Just down the road from my faculty building is a site called CarriageWorks – it was an abandoned train station which got remodeled into a contemporary art site. It’s quite a charming place, and it makes perfect sense for the upcoming TEDxSydney to be hosted there. Being an abandoned train station, it also is quite the goldmine in terms of textures which may be used for budding CG artists.

Last Wednesday I snuck around and snapped a bunch of photos of the mouldy, rotting and disintegrating, as well as the lovely mechanical details here and there. I haven’t done any modifications or cleaning up on the photos, but they’re sufficient to be used as references or basic texture works.

Licensed as CC BY-SA.

If you use them please link me to your work as I love to see other’s creations!

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Because I fully emphathise that people with a grip of things wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about my life, I decided to show some pictures of the trouble I’ve been having trying to rig Taras, one of the main characters in The ThoughtScore Project. Here are two statically posed shots of Taras:

The left shows him in his unrigged pose. The pose he was modeled in. The right shows him "looking" down, slightly bent forward with his left arm reaching towards you. Disregarding the fact that the lighting is completely faked (what is that suit reflecting, anyway?), we have two other major problems to deal with.

Problem Number One: His arm was not built to be in that pose. Not was any other part of his anatomy. When standing straight his arms are abnormally squashed in order to look natural in that one pose… and when in a dark environment. In any other scenario you’d see two spindly arms sticking out of a hunk of metal. The way it was designed, his shoulder "ball and socket" joint is more of a "plank of wood stuck on a block of wood" joint. It doesn’t fit nicely like a joint should.

Put simply, all of his joints (legs included) will have to be remodelled in order so that you don’t have gaping holes or bits of the suit intersecting when limbs are moved in their extremeties. Not an easy task.

Problem Number Two: The torso. The torso is made up of several different meshes. Each part fits together nicely in one way and one way only. If you look at the picture, you’ll see that when he leans forward, the upper torso covers the middle torso, which largely remains stationary, the groin panel shifts outwards slightly, and the piping all has to move to accomodate this change and not randomly stick out where it shouldn’t. Think of it like the parts of a steam engine.

Long story short, it’s going to be a PITA to rig that guy just to bend over. Heck, I don’t think you can bend over in a suit like that.

Normally I stubbornly plod down the road of "create first, learn later, fix and redo even later", but this time I think I’d better buy some of Blender’s training DVDs before continuing on ThoughtScore.

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I am truly amazed with what has been going on and I will definitely throw myself back into Blender this holiday and its stuff like this that really shows what open-source is capable of. Blender is one serious threat to the huge commercial monopoly in the 3D industry. Here is a short list of the features he describes:

• New design/look
• Panel splitting/deleting/management
• Not limited to one window only
• Massive reorganisation of features that make it more intuitive
• Real-time playback animation while editing
• Real-time playback animation while rendering
• Every single value in Blender can now be animated
• Support for macro options
• New transform panel
• Search option for features

Without further ado:

Clicky here to watch the video.

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You can see the pitiful post I made after scrolling through history on this page:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=88517&page=3

Revive ThoughtScore! I need a plan, a design, something huge! Grab me some pencil and paper, and let’s bring my vision into a reality! I have a holiday coming up, and I hope I can approach this through another angle which should allow me to continue production.

The next post will be in a week’s time because I am going to be stuck in a jungle throughout next week. You will then receive posts in this order: 1) The Trek, 2) New Perspective Magazine Released, and 3) What is becoming of Eadrax.

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Even if you know nothing about Blender, help me in this open-source dilemma, please read on.

Recently, Bart Veldhuizen over from BlenderNation.com started beta-testing for a new resource sharing system known as BlenderNation Links. BlenderNation, for those that don’t know, is the central news website for all things Blender related. It’s the central hub that Blender development and community news goes through – outside the official blender.org website, which is a bit more boring and just says “hey guys, new version” – as do most official websites. (Just joking!)

I was recently pleased to be given the opportunity to beta-test the new system. Well, this new BN Links categorises things as “individual” items – a model repository, as one might expect is not just one individual item, but instead a whole other resource system. The thing I’m wondering about is “how do I make the repository’s resources just as accessible through the BN Links system?“.

A while back I wrote the second part of my open-source analysis article, called “The Open-Source Market – Limitless and Forever Expanding?” (click it to read the article – it might interest you) One of the conclusions I came up with there was that in the short term, open-source should have plenty of choice and competition, but in the long-term, it must realise the synergy is what is needed to ensure its survival and continued growth. This is a perfect example of this concept in real life. There are two resource sites, one obviously much larger and more popular than the other, originally offering slightly different things. BlenderNation focuses on news, and has a small tutorials/resources section, whereas the BMR (Blender Model Repository) focuses on…hosting models and tutorials. Now BlenderNation wants to increase its focus on tutorials and resources, thus duplicating the BMR’s function somewhat. Is this, perhaps, the time to synergise?

Firstly, let’s get the facts down:

• BlenderNation is much more popular and well known than the BMR. It also has a cooler name.
• The BMR is a hub for models. I have no legal right to give all my models/let them be published on BN Links.
• Competition is good, but function replication is not.
• I do have the legal right to “link” to each individual model, but such manual addition is tiresome, and will have to be constantly updated as new models come in.
• The BMR does have a built-up reputation for those that know it. It’s not very nice to say “hey guys, we’ve uh, disappeared – check out this cooler site“
• The BMR is running on depreciated technology – sad but true. Whoops, did I just say that? But hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
• The BMR is a bit like a music collection with some missing metadata. Some files are hosted elsewhere, some don’t have preview pictures. This means that links die out.
• The BN Links system, from what I’ve seen, seems a lot more flexible and makes it much easier for users to find what they want, which is great for the community.
• I juggle a lot of projects. BMR maintenance is somewhat of a gypsy on my todo list.
• I’m human – try ask someone else to delete a section of their site so somebody else can run it. (Ok, that sounded very selfish and attached)

Well. Here’s where you guys come in. To what extent can I realistically share resources, how should this be done, and tell me – is this the time to synergise?

Please leave a comment. Even if you know nothing about Blender.

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For those who have been following my Twitter feed, you would know that I’ve recently finished my music exam, then flown over to Singapore to attend the last day of SIGGRAPH ASIA 2008. What is SIGGRAPH? Well, it’s basically to 3D modelers, animators, graphic artists and the like what E3 is to gamers (or if you don’t know what E3 is, it’s like what “Palace Erotica” is to a pervert). Firstly, being an absolute klutz, I didn’t snap any photos or cool pictures of the exhibitions and whatnot. Secondly, devoid of any income, I can’t exactly cough up 850 Singapore Dollars to pay for full registration which entitles me to view everything – so I went for free, only attending the (limited) exhibition. Thirdly, I’ll have you know that I’m all for open-source, so any demonstations there (all on proprietary software) could not be replicated exactly: the most I can do is check out the concepts, and apply them the best I can.

Again, my apologies for no happy pictures (apart from that logo I ripped off up there), so all I’ll give are boring, vague descriptions of what I experienced. Ok, I didn’t get to view the Computer Animation Festival (shucks!) due to my “Exhibitions Only” free pass. That’s probably one of the best things I missed. Well, there was obviously the NVidia and ATI stalls competing against each other (Go NVidia!), showcasing how their awesomely powerful hardware can do such awesome real-time rendering. Ooooh. There was a huge Autodesk (lol, now huge both physically and virtually) desk doing Autodesk-ish presentations throughout the whole day. Yeah that’s right, 3DS, XSI, Toxic, and whatever other stuff they’ve got in their pigsty of a product portfolio. Well, the talks were interesting. Covered quite a bit on Mudbox which included interesting sculpting techniques which I’m itching to try out.

There was what looked like a permanently unmanned Lucasfilms’ stall, advertising their new Clone Wars animation as well as some “Jedi’s Course to 3D Stuff” via a row of TV screens. There were also the folks from Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) and other companies who showed in-detail work on how things were created for The Golden Compass. Now that’s some pretty amazing graphics work. How each layer was done, how it was composited, how it was matched into the stock footage, how the “little green men” (green-suits) did their jobs, the processes of making the Yeti character (from concept art, turntable, fur, animation, etc) … etc. Other visual effects that were shown were from some Harry Potter films (pretty awesome scene recreation there), some Warcraft, Bioshock and various game trailers, as well as a variety of mini videos (ever seen Iron Man, Spider Man and The Hulk fight together? – Spider Man pretty much sucks.)

What interested me most was explanations of industry workflows. Workflow is one of the most important aspects in film and movie creation, as that’s pretty much how things get done. I daresay I might either humiliate myself due to lack of knowledge or confuse a lot of people if I tried to explain everything I learnt here (especially because workflows change slightly depending on the situation). So I’m just going to leave it as “yes, it was very interesting, and you’ll definitely see a bit on workflow when I post some work-in-progress posts for ThoughtScore in the future”. Happy? Rhetorical? Yes.

Of course, there was the usual plethora of shady looking Universities and organisations offering related courses. I sifted through the lot and found some that might be interested in personal guidance given my no-income situation. But that’s all for future investments, so other than “I got myself a collection of namecards”, there isn’t much else I can announce in my post here.

So yeah, other than the indescribable knowledge I absorbed, the motivation (you know, that sudden urge to create something amazing), the nametag and 3D glasses I stole, that’s really all I can say for SIGGRAPH. The next SIGGRAPH Asia will be in Seoul, which I most definitely will not be attending. I must say, I’m a bit disappointed at the amount they restrict for people who aren’t willing to break their banks. Other than that, a very worthwhile trip indeed.

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View the ThoughtScore update!

You know you want to check it out.

Note: the update is my last post on that page. The first post was a pretty old update. You can also check out pages 1 and 2 of that forum thread to see how far the project has progressed.

Well, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here are some wallpaper sized renders (also available in the thread) to entice you to click that link up there. If you’re too lazy to register an account on BlenderArtists.org to comment on that thread, just leave a comment to this post ;)

One of Cicero:

And one of Taras:

And one of the station:

On more unfortunate news, I will be overseas and there will not be an article until the 16th of August. However, I promise sometime on very early September there will be another really huge release by me … something so big it might even shadow ThoughtScore. Now that’s just scary.

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BLENDER

So, what are you waiting for? Get it now and check out the new features.

The two most stunning features I’ll be looking out for in The ThoughtScore project will be the new AAO (Ambient Approximate Occlusion) which will speed up render times when doing horrendously-difficult-to-be-lit scenes such as forests…and remove the trademark grainy-ness of normal AO. Another feature will be the strand shader and rewrite of the particles system. This allows me to do stunning grassworks without killing my computer…what could be better than that?

5 minutes into the program I made this just to test out the new features…check it out: 10 second render time, 20000 particles, along with other effects. Click it to enlarge it. As with other news, I now have done 10 exam papers and I still have another 15 or so to do. I shall give you some previews of what’s new with my portfolio and little graphics work the next post. Also, completely unrelated to previous news, is that the 16th of June is coming up, so buckle your seat belts, and await the notifications.

For all those badgering around on the IRC channel just leave your messages and an email and I’ll get back to you if I’m not online.

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Looking forward to your comments! Always remember you can catch me on the IRC server irc.freenode.net on the #e2-productions channel!

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Given this information, I don’t see why Blender just doesn’t hop right up and declare immense popularity. I guess people don’t take Blender seriously enough compared to something they feel they “paid” for. Or maybe they look at its stunning 12MB filesize. Or maybe they’re just scared by its cluttered interface. (Yeah, but you get used to it)

What’s the purpose of this post? Nothing actually. This is another of the 99% of useless blog posts. However, just think about Blender for a while. If you’re thinking about starting 3D art/animation, why not use Blender?

Decide for yourself: http://www.tdt3d.com/articles_viewer.php?art_id=99

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