Image of the week

Two more screencap from the animation I am working on at work.


The images above are screencaptures from an animation I am working on for my university. The video is 2 minutes long, with 5 scenes showing the Northwestern Hawaiian Island and its beautifully pristine coral reefs.

Took about 1 month of preparation, 1 month of modelling and animation in Blender, and 1 month of lighting set up and compositing work to get to where we are today.

The most understated game engine

Gamekit is fully compatible with Blender, runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android, and uses a completely non restrictive license so you are free to sale your game without worrying about copyright issues.

Chances are, you’ve never heard of Gamekit.

Despite a simple website, and a whole bunch of confused users who want to try gamekit but don’t know how, gamekit is pretty darn functional already. Within half an hour, you can make a simple 3D game that compiles and runs on an iPhone. It also supports shaders, physics, animation and lua scripting. If you a looking to replace the Blender game engine with something lighter, faster and more modern, take a look at this game engine.

Sure the documentation is a little sparse, but as more artists start using this engine, hopefully we’ll see more literature on the topic.

Showing off more Cycles eye candy

Rendered with Cycles by me, the beautiful Audi R8 model is provided by Ethan Luo.

The new Cycles rendering engine in Blender really made it easy to create hyper-realistic looking images with so little effort. This model was prepared for Cycles rendering in less than an hour. The rendering took less than 5 minutes per frame on a GTX580 GPU.

 

Some new Cycles rendering

In case you haven’t heard, Cycles is the new experimental rendering engine for Blender. It is a physically accurate ray-tracer that integrates seamlessly into the Blender viewport.  As you edit the scene, it will continually update the rendering, progressively refining the image for as long as you allow it.

This almost interactive method of rendering already allows the artist to work much faster than before, since they no longer have to wait for the entire image to render to see the result.  Even better, Cycles can take full advantage of Nvidia’s CUDA GPU acceleration.  This means that lucky owners of top-of-the-line graphic cards can now enjoy a non-stop 16 hour work day.  No more rendering-breaks!

All of the image in this post is rendered on a Geforce GTX 570 video card at 1920×1200.  Rendering time never exceeded 5 minutes for each frame, which is phenomenal considering the quality.

The source Blender file of the car model is available for download here. You’ll need a Cycles-enabled build of Blender to render it.

Some one told me that this car will be shown at FMX Germany in the next few days. So check it out if you are near by.

Realtime GPU accelerated raytracer

I discovered a lot of mind-blowing technologies this week. First I test-drove Ian’s OpenCL fluid particle implementation by pushing 1 million physically-accurate fluid particles around in realtime. Then I  ran across this jaw-droppingly detailed 3D map. And now, thanks to Brecht’s latest work on the Cycles rendering engine for Blender, I am doing raytracing on the GPU in realtime.

Above is a rendering of my ubiquitous BMW.  The total rendering time to get to this quality is less than 40 seconds. (Compare to over 3 minutes using the old Blender renderer) Even more impressive, is that the rendering takes place in the 3d viewport directly, in a progressive fashion.  So one can edit the scene while the rendering refines itself.

No more F12, rendering just went realtime Yo.