 2.30), Ton and I were joking and pondering about the similarity of their ‘Dashboards‘ to Blender’s floating panels. Today when using Motion, I found another very uncanny similarity in their number field controls, which I took a little video of on my camera.

(MPEG4 video, 900KB)

And Blender’s, for comparison

In a recent explosion of coding from Ton Roosendaal, Blender’s mesh editing tools have had a serious overhaul, making life for modellers roughly a billion times better. The amount of improvements are staggering, and too many to mention here, but as a brief highlight, there are now separate vertex/edge/face selection modes, direct editing of subdivision surface edges and faces (as well as the 0-level proxy cage), fast edge/face loop selection with Alt-click, backface hiding/ignoring, a new lasso selection tool, fake ngons (fgons), and loads more.

To test and bug-hunt the new features as well as to brush up on my rusty character modelling skills, in between all the other crap I’ve got to do right now, I started a little project modelling a Thai Buddha using some photos taken while travelling in South East Asia at the start of this year. It’s still rather WIP, and probably won’t even get finished, but hey. :)

WIP render and wireframe

I recently completed some work, freelancing with LKS Design in North Sydney. The finished product is open and live now, so hopefully I won’t get in trouble for posting this here :) The project was done for Fuji Xerox, who are opening four showrooms/exhibition spaces (called ‘epicenter’) in Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore and Sydney to promote and demonstrate their high-end printing equipment. The Tokyo site opened yesterday.

My main job consisted of creating an interactive kiosk display in Flash (microsite) for display on a huge 80″ plasma screen inside. Additionally, the epicenter contains around a hundred posters exhibited throughout the space, illustrating various ideals that they want to promote (eg. innovation, sustainable development, consistency of colour) that serve a dual purpose of showing off the print quality of their top hardware. I worked on two groups of these, business results and creativity, which was quite interesting.

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Woops, forgot to post this earlier, now it’s old news already! Well, here’s my entry to last week’s Weekend Challenge at elysiun.com. The topic was ‘Primitives’. (CG in-joke, har har) It was a great contest and fortunately I ended up winning with 37% of the votes! Well done, to all who entered. :)

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