Planet Blender

Thank You J.A. Forbes
Phil McCoy's Posts - Project London - 2010-04-21 23:30:00

Jen Forbes, basically the glue that held us together during production, is leaving the Project London Team to move and pursue her career in another state, Nebraska. Jen let me know just a couple days ago that she accepted a job at an atomic power plant and will be moving and starting work in early May. We (Nate, Ian and I) are exceedingly sad to see her go.

Jen helped us take an idea and turn it into a movie. She describes her involvement with Project London in the following paragraph.

J.A. Forbes: "Ian tossed me a flyer one day and said to email the producer guy if I wanted to work on his film. I thought, sure why not, this kid (and I do mean kid; the boy couldn’t even drink legally at the time) will go places. Somehow The Triumvirate in their infinite wisdom (or lack of any better candidates) decided to bestow upon me the role of assistant director. I must have proven myself worthy of greater things because they promoted me to Production Manager (though I still had to earn my keep as AD) shortly before we rolled into production. Again I must have been totally awesome (or they were totally desperate) because they brought me back to supervise post-production! When I’m not catering to the demands of The Triumvirate, I make my own movies."

Please join with us in wishing Jen, "all the best" on her new adventure.

Sort the list!
pixel-sized - 2010-04-21 19:23:00

Some news from the Blender for Robotics project
BlenderNation - 2010-04-21 17:57:46

A bit more than a year later, some update on the Blender for Robotics 
project! Behind the scenes, a lot of things did happen over the last 
months. Blender for Robotics is an effort from several European robotics 
lab to build over the Blender Game Engine a set of tools for 
roboticians, including a new, multi-purpose simulator.

Logo / identity design
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-04-21 15:28:07

Hi everyone,

Here’s another call for community involvement… we need a good quality text+logo for the film. We checked on some initial ideas, like the Sintel text in the header here, combining it with the main symbol in the film, the dragon tree emblem. But it didn’t work out well. I also think a 3D extruded logo is too easy and cheap. We can do better!

Here’s the simple briefing:

• Design a 2D stylized logo, which fits well on film posters (on top of graphics), on a DVD cover, but also on tee shirts. The logo should have at least the text “Sintel”, optionally with other visual elements. Font type and capitalization is free.
• Deliver the logo in SVG vector format (use Inkscape!).
• Use the open project forum for posting designs and for reviews! Do not mail me!
• You will keep all rights on the designs you publish, but you agree to transfer copyright to Blender Foundation if we choose your design.
• On april 28th we might make and announce a choice, maybe later.

Check the Big Buck Bunny logo for example. It’s a strong visual that works in many situations very well. The ‘flat’ 2D nature of the logo makes it stand out well on top of 3D graphics as well.

What’s not going to be used:
- 3D extruded logos or text
- Designs that have the Blender logo in it, or versions of the Blender logo, or something resembling any other logo!

Reviews will be done by everyone of the Durian team, here. Colin’s and David’s opinions weight a lot, and I will make the final decision. The designer we select will get a prominent credit, and a free Blender Conference ticket + dinner and three nights in a good hotel in Amsterdam!

Thanks,

-Ton-

(BTW: there’s a teaser/trailer being worked on now, that’s why the short deadline…)

Ptex and the Open Source Community
Blender to RenderMan - 2010-04-21 13:46:00




Figure 1: T. Rex with 2694 faces rendered with Ptex. (©Walt Disney Animation Studios)

I decided today to write an article on Ptex, the texture map library that Disney developed and recently released as open source. While this is not fresh news by any means, since it's official release early this year there have been some development in both the commercial and open source worlds.

One of the first applications that support Ptex is naturally Pixar's RenderMan 15.0. After the announcement by Disney in Jan. 3D-Coat was one of the first smaller 3D applications that implimented it within a week, which of course brings to mind that infamous set of images found in the forums.




One of the more interesting images was the texture map itself which looks unlike any map I have ever seen.


















The original forum thread can be found here : http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=4834&st=0

However in the open source world it has not caught on quite as fast as expected, in fact to date none of the software in the Blender to Renderman pipeline support Ptex. This is not because of the lack of interest, it is more or less due to development targets. Simply put both Blender and Aqsis are in the process of major rewrites so to implement Ptex into these at this time would divert attention from the important targets in these applications.

Aqsis 1.8.0

Blender 2.5

Does this mean that Ptex will never see the light of day in the open source world? No. In fact if you recall it took some time before OpenEXR was added to Blender, Aqsis and Pixie so while the technology is there currently, it may be some time before it is added across the board. This is not due to developer laziness or as mentioned before, lack of interest (because there is an interest in it from the Aqsis team), it is simply there are more important things to worry about in each application such as functionality, stability and speed.

But all is not lost and it seems that some people have been using workarounds to accomplish usage of Ptex with applications that do not support Ptex, such as Blender.

CG Society Article

Recently there have been some usefull code that has popped up that not only will benefit Aqsis but Blender as well. For instance OpenImageIO (OIIO), which if combined with Ptex and supported in Blender and Aqsis would be something that can be very usefull. OpenImageIO was developed by none other than Larry Gritz, possibly one of the most important figures in the CG industry, from BMRT and Entropy, to the work he did at Nvidia with Gelato. So not only is OpenImageIO a powerfull imaging library but it's also one of Larry's greatest contributions to the open source community.

The /*Jupiter Jazz*/ group has also provided a usefull file cache library called "JupiterFileCache", of which at render time could improve file access speeds, the files can be texture maps, point clouds or other large files to reduce network traffic and disk use. Combined with the OpenImageI/O and Ptex libraries could be a useful benefit for everyone.

The Blender to Renderman project is aware that these recent contributions could have a massive impact on the open source CG industry, so I have a proposal to ALL the developers in these areas : Let's get together and at least come to a common goal to impliment Ptex into these applications as soon as possible. Even if I have to personally spearhead the development and communication between all parties involved, this could very well be one of the most pivotal moments in development after the core rewrites to the applications themselves, in reference to Blender, Aqsis and Pixie of course.

In conclusion it is nice to see more and more large scale studios contributing to the open source community, while the tools or libraries they provide may be small and few, they are greatly welcomed by the community and we are encouraging more of it. One of the goals we are trying to promote is to "play nice", which means that open source software should be able to work well with commercial or proprietary software in terms of file formats, libraries and standards. One of those steps was the addition of OpenEXR (except the minor issue of Blender reading and writing EXR images upside down), hopefully more of the same follows and one of those steps can be the subject of this post : Ptex.

The actual details of Ptex can be found here : http://www.disneyanimation.com/library/ptex/

(© Pixar Animation Studios)
(© Walt Disney Animation Studios)

Colorado Blender User Group, April 22nd
BlenderNation - 2010-04-21 06:58:39

I'm going to start a Blender users group and have our first meeting this Thursday April 22nd at 7pm! It will be at the Parker Library in Parker, Colorado.

Come on over and say "hello" and share your Blender experiences and questions.

Blender Workshops in NYC May 8th
BlenderNation - 2010-04-21 06:56:46

The Blender 3D Animation Production Group - NY will be holding it's first workshop in NYC on May 8th. Hosted by Mongrel FX LLC at Simple Studios.