2.5 d Front Projection Moves to 3D

I am a big fan of the illusion created by 3d projection. That's a technique by which some form of video or film is projected on a non-square surface for the illusion of life or movement of the object. It's a neat effect that I first saw at the Smithsonian Institute. They projected the video of presidents speaking ( Lincoln, Washington) on a smooth generic bust of white marble. It made the bust come alive. Although, they call it 3d projection I want to say it's more like 2.5d than 3d. These projections are often done on a grand scale ... like buildings. Here is one for the promotion of the movie the tourist.






The best of these take into account the structure of the building which really makes the illusion wild. I have recently discovered a 360 degree video projection on a sculpture of a man crouched . The projection happens in real 3d as you can walk around the sculpture and see it transform from all sides. Pretty neat. The company responsible for the 360 projection is Drawlight in Italia. Check them out.

The Long Saga of diePod is Finally Over... Sadly

Two Summers ago I decided to create an iphone app based on some special fx R and D I was doing. Somewhere along the line while doing R and D I wound up building a 3d iphone with 3d icons so I could get particle physics (flame) to interact and flow around the iphone icons. It turned out pretty neat. I thought, wouldn't this make a cool little goof for the iphone crowd. Just fire engulfing your iphone didn't seem like a fully proper app so I went about creating diePod. I decide to create an app that used different dangerous scenarios to "FAKE" the destruction of your iphone. Perhaps you wanted to pretend that you were a spy who did not want the iphone getting into the wrong hands... I don't know, man. It's your fantasy! I thought if I could do 4 different scenarios that it might be worth 99 cents. It seemed better to me than a fart machine anyway. I created a four button app that would destroy your phone either by fire, flood, freezing, or frying (electricity). I toiled away for a great period of time .... months and months in my spare time. About a month before I was finished Apple comes out with their voluminous tome that is the Apple IOS SDK Guidelines for what is and is not acceptable as an app. To say the least they are very strict. In hindsight I didn't have a snowballs chance in hell of every getting this through the review process. I tried and it was rejected time and time again. each time for different reasons. I'm going to make a long story quite short. Needless to say I decided that I wanted this app to be seen. Never mind how much time I had spent on it. Apple wasnn't going to approve it's sale. Hip hip hurray for Fart Machines.... Very Classy.. But my cute little app was going to cause too much confusion. Are peeps that stupid as to think that their phones were really going to... BUT i digress. Therefore with a kind fondness for the JAILBREAK crowd, I decided to release it for free to anybody with a jail broken system that wanted it.














By the way, I thought diePod was an awesome name. Turns out that it's not. It wound up being FAKE DESTRUCTOR before it's last and final REJECTION. 

If you are Jailbroken or not and want a copy of the .ipa file of FAKE DESTRUCTOR. then download it here. http://www.bigheadedkitty.com/Fake Destructor.zip . Let me know what you think of it.

OBTW if you are interested in the technique by which it is possible to HOMEBREW your own Iphone/Ipad apps then check out this link HERE. Good Stuff

For No Other Reason Than It's Neat #4

There is is little known subculture of computer graphics programmers out there that are affectionately known as the Demoscene. The Demoscene is a fascinating area that has been active since as far back as I can remember (and thats the Timex Sinclair !) Groups of programmers like small gangs would compete to produce "Intros" that were usually (but not always) attached to pirated software. This stuff has mesmerized me since I laid eyes on my first demo. The amazing thing about these demos is how small they are. Props were given to those groups who could produce the most awesome graphics demo in the smallest amount of code. Siggraph actually recognized the Demoscene a few years ago. When I mean the smallest amount of code... I'm not kidding. The guys that are the best at this are real geniuses as far as I'm concerned. To have such mastery of the hardware and command it with machine level code is an incredible talent. You can get more info about the Demoscene HERE. If that's a bit overwhelming then hit wiki first. One of my favorite Demoscene groups is Farbrausch. CHeck out this award winner from them, all the time keeping in mind that what you are watching is done in 177kbs of coded executable. Yeah I said it. 177KBS ! That includes the music. Props to Farbrausch

3D Infinity - Welcome to Mandelbulb

There are good fractals and bad fractals. These are some of the better ones I've seen. They come from the Mandelbrot set on steroids. HERE is a great site that details the mandelbulb in all it's intricacy.

If your wondering what these things look like moving. Check this out.



And in case your interested. These are some very heavy 3d models.  ;)

Cat Lotto Comes to an Ipad Near You Soon

Our first Ipad app is almost ready. Cat Lotto let's your cat pick your lottery numbers for you. Check out our short video to see our cats pick our lottery numbers for us.

They couldn't be any worse at picking numbers than us. RIGHT? I mean they can sense all kinds of things we can't ( like earthquakes ). Maybe they can see into the future and pick winning numbers !

Naiad: A New Way of Approaching Fluid Dynamics

Funny name right? In Greek mythology, the Naiads were a type of nymph who presided over fountains, wells, springs, streams, and brooks. That's what wiki says. Naiads from Exotic matter is getting a lot of play in the VFX houses lately. I have yet to play with it at all but hear great things. It has a new way of approaching simulations as opposed to Realflow. It uses a graphical node based paradigm to get the job done. If you want to see a boatload of Naiads video join the Exotic Matter Channel on Vimeo. It's very inspiring stuff .

And here is another Arnold sighting courtesy of Exotic Matter and Naiads and Vahan Sosoyan (I got that right)

For No Other Reason Than It's Neat #3

There are artists out there whose work I really admire. One of those is James Ludemann. James does some very interesting mathematical models and then renders them as photo real sculptures, as you might see them displayed in a museum. I think it's a neat idea. The only thing that might be cooler is if they could be rapid prototyped with the textures so you could actually go to a museum to see them in person. Baby steps ... We'll get there some day. You can see more of his work at Deviant Art

I'm a big fan of anything that Next Limit does. this includes their Maxwell Render. Anyone using it may be interested to know that version 2.7 is on the way soon. Oddly enough, one of the features that they are touting is the rendering of grass. A bit odd till you consider that a good portion of Maxwell Render users are doing architectural renderings. This makes a grass feature seems a whole lot more logical.

Maya and Maxwell render go together quite nicely. If you need to get up to speed on using the two together then you are in luck. Digital Tutors has just released "Getting Started with Maxwell Render in Maya"

And just for pretty... here is their 2011 DEMO REEL.





Reel Nice !

Other Realflow Plugin News

I have been asked if I know of other Realflow Plugins that are available. As a matter of fact I do. There are a couple. Wet Work is a series of Realflow Plugins for RF 2012 and RF 5 that do some neato things. D&Esign are responsible for some rather usefuls plugin tools. They include Snow 2.0, Viscous Drop, Repletum (crown spash), Morphing, Dripping and Cursum Linearis. You can get demo video's of each plugin HERE . I have not worked with these plugins but there is a group called the Ugly Kids that specialize in RF VFX work. Check out their reel HERE.

I found Snow 2.0 to be of real interest. Check out the demo reels for Snow






The plugins are available now and eval versions available as well. Check them out.

Yarn Level Detail for Modeled Clothing is Nearly Here

 Getting psyched about Siggraph ? I found this paper that will be presented called "Stitch Meshes for Modeling Knitted Clothing with Yarn-level Detail". Sounds like a mouthful but it means modeling sweaters in 3d on the actual yarn and stitch type. Below is a graphic of actual photos(top row) of stitches versus 3d CG modeled counterparts (bottom row).

With everything in the fashion world starting to make it's way into CG, I can envision a whole new fashion designer already emerging. You can get the paper HERE in PDF.  Thanks to Cem Yuksel for the images.

An Awesome Realflow Plugin !

A lot of people don't seem to know that Realflow has an open plugin architecture. This means that third parties can write new functionality into Realflow via a plugin . I haven't covered RF plugins before but there are a few. Quantum Force from V-Motion is a doozy.

The demo video says it all. Doesn't it? It needs a good editor BUT it really does show off the amazing things you can do with it

RF Quantum Force

Realflow Force Field Fluid Sculpting

• Price: €299 / $399
• Over 7 Different Force Modes
• Accelerate, Push, Pull, Attract, Heat, Filter (With and without Grid Cells)
• Precise Control of Forces by using particles or objects
• Support for SPH and Grid Solver
• RF 5 and RF 2012 support
• Entirely new way of sculpting fluids

A Cardboard Town.

GhostTown is a little program that does big things... Like cities BIG. It is a procedural modeler for helping to design cities. It's neat. If you are familiar with CityEngine from ESRI then you get the idea. Whilst CityEngine is great, it's expensive and commercial. GhotstTown is a free program is constant BETA. There is a forum there for users to work through the intracasies of the program and generally find bugs, show WIP, and banter about this new city and that.

Just to give you an idea of how cool procedural city making can be check out this video trailer for CityEngine 2011

All things GhostTown can be found HERE. Just register, download and start making cities. For a free program it's really robusto. Check it out. I found the following images in the WIP section of the forum. A cardboard city rendered in Octane ( oh no not ANOTHER renderer...YEP). If you are unfamiliar with procedural modeling of cities now is your chance to get in on the ground floor of a great little program.

For no other reason than it's neat #2

HERE is an interesting site worth perusing. In particular checkout Flame Painter. If you have JAVA installed ,play with it online. Don't skip the experimental stuff.

Plexus: A cool AE plugin UNCOVERED !

 I found this website called  aescripts.com/ that is a resource and repository for AE scripts and plugins . These are not the usual scripts and plugins. The work on the site is mostly from private users who have decided to share their gistd with the world. There is free as well as paid stuff on the site. Plexus is one of those cool plugins that seems to stay hidden from most of us. It's really quite neat. It's a particle system thingy that is a little different. Rather than explaining it...


 

Check out the other videos on the PLEXUS page. And do yourself a favor and checkout the entire aescripts site. It's a must for anyone using AE.

Kudos to Mark Ruffalo for Bringin' the Hulk

Can you say HULK ?

Can we say they finally got HULK right?

Congrats to ILM and Mark Ruffalo for an outstanding HULK ! Finally !


And in case you have been living under ground. Far under ground

Another Great Find

 An Ivy Generator

I love a good independent graphic program. Somebody had a personal need to generate Ivy so he created a program to do just that. An Ivy Generator by Thomas Luft at the University of Konstanz is a FREE program that does an outstanding job of generating crawling ivy.

Check out some of the renderings of ivy and other experimental things some people have done with the program and then download your free copy and send Thomas a nice rendering.

On the site you will find  precompiled versions for Win32, MacOS, and Linux including the source code of this project under the GNU General Public Licence. The MacOS port was kindly done by Robert Templeton (Kuroyume's DevelopmentZone). The Linux port was kindly done by Ruben Lopez. Previous releases and additional stuff can be found in the download section

Neat Level Builder for Unity 3d

I am not much of a gamer but I found this neat little Voxel mining program for Unity 3D'ers. Unity 3d continues to grow by leaps and bounds in the game developer world. You can find out more HERE. More and more I am coming across little utilities that make Unity 3D even more powerful for the development of games.

Videos always help. HERE

Voxelform 2.0 allows you to create unique levels by mining your way through rock and other materials. It's kind of a 3d Dig Dug (am I dating myself) except your creating game levels.

The results of your voxel mining can create intriguingly complex player levels. There's much more to it than that, but I like the interactivity of mining.









 Here's a swoonful feature set:

Feature set keeps growing.

• Designed to be a flexible, customizable, part of your project.
• New: Includes two demo scenes: A simple run-time editor demo, and a simple FPS controller game demo.
• Heavily documented source with XML code docs for tool tip support.
• Marching Cubes algorithm at the core, provides efficient dynamic organic terrain.
• Sculpt the terrain on the fly, any way you see fit.
• Easy access to voxel data, and easily scripted externally.
• New: Voxel data source is fully customizable via an interface.
• New: Voxel structure with "factory settings" includes support for volume, material index, and neighbor info.
• New: Use voxel type information for multi-material support with material palettes.
• New: Material palettes (for use with voxel terrain) support a theoretical maximum of 65,536 Unity Materials.
• New: Hidden regions within multi-material welds are culled before Marching Cubes processes them.
• Chunk based design.
• Flexible voxel chunk sizes.
• Chunks can be any shape or size.
• Create as many chunks as you can safely fit into memory.  Note: Mono has a limit.
• No wait time for initial building of the chunks. Chunks load in, and away from you as you play.
• New: Single frame loading allows the entire voxel terrain to be loaded on the first frame, but incurs a delay.
• Chunks past a certain distance become disabled, and then re-enabled as the observer moves.
• A queuing system keeps chunk processing well balanced over multiple frames.
• All background tasks are successfully load balanced on the main thread.
• Your clients will not need a multi-core processor to run your game.
• New: 15 built-in volumetric shaders with built-in material examples for each will save you time.
• New: Built-in shaders provide diffuse, normal, and specular mapping for triplanar texturing.
• Easily simulate granite, marble, regular stone, stratification, and more, or roll your own shaders.
• Built-in methods for saving, and loading raw terrain data.
• Built-in methods for Improved Perlin, and Simplex Noise to create fractal geometry.
• Solid (volumetric) texturing.
• Solid fractal texturing.
• Triplanar texturing.
• New: Complete code overhaul with improved flexibility, and additional helper methods.
• New: Editor menu items for saving, loading, creating, and editing voxel terrain.
• New: Experimental (beta) voxel terrain editor (editor extension requiring Unity Pro) is included but not required.

Robust 2D Physics for After Effects is Here

I love finding out about new software that I've never heard of before. I really, really love it when it's really, really cool. A group from France (the french always do great stuff) called Motion Boutique has developed a plugin for After Effects that brings physics to the table.

Take a look.

Here's what they say

It's going to revolutionise After Effects animations !

 Simple to use and fast to execute, Newton is the must-have animation plug-in.

Newton interprets each 2D layer as a rigid body in a real environment.
Once simulation is completed, animation is recreated in After Effects with standard keyframes.

Main Features:
. robust and fast
. simple and intuitive user interface with OpenGL preview
. gravity, collisions, friction, etc.
. support of masks and shapes
. handles different sorts of bodies: static, dynamic, kinematic, etc.

I am looking to get a copy to play with. It seems easy to use and quite powerful.