Posted by Damien Pollet
Fri, 13 Jan 2006 00:33:00 GMT
Inspiration and morale have been scarce resources during the last few weeks… thankfully, family and friends are here to help.
Anyway, enough of this… I remembered this old POV-Ray scene I made in high school and thought that would be a good pretext to have a small update here. I re-rendered that scene some time ago with a tweaked lighting and some focal blur ; better show it here than let it take the dust on my disk ;-)
Tikky on prolog notes (POV-Ray render)
Update: fixed a few details in the image.
Update 2: added the box of leads, tweaked the plastic reflectivity and made the caustics actually visible.
Update 3: scanned and modeled the sticker.
Read more…
Posted in Graphics, Personal | Tags 3D, povray | 5 comments
Posted by Damien Pollet
Tue, 06 Sep 2005 20:17:00 GMT
K-3D builds on Mac!
And it runs, too ;-)
Huge kudos to Romain from the dev team for applying his C++-fu to an initial build of this very promising modeler! I’m currently putting together Portfiles that I’ll release here, soon. (update: portfiles available but not in a usable state)
Metropolis
I’ve also been reading a little about Metropolis Light Transport (MLT), a rendering algorithm using a mutation approach to solve the global illumination problem. Rather than sampling the possible light paths in a recursive way, it tries to discover paths that contribute more to the image by random path mutations. More samples will be taken in the zones of higher contribution, so MLT is really efficient for scenes with difficult lighting conditions: very indirect lighting, complex caustics, etc
Last weekend I’ve thrown together a quick-n-dirty limited version of the algorithm, and while it worked it also demonstrated that metropolis is not exactly interesting to integrate simple math functions like sin(x^2) :-)
Posted in Graphics | Tags 3D, k3d, porting, research | 4 comments
Posted by Damien Pollet
Sun, 14 Aug 2005 01:53:58 GMT
Aqsis is a powerful open-source 3D renderer that implements Pixar’s Renderman specification and Reyes algorithm (remember BMRT?).
I’ve written a Portfile for it but it’s based on a CVS snapshot so I can’t submit it to DarwinPorts yet. In the meantime, those of you curious enough to try will find the necessary files and instructions here.
Posted in Coding, Graphics | Tags 3D, aqsis, porting | 4 comments
Posted by Damien Pollet
Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:57:00 GMT
This weekend I stumbled on the Assembly 2005 demoparty. And there was this really nice surprise from ASD, entitled Iconoclast, which got the 1st place in the demo compo. Really stunning graphics, not only impressive but just beautiful, progressive rock/metal music instead of the usual techno/trance/indus… Go ASD!
Sadly the demo is win32, but the code is available and there is a video for those who use serious OSes :)
update (nov. 2006) the video link seems dead, see here or go to scene.org and search for iconoclast.
Posted in Graphics, Music, Link | Tags 3D, art, praise | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Damien Pollet
Tue, 24 May 2005 20:20:00 GMT
I'm not really not fond of the UI in Blender, but I have to admit those guys have some ambitious ideas... They want to produce a short CG movie called Project Orange:
Not only will the project be realized with Open Source/Free Software, but also the resulting movie -- including all the production files and software -- will be published under an open public license. This makes it an exciting premiere as first ever "Open Movie" project!
The movie will be rendered on film resolution, becomes available on DVD and is targeted to be transfered to film for theatres.
The project will be funded by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Institute.
The goal is obviously to demonstrate open source tools and foster their development, but also to research ways to increase the quality of open source software. That's interesting because IMHO the bazaar development model is not exactly good at producing consistent and simple functionality or user interface.
I hope that Project Orange will be a real success, and that most projects in the field will benefit from the buzz, because many of them -- Aqsis, CGkit, K-3D in particular -- really deserve more attention.
Posted in Graphics, Link | Tags 3D | no comments
