Planet Blender

The Ian Report #481 - Exciting Beyond All Comprehension!
Ian Hubert's Posts - Project London - 2010-01-28 22:00:00

Staring at the Excel spreadsheet of all remaining tasks, I'm noticing that over half of them are labeled as "IN PROGRESS"—meaning that if I can complete all 'IN PROGRESS' shots this week, I'll have done over half the work remaining on the VFX list.

Meaning it might only take a week from this Saturday to finish the sheet.

This is exciting beyond all comprehension. After 2 and a half years, the VFX could finally be done!

However; it's not as simple as all that! For there are other things to be done afterward!

1.) Complete animated intro and ending. We're starting and ending the movie with little animated bits that should help bookend the thing in a fun context. I've got Benjamin Bailey and Nate Taylor ready to help me on that as soon as we're ready to go—it should be fantastic.

2.) Finish tasks on the 'polish list'. We've made a list of things that are passable, but that we'd love to spend a bit more time on—as we work our way through sound design, the hope is that I'll have the time to work my way through this list and get everything up to par.

3.) Fix Interlacing Problems. This one is basically the same as #2. We filmed in a crazy interlacing pulldown, and... let's just say the first 2/3 of the effects were done somewhat incorrectly in regards to compositing the VFX into the live-action footage. For the most part it will work out fine (although we're hoping we don't run into trouble converting into the PAL format)—but there are a few shots where the artifacts are evident (basically only when the live-action shot is panning or moving like that). Hoping to get a chance to clean that up.

4.) Remove Grading. In order to judge what I could get away with in the VFX arena, at the start of the film I was adding grading to all the VFX shots I did... but about half way through the VFX process we nailed down that we were going to do it as a post-post process, after they were all done—so I've gotta go through and re-render a hundred shots to remove the grading (a process I've already slowly begun)

Fortunately, none of these are as hard as "MAKE A GIANT ROBOT BATTLE A GIANT MONSTER GUY FROM SPACE WHILE A GIANT FLEET OF HOVERING BUILDINGS WATCHES ON, AND MAKE IT REAL, OK?"—and should be more like chewing on candy, as opposed to chewing on... large bricks.

[VFX SUPERVISORS TIP: You know what hasn't been done a lot in movies? Invisible aliens! It adds mystery. It's great. I promise.]

Ian Hubert
Writer Director

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graphicall: Changed max threads from 8 to 64 by ideasman_42 [26374]
Twitter / graphicall - 2010-01-28 19:22:29

graphicall: Changed max threads from 8 to 64 by ideasman_42 [26374]

Tip: Match Image Plane Aspect Ratio to Image
Blender Newbies 3D Video Tutorials (Learn to Create 3D Graphics with Blender!) - 2010-01-28 18:15:00



In this tip video, we’ll take a look at two ways to set the aspect ratio of a Plane object to match that of the image mapped to it. This is important to prevent distortion in the mapped image. This knowledge will be helpful when using image planes for cutout trees and people, instanced image planes for particle effects, and any situation where you need non-distorted images on Plane objects.

The “Add Image As Mesh” script (created by Ed Mackey) can be downloaded at:
http://www.blinken.com/blender-plugins.php

You can find help with installing python scripts at:
http://www.alienhelpdesk.com/using_python_scripts


You can check out the tutorial at BlenderCookie.com
Version Compatibility: 2.4x
Tutorial Level: Beginner

technorati tags: Blender3D, 3D, graphics, Blender tutorials

A sad news for the open source world
Tinker Code - 2010-01-28 15:51:56

Hi I want to share this, when I read it I feel really sad: The biggest OpenSource host site SourceForge has pledged to the EEUU decistion to forbid users from Cuba,Iran,North Korea,Siria and Sudan to access their content…. and this is true: I can no longer download a single byte from them  This is a sad [...]

A step closer to particle surfaces
Tinker Code - 2010-01-28 15:10:56

Hi all Last night I finished the implementation of surface refinement for particles, this allows to increase the resolution of the mesh for smoother surfaces. I still need to redefine my current surface evaluation from particles because I’m getting the wrong isosurfaces but still I could show you my progress. This will be [...]

Animaatioskaba #2 – “Kokeellista taidetta”
#blender.fi - 2010-01-28 13:02:51

Laitetaan pitkästä aikaa animaatioskaba pyörimään, aihe on siis: “Kokeellista taidetta”. Osallistumisohjeet löytyvät alla olevasta linkistä.  Deadline kahden viikon päästä sunnuntaina (14.2.2010).

Linkki skabathreadiin.

Twitter: 2010-01-28
Matt Ebb - 2010-01-28 10:01:00

• @effstops in my exp splitting up things too much and doing lighting in comp is *way* more trouble than it's worth, esp. on big projects. #
• @effstops yup, its best physical analogy imo is approximation of an even environment light. in reply to effstops #
• I nominate @DrRachie for a Shorty Award in #health because… she promotes science, not paranoia http://bit.ly/shorty #
• @effstops hence, just slapping it on top and multiplying across the entire render = yuck #
• @effstops otherwise if you want it to darken, it should only be used on an 'ambient' component, not direct lighting. #
• @effstops depends what you want it to be. usually i use it as an environment 'skylight' which adds light, which seems more natural to me. in reply to effstops #
• @thisismywww what shopping center was that? #

GPU Rendering with LuxRender is coming!
BlenderNation - 2010-01-28 09:43:18

The processors of modern videocards (GPU’s – Graphical Processing Units) are SO powerful, that they’re much faster at rendering than CPUs. Here are the first results of a test project that introduces GPU rendering in LuxRender. If they pull this off, it promises an incredible speedup! The frames in the following sample only took seconds to [...]

Tip: Match Image Plane Aspect Ratio to Image
Blender Cookie - 2010-01-28 04:51:10

In this Blender tip video, we’ll take a look at how to set the aspect ratio of a Plane object to match that of the image mapped to it. This is important to prevent distortion in the mapped image. This knowledge will be helpful when using image planes for cutout trees and people, instanced image [...]

http://blendercookie.com

ご無沙汰(BlogPet)
CG系blog - 2010-01-28 02:44:02

きょうはFDTKと使用しようかな。
FDTKはご無沙汰してくれるかな。

*このエントリは、ブログペットの「輪ゴム」が書きました。

News about GPU rendering with LuxRender, YafaRay, iRay and Maya
Blender 3D Architect - 2010-01-28 01:46:57

In the past few days a lot of interesting news and demos about GPU rendering appear o twitter and user forums. It`s quite clear that after the announcement of Octane Render and Arion, we will start to see even more releases related with GPU render. I will start with the announcement of a GPU render [...] Related posts:

1. LuxRender may use GPU power in the future Since the announcement of Octane Render last monday a lot...
2. Arion: Another GPU based unbiased render engine A couple days ago I was talking about the announcement...
3. iray Demo: Realtime rendering for architectural with Mental Ray From all predictions about the future of architectural visualization, one...

A random collection of thoughts
Blender to RenderMan - 2010-01-28 00:50:00



This post is not really about anything in particular, really it has been a month since the last post so I want to just put down some thoughts about some of the stuff that has been sitting in my head over the past year.

Project Widow has become QUITE the task, I really do not think any of us realized just how difficult it was going to become. Considering that this is a small team it is not surprising that the initial 3 month deadline was completely blown. What started as a test became a short film, it will even have its own soundtrack provided by a fairly well known artist (that is MY surprise!!), which that too is considered CC license but anyways back to the point. When the idea started to form it was due to postings on websites that asked if this technology was able to do what we claimed, then why can't we re-render something like Big Buck Bunny? Well one reason was because of the technical implications, BBB was designed for Blender - not something like Aqsis. Another reason was simply why redo something when we can create something new? I took the idea that Pixar perfected, using short films to showcase advances in their software or more accurately - create short films to take advantage of the advances in the software that they developed. Well this is sort of one of those reasons. Quite a bit of programming has been done because of this project, new ideas and methods are also being developed as well. We are doing something never done before using the tools we use and in some cases - develop. Of course we have had more than our fair share of issues as well, in many cases some of the original ideas have either been scraped or re-developed in hopes that this or that would work. In all this is a huge learning experience for everyone and not to mention great demo reel material for all those involved, at the very least something to be proud of! Hopefully before the end of the year this will be completed, we are chipping away at this even if at times we want to throw in the towel (lol) but this is something that needs to be finished.

Something else that has happened over the year or so is that there is a great deal of interest for this pipeline, not only from the average user but also from studios or at the very least certain people within these places. I really cant say who, simply because I have not been authorized to release that kind of information but to the best of my knowlage at least 3 studios are testing these tools in some form and one of them is fairly well known in the CG industry. We have even gotten interest from a member of the Blender Foundation (other than the link on the website that is). Tens of thousands of hits to this very site over the past couple years and some of them from the big studios that we all know. I find this totally mind blowing, regardless of how little I personally have done to develop actual code, this site itself has really grabbed the attention of these people and it all started because I wanted to create a small community where we could bridge that gap between Blender and Renderman somehow.

Here is the best part! We have only just begun! Really this is the technolgical TEST that in a sense has proven that while the intagration of the tools is still not completely %100 compatible and some work arounds are required to achive certain results - all of it was mainly to prove that this WORKS! Project Widow already proved this long before this current stage even, Eric made a quick 10 second small rendered video of a test shot, so the proof of making an animated video using these tools has already been done time and time again. Project Widow is no longer a test, it is a short animation. When Blender 2.50 comes around and the next build of Mosaic is stable enough, who knows what is going to happen but I can say for certain that it will only improve over time.

I promise the next posting (coming early next month) will be a bit more than personal ramblings...