Moritz Moeller writes to tell us her has added RIB export to the modelling tool Structure Synth and the tree generation program Arbaro. Structure Synth is a procedural modelling tool similar to the 2d procedural tools Processing, Shoebot, Drawbot, and Nodebox.
Update – Lukas Vojir has used Processing to make monsters!
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
Disney/Pixar have announced their 3d animated lineup until 2012. Next year’s Disney release Bolt already has a couple of trailers out, and it’s looking pretty good. The Hollywood Reporter also has an article about Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter and his career at Disney and Pixar. Disney is also breaking into India’s Bollywood market with their joint animated feature Roadside Romeo. Apparently it was rendered on the 8th fastest supercomputer in the world. And finally Pixar’s Toy Story even has it’s own religion Universal Protectionism, fashioned after Buzz Lightyear’s Star Command.
And just to get you in the mood for Halloween Ray Villafane has some amazing sculpted pumpkins on his website.
This year’s Stupid RenderMan Tricks is available to download from The RenderMan Repository. This year the presentations are available as pdf and quicktimes. Not all the tricks are online yet, but the ones that are, are very good. Update: Dan Piponi’s quine trick is here.
Not on quite the same scale, but nice none the less, J. Adrian Herbez has some nice advanced MEL tricks, such as making a OpenGl like API in MEL and creating classes in MEL – using Maya nodes to hold their data.
Keep an eye out for Thomas Bitmatta – he may only be 7, but might be your next supervisor soon at the rate he’s going. And finally all hail the mighty greeble!
There is some interesting computational photography news from this year’s Siggraph from Microsoft Research with the University of Washington, Seattle and the University of California, Berkeley. Firstly Finding Paths through the World’s Photos is an update on last year’s Photosynth. It uses a set of images to recreate an environment from the cameras they were shot through. You can then move through that environment, through the most approriate images. This includes stabilisation and colour matching. Also Unwrap Mosaics is a method of texture mapping video footage directly without 3d geometry. It can also be used to track in other 2d layers. And finally Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene uses the parallax information to generate depth information from video footage. This is used to blend a set of photographs of the same scene to enhance the resolution and dynamic range of the footage. Hopefully this technology will be commercialised soon!
Maxon hs released a tool called Cineman which lets you render directly from Cinema 4d to Pixar’s prman, dna’s 3delight and sitegraphics AIR:
CineMan translates the entire CINEMA 4D scene, including lights and materials to a RenderMan-complaint RIB file. CINEMA 4D shaders are immediately available in RenderMan, and RenderMan shaders can even be used within CINEMA 4D as long as a compatible render engine is selected. Best of all, third-party render engines integrate seamlessly into CINEMA 4D, providing editor rendering and material previews.
The speakers for this years 10th Anniversary Stupid RenderMan Tricks at the Pixar User Group and it is an impressive lineup:
There are also a lot of updates on Meteor Studios employees seeking their unpaid wages. The main point of information is this thread on cgtalk. There are articles in The Montreal Gazette, Playback Online, and CBC Radio. Brendan Fraser – who starred in Meteor’s last project Journey To the Center of the Earth – has put his support behind the artists.
Firstly Softimage XSI 7 has been release. This includes a new node based programming system – along the lines of Houdini – called Ice. Christoph Schinko has video of the launch presentation in London.
In RenderMan news, Nicholas Yue has put some rib client bindings 3delight RIB bindings for Java, Python and Ruby online. Bernard Edlington hosted the first RenderMan Community of Japan meeting in June. He has also set up the RenderSan website for the group. And Will Miller’s blog Reversed Normal has some nice RenderMan articles on it.
The RenderMan Repository has a couple of new articles – RenderMan Nuts and Bolts by Mark Hammel and Tal Lancaster, and Brent Burley’s notes on prman filtering.
Brent Burley and Dylan Lacewell, from Disney and the University of Utah, also have a paper about Ptex – their technique for adding implicit texture mapping to subdivision surfaces. Also check out Jim McCann and Nancy Pollard’s Gradient Painting – there is a great video showing the potential of this technique.
In film news, there is an article about the 8K pipeline Double Negative used on Batman – The Dark Knight. Apparently after using 8K (actually mainly 5.6K) 4K seems quite easy! There is a great article about the Cinesite’s vfx in HBO’s Generation Kill on vfxworld. Also check out the trailers for Framestore-CFC’s The Tale of Despereaux and Watchmen – with vfx by MPC. You also might be interested in Ziga Dolar’s website, where he has some of interesting Shake experiments (or visit his current website).
Also Unfortunately it also seems like Meteor studios artists still haven’t been paid.
And finally – fancy building a small renderfarm and need somewhere to put it? You might be interested in the Ikea Renderfarm – a renderfarm built into an Ikea storage cabinet.
Pixar is looking for submissions for this years Stupid RenderMan Tricks:
This year’s SIGGRAPH RenderMan User’s Group meeting will be on Wednesday 13th, 2008. It’s now time to submit something for the 10th annual Stupid RenderMan Trick. The deadline for a Stupid RenderMan Trick is July 17th.
If you have a submission to consider send it to: stupidrattricks@pixar.com with the subject Stupid RenderMan Trick, a few paragraphs describing the trick and images, code snippets, etc. If ther is a large amount of material they would prefer a location to a web site with the material.
NOTE: Invitations to the User’s Group meeting will be mailed out to Pixar customers at a later time. Do not try to RSVP until you have received the invitation.
To get the ball rolling – and as I cannot fufill one of the criteria ie. being at the User Group Meeting – here is my Stupid RenderMan Trick.
People often equate a render farm to the Unix printing program LPR. However I couldn’t find anyone who had actually done it so I decided to build a renderfarm using CUPS (the updated version of LPR). All the details and code is available for download. Any comments will be gratefully received!
Firstly Bertrand Bry-Marfaing has implemented the bonus paper by Brent Burley “Shadow Map Bias Cone and Improved Soft Shadows” in the SIGGRAPH 2006, course 25, “RenderMan For Everyone”. Hosuk Chang has some really nice pages about his experiments with very large numbers of particles with RenderMan and beziers in RSL. And Tony Ambles has some test with his fluid dynamics simulation program.
Scratch-a-Pixel is a website that is building up a collection of articles about 3d rendering and comes with source code to implement them. There are only a few articles at the moment, but it should grow into a very useful resource.
The Python inside Maya group has been set up on Google Groups to collect knowledge about using Python with Maya. It is strongly linked to PyMEL – and enhanced API for Maya which is more Pythonic, and mapy – a program that lets you run Python Maya commands from an external text editor.
HP has teamed up with Dreamworks to create a new HP DreamColor 30 bit display to bring good colour fidelity to LCD displays. Also a research team at Rice University in Houston have created the darkest material in the world which absorbs more than 99.9 per cent of light.
Riggers may be interested by T. J Galda’s new book about Advanced Character Rigging: Creating Advanced Tendon and Muscle Systems.
The University of Hertfordshire’s digital animation course has set up a website at 3d HIT to share information and promote their work.
Nvidia has released the first edition of GPU gems for free. Also Gelato Pro has been released for free. Unfortunately this is because Gelato is being discontinued and nvidia is focussing their effects on Mental Ray.
ZignCreations has a cheap facial tracking software for sale. There is also a video here showing realtime 3d geometry video scanning.
HDRI Locations is a new service by Thomas Suurland which offers packs of HDRI environments and a series of background plates to go with them. He will also shoot images on commision.
If you want a digital camera that you can extend yourself, then certain Canon Powershot cameras can use the Canon Hacker’s Development Kit. This lets you access enhanced photography modes and run simple scripts on your camera. There is more information on Lifehacker and Wired.
Microsoft Excel may not be the fastest way to render 3d but it is possible. And finally Matt Bledsoe and Troy Hitch of Big Fat Brain knows you suck at Photoshop.
I have added a couple of articles about shader development with git. This is a really great source version control system – it just works the way it should. The only small downside is that Windows support isn’t as good. If you are on Windows there is MSysGit, but there aren’t any tools like TortoiseSVN yet.
I also have an article about installing Linux… on Windows Vista! using Sun’s VirtualBox. The more observant will notice that this gets around the issue of Git on Windows.
Hopefully someone else will find them useful. If nothing else it means I have some orginal content on my website – for a change!