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.

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.

It’s been a while since my last post here, I’ve had a few things going on that took priority. Kat’s been very sick and I’ve been spending most of my available time over the last four weeks at the hospital with her. It’s been exhausting for all of us, but she’s now recovering well and going home in a matter of days, which is a great relief.

Work has been going quite well, with bursts of very busy periods interspersed with down-time. I’ve barely needed to touch Max and have been working in Blender just about all day every day, with some compositing in Fusion every now and then.

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.

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!

As mentioned a few posts previously, I went to the linux.conf.au open day last week, representing Blender amongst all sorts of other projects.

I had a great, though brief time, took some photos, and wrote up a short report for BlenderNation, which I’ll also post here:

A lot is said about the bokeh effect in photography (and simulated in 3D CG), but it may not be commonly known that it’s something that can happen any time light passes through a small aperture, not just within a lens. The other day while I was in the back yard, I noticed the same thing as light was passing from the sun down through leaves in the trees above and casting beautiful patterns as each point of light spread out to become a disc shape on the ground below. I had to take a photo of it, and I bet there’s some kind of irony in that. :)

As far as simulating bokeh is concerned, we now have an incredible new Defocus node in Blender’s compositor in the upcoming 2.43 release, for simulating depth of field blur. I did a bit of testing while it was under development, and for the most part, it does an excellent job. Big thanks to Alfredo de Greef for that one.

Linux.conf.au is one of the world’s premier Linux and open source software conferences, and it’s coming up very soon at the University of New South wales, in Sydney, Australia.

Part of the conference includes an ‘open day‘, almost like an open source trade show, on Thursday the 18th of Jan. I’ve been invited, and have agreed to give a short demo of Blender / Elephants Dream at the open day, but I’ve recently learned that there will also be 40 or so tables set up and available throughout the day for each project to give demos and have a chat with people.

There will be a lot of interesting people and open source projects represented here, and it would be great for Blender to have a presence. I can be at a table for a short while, but I’m really busy on that day and I have to leave early. So, are there any Blender users in Sydney who would like to come down and hang out there in the afternoon? That way there won’t just be a pathetic looking empty Blender desk as people come by A computer would be useful, but if not, it might still be good to have someone there at least to chat, show some pictures, etc.

Last week, my ADSL2 modem bit the dust and until my ISP sends me a new one, I’m disconnected from the net - I’m posting this from an internet cafe. Of course, thanks to the christmas/new year break it’ll probably be a while before I get connection back again, so if I take a while to reply to email etc, that’s why, and I apologise!

Hope you’re all enjoying the holidays, see you back online soon.

Edit, a few hours later: Scratch that, I arrived home and there was a nice working modem waiting for me. Yay!

Unless I’m mistaken and you, my readers, are extremely interested in selling me viagra and car insurance, I’ve been suffering from an increasingly bad blog comment spam problem, and it’s been getting a lot worse lately. Most of this is due to being stuck on an old version of Movable Type, which has very poor spam prevention. I’d been planning for a while to move over to Wordpress, which I like a lot more and have set up many times before (including on elephantsdream.org) but had been procrastinating for a while, worried about the changeover process.

Today, I finally cracked and exported this blog over to the new system, which went surprisingly smoothly. Most of the work took very little time at all, while tweaking the template to get it working just right took a little bit longer. Luckily Wordpress isn’t written in Perl, like Movable Type is, so when I ran into a limitation in the templating system, I could actually understand it enough to hack together a simple plugin to do the job. Hopefully everything should be working smoothly and you won’t even notice a difference, though I’m still working on a solution to keep old links pointing to the right pages. If you notice something that’s obviously messed up, please let me know! cheers.

I’m back in Sydney again, after arriving yesterday with surprisingly little jetlag. Previous times I’d been to Europe, I’d been a total zombie for the week after, but I suppose thanks to a fortuitous combination of travel times and aeroplane seating arrangements, I’m feeling pretty good. My time away was rushed and brief, but still very interesting.

After only arriving in Europe the night before, Blender conference came and went very quickly, it was great to catch up again, with the general Blender crew and of course the others from the Orange team (except for poor Basse, who was stranded in Finland after an airline strike :/ ). Some very well produced videos of the proceedings, including our Making Elephants Dream presentation, are available on Google Video and BitTorrent, with hopefully more to come soon.

Just a brief update, I’m sitting in the side room of De Waag in Amsterdam on the third and final day of the 2006 Blender Conference, waiting to give my next artist tutorial session. Having a great time as usual amidst the late nights and jetlag. Most of the presentations I’ve seen have been interesting, and they should be appearing as video downloads soon, for those who couldn’t be here.

Bart and the others from Blendernation are here, doing a great job covering the event with video reports and interviews already online, and there’s also an excellent live video stream coming straight from the main theatre floor. I wonder what sort of nonsense has been recorded coming out of my mouth, for the world to see…