Category Archives: Uncategorized

Jaw-dropping online 3D Map

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“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

 

Paul Debevec published his seminal work on image based modelling in 1997, just over 14 years ago. By taking multiple images of an object from different angles, he was able to reconstruct the 3D geometry of the bell tower at  UC Berkeley.  Programmatically generating 3D models from 2D images!  It was so revolutionary at the time that the sfx team behind the Matrix movie worked with Paul to use this exact technique in the film.

Pretty impressive eh?  Now imagine going this for an entire campus, or an entire city, or the entire world.  Without human intervention. At 10cm resolution.

This is what C3 Technology and Nokia came up with, and it runs inside a web browser.

A better writer might be able to describe to you the magnitude of what you are witnessing, but I am truly at a loss at conveying the significance of this to the future of mapping.  Click on the image to see the demo for yourself.  You’ll need to install a plugin, but it’s well worth the trouble.  Someone less technically might not fully appreciate the complexity of what’s going on behind the scene, and as someone who only knows enough to be dangerous, I am still not convinced technology like this even exists today.

Wow.

Progress Report

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Here is a screen capture from a video production I worked on 3 years ago for the UBC Fisheries Centre.  It’s all computer generated, and pretty good for its time, and it even got us to the ‘Finalist’ position at the International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

And here is a snapshot of what I’ve been working on this year. Straight out of Blender, the only touch-up I did was a minor color correction.

What bothers me is not how bad the first one looks, but the fact that I didn’t realize how bad it was at the time. Well, I am also a bit troubled by the fact that there is less fish in the ocean. But not nearly as embarrassed about it as the huge gap in quality.

The other artist behind both of these production is Dalai Felinto. So I can’t take all the blame credit.

A new racing game

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I’ve been wanting to make a racing game in Blender for more than a year, but was lacking the skill and the motivation at the time.  Now, after spending my past year working with Blender on various realtime projects, here is my first serious attempt at making a game that is more than just a ‘tech-demo’:

This is very very work-in-progress.  So suggestions and comments are very much needed at this stage.