thinkMoult » blender

Back in Malaysia, and other things I have dabbled in.

Dion Moult — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:03:50 +0000

Blog posting has been slow lately. This is mostly due to real life and connectivity issues, but despite this I have had some time to dabble in the various public projects I juggle. The pace is not rapid enough to be able to keep up a alternate-day post like I used to, but is suitable for a summary post, such as this one.

The ThoughtScore Project

The first project is my ever-incomplete ThoughtScore animated movie. The highlight of this update is that there has been an animation update with a few extra shots added. You can view the ThoughtScore Blender animation here, or click the screenshot below.

You may view more feedback on its BlenderArtists forum thread (page 4).

The project also got awarded its own domain with some content I pulled together quickly in about an hour. See ThoughtScore.org.

I do have a couple more scenes prepped and awaiting animation & rendering, so more updates will be popping up.

live.WIPUP

WIPUP, a way to share works in progresses, has experienced the yearly dip in content due to the holiday season, but live.WIPUP (the bleeding-edge iteration of WIPUP) has received experimental design changes and slight SEO updates.

live.WIPUP -like the projects it was built to showcase- is also a work-in-progress. It’s incomplete, but as always, hopefully a step in the right direction. Text link to check out live.WIPUP – share your works in progress here.

Real Life

Apart from badminton, taking a break from learning Chinese, globetrotting, and client work, this picture says it all.

Well, that’s it for a brief summary of what I’ve been up to. I hope everybody have also had a great Christmas, New Year, upcoming Chinese New Year, and awesome holiday.

Free textures from CarriageWorks

Dion Moult — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 12:17:49 +0000

Firstly, some apologies for the lack of life on this blog. Things are trickling in and you can actually keep an eye on WIPUP for incoming updates on my projects that I won’t write about in thinkMoult.

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!

No related posts.

Cinematic Perception film entry

Dion Moult — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 13:05:38 +0000

Hey folks, I haven’t posted anything since the SLUG meeting for (what should be) obvious reasons. University has started and it takes a little time for me to adjust back into a schedule after almost a year without one. I’m still working out the kinks to juggle university, freelancing, family time, thoughtscore, wipup, sports, music, time well wasted (reading, tv, internet), household work and socialising. It’s a little tricky but I should have it sorted out soon (there’s no such thing as not enough time). Not enough motivation, maybe, but never not enough time.

I am still doing things, which can be seen trickling slowly into WIPUP, but one of the more interesting ones that warrants a blog post was a short film-making competition I took part in a week ago. First off, I know nothing about filmmaking. 3D animation a little perhaps, but not filmmaking. So I initially went it just to have some fun. However walking away with first prize was definitely not what I had expected. Here was the entry after several hours of filming and splicing the video clips together.

Enjoy!

P.S. Yes, of course, Blender was used as the VSE.

No related posts.

Toronto’s “mini-sprint”, and Sydney’s KDE/FOSS Community

Dion Moult — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 15:58:36 +0000

During the holidays I met up with Eugene Trounev, (aka it-s), one of KDE’s awesome artists to discuss our reorganisation of KDE.org and the design aspects of it (which is coming soon in the series). It was a 2-day meeting and it was my first time meeting another KDE enthusiast face-to-face, as given my inconvenient geographical location in Malaysia I don’t know anybody else here. I won’t post the outcome of the sprint here but it will be released periodically with the rest of my kde-www war series. It was extremely useful and awesome of course (and yes, lots did get done), and since no photos were taken, here is one of a random conifer tree to make up for it:

I’ve just arrived in Sydney, Australia to get ready for my upcoming year of university, and so I wanted to quickly throw out the question to see if anybody in the KDE / Blender / FOSS crowd lives there. If you do, throw me an email/comment and if there isn’t an existing community, let’s start one :D

No related posts.

One project finishes construction, another starts.

Dion Moult — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 08:14:50 +0000

Blog posts are getting a little r- wait a minute- oh, there haven’t been many blog posts! This of course doesn’t mean I’ve been lounging around doing nothing, but probably means I’m doing more since I’m not clearing out the random gunk that accumulates in that little hole in my brain.

Anyways, firstly the project that has recently been "finished" (well, technically I’m still waiting for a little bit here and there to fill up the rest of the pages – but the bulk is done anyway), is the grand web-portfolio of Erik Kylen. The web system is using Kohana of course, and behind the scenes there is a very simple administrator panel to CRUD portfolio items.

Also, after so many empty sentences saying I will get back to The ThoughtScore Project, I finally have. A lovely bonus is that this time the update includes both a riveting storyline update as well as pretty pictures (or I think they are pretty anyways).

More awesome in the oven. Temperature set on high. Very high.

No related posts.

Hello 4.5, hello ThoughtScore.

Dion Moult — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 16:04:50 +0000

KDE 4.5 is out! (Yes, I am a little late) I was really happy to have contributed just that little bit to this release and hopefully that trend continues. Just wanted to say how much I appreciated this DE and to congratulate and thank everybody for their hard work.

Something else that could be interesting for some is an updated ThoughtScore video I found lying around the other day. You can find the low quality version on WIPUP (I do have a large version but will not host it online). It contains some small changes since the last video and I quite enjoy watching it.

In other news, I got my A Level results today (for those not under the British education system, that’s basically the grades that determine my entrance into university) and I’m exceptionally happy with my results. Any suggestions of stuff to buy to celebrate (recommended food is welcome – and big + useless items that catch my fancy win extra points) are welcome.

Sorry for the lack of blog posts. I am actually doing some stuff which can be seen on WIPUP, and some stuff just aren’t blogworthy enough.

No related posts.

Rigging a machine.

Dion Moult — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 18:52:56 +0000

Things have been going absurdly slow lately. No commits to WIPUP. No new ThoughtScore models (though a few more seconds of video have been added). Nothing open-source related (except for trying out the Ubuntu beta1 on a box). Even schoolwork has slowed.

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.

No related posts.

Blender Model Repository system upgraded

Dion Moult — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:39:53 +0000

Today I just wanted to say that I finally got around to upgrading the system behind the Blender Model Repository. The BMR runs on the Xoops CMS and I can’t say it’s the best CMS I’ve seen. It’s a good many versions out of date and has been in need of an upgrade for quite a while.

Recently we’ve been under attack by some rather pesky bots and even hacking attempts. I don’t condone hacking (unless it’s authorised stress-testing) and feel quite sad that some people would even consider trying to break into a harmless community supporting website.

There were several options for an upgrade, including a fresh install with a manual import, or perhaps just an overwrite of all the valuable files, but in the end it turns out the developers behind Xoops cared about backward compatibility and provided a guide for dealing with such situations.

During the upgrade process, and even when monitoring those would-be intruders I would like to highlight my host, OpticEmpire – their stunning customer service, personable support and hilarious working hours leave little to be desired. If you need a website host, I would recommend them.

Needless to say we are up to date again and I’ve got some upcoming plans for the BMR – but I think I’d better get Eadrax ship-shape first.

No related posts.

Blender 2.5 Features Video

Dion Moult — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:36:02 +0000

Hello everybody, I’m back from my 5 day jungle trek and I’m just catching up on what I’ve missed throughout the week. I was initially going to award you all with a post about the trek itself, but it turns out Jonathan Williamson from Montage Studio (the very same who does the Blender screencasts and gave some good tips for ThoughtScore) has got himself a Blender build for Windows 7 and has recorded a short screencast demo-ing the development.

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.

No related posts.

ThoughtStall

Dion Moult — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 08:22:44 +0000

The ThoughtScore project is another gypsy on my to-do list along with the BMR. It seems as though the world of 3D graphics and I are drifting slowly apart. It’ll be such a pity to let it go, so I want to make a serious effort and continue the amazing progress I once had on ThoughtScore.

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.

No related posts.