Digital Anthology

Tears of Steel Rises - A remix of the Open Source film Tears of...

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 04:21:16 -0700

Tears of Steel Rises - A remix of the Open Source film Tears of Steel set to the soundtrack of The Dark Knight Rises trailer done at 4am.

Trying to recreate the AE Plexus trailer, in Blender.

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 18:34:04 -0700

Trying to recreate the AE Plexus trailer, in Blender.

Video Game as Art

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 17:42:52 -0700

Video Game as Art

Video demonstration of the procedural textured terrain. Be sure...

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 17:23:48 -0700

Video demonstration of the procedural textured terrain. Be sure to view in HD.

Ditching Diffuse Maps - Efficient use of textures for landscape...

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 12:25:00 -0700

a large scale terrain

6 texture layers

combined texture encoding

mask texture encoding

Ditching Diffuse Maps - Efficient use of textures for landscape rendering

This is a followup to the previous post on terrain rendering. Hopefully this will make clear what the shader is doing in the sample file.

So here we have a terrain model, it has 3 colour layers (rock, grass, sand), an ambient occlusion layer, a specular layer, and lastly a detail layer. The usual.

One could combine 1,2,3 into one monolithic diffuse map that covers the whole mesh, and use a lower resolution texture for AO(4) and specular(5). And finally a small detail map(6) is tiled across the object to add some high frequency detail at sub-diffuse map resolution. This is the most obvious approach. At the cost of huge textures memory usage.

A better way to do it might be to have 1,2,3 as separate, tillable textures. Then an additional texture can be used to mask between them, like a stencil. Texture Splatting is apparently the term for it. AO(4), specular(5) and detail (6) stays the same. Despite using an additional texture, we can achieve much higher resolution without using gigantic textures.

Considering today’s video consoles - PS3 with 256MB of RAM, Xbox 360 with 512MB of RAM, it is obvious that memory is premium. A single 4096x4096 RGBA texture would take up 64MB, uncompressed. We need to pack more pixels into less bytes.

This is where this novel approach comes in. Basically we are storing absolutely the bare minimum image data needed to reconstruct the surface, relying on a shader material to supply some of the information that’s missing from the textures.

Here is how.

Grass is green, sand is yellow, rocks are gray. These textures typically have a rather uniform colour that don’t change much. So we should be able to set the colors of these textures in a shader, there is no point in wasting 24bit (3 channels per pixel) just to encode colour information.

So now that we are removing all the colour information from the base textures, up to four grayscale images can be combined into a single RGBA image. Yay!

Now we need a way to specify which image gets applied where. This information is stored in the R channel of the mask texture. Which, through some colour-ramp and nodal material magic, maps the grayscale image into a series of masks which can then be used to control the distribution of the textures.

Lastly, the gray textures are colorized by a the shader, combined with AO and Specular (which are stored in the G and B channel of the mask texture. And finally displayed.

Conclusion.

First of all, recognize the fact that this approach works far better with high frequency, tileable textures such as wood/bricks/asphalt/grass than non-repeating textures such as logos/markings/etc. As such, terrain is a perfect candidate to try this texturing approach on.

Some notable features of this method: Smaller texture footprint > Less system RAM and Video RAM usage; faster loading time Higher shader complexity > More arithmetic computation; but less texture-fetch Most image compression/texture compression down-samples chroma, making this texture encoding scheme less effective.

Uber efficient use of textures for terrain...

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 19:52:00 -0700

Uber efficient use of textures for terrain rendering

Traditionally, for a terrain this size, one will need an 8k texture at minimum. The landscape is rendered using a single 2028x2048 texture and one 512x512 texture.

This post is inspired by Andrew Maximov’s article. In which he explores the limitations of traditional diffuse colour textures, and proposes a shader based semi-procedural texturing approach.

This is that method in Blender.

Download the Blend file here Here is the texture use break-down

Combined.tga R Channel: Dirt texture
Combined.tga G Channel: Grass texture
Combined.tga B Channel: Rock texture
Mask.tga R Channel: Gradient Map (used to control which of the textures (Dirt, Grass, Rock) to use)
Mask.tga G Channel: Light Map (Ambient Occlusion)
Mask.tga B Channel: Specular Map

To see how these textures are being used, take a look at the nodal material setup in Blender.

Blender Game Engine improvements to keep an eye on

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 23:03:00 -0700

OpenGL Mobile Compatibility and Android Port (GSoc 2012) - Alexandr Kuznetsov: This project aims to made OpenGL slightly faster and compatible with OpenGL ES in order to port Blender Player to Android. This would include port of libs, ghost and build infrastructure. At the end Blender Games can be played on Android.

BGE Converter Improvements and fixups (GSoC2012) - Mitchell Stokes: Various improvements such as saving out converted data to disk and allowing for asynchronous level loading. Will make loading of large geometry much faster.

Multitouch Framework (GSoC 2012) - Nicholas Rishel: Extending recognition for multitouch input for SDL for the purpose of navigation, and a framework for future additions. As envisioned, the immediate result would serve as a compliment to a stylus. This would prepare Blender for the incoming Slate form factor machines (see Samsung Series 7 Slate and Asus Eee EP121), and potentially ease ports to Android touch devices.

Adapting the Hive system for the Blender Game Engine (GSoc 2012) - Spencer Alves: This project aims to make a more accessible, efficient, and useful editor for logic systems in the Blender Game Engine by integrating the Hive systems project into Blender.

The above 4 projects are collectively codenamed “SwissCheese Branch”.

Candy Branch - Martinsh Uptitis and ‘mokazon’: General eye candy improvement [link]

Harmony Branch - Daniel Stokes et al: Phase 1 merged into trunk, more goodies coming [link]

Boston Blender Game Engine Talk

Mon, 21 May 2012 16:13:05 -0700

Boston Blender Game Engine Talk:

Here is the slides for my presentation at the Boston Blender get-together this past week.

Beginner's Blender Cheat Sheet

Thu, 17 May 2012 13:14:19 -0700

Beginner's Blender Cheat Sheet:

This is a cheatsheet I created in collaboration with Jonathan Williamson of Blender Cookie.

Concept Art

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:26:58 -0700

Concept Art

Concept Art for yet another project.

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 14:36:21 -0700

Concept Art for yet another project.

Two more images of the BMW 1 series M.

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Two more images of the BMW 1 series M.

Suddenly, A New Car. Spent a month on this project, and now...

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Suddenly, A New Car.

Spent a month on this project, and now here it is! A 2011 valencia orange BMW 1 series M.

This article on making CG bokeh was written by me, and first...

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

This article on making CG bokeh was written by me, and first published at DIYPhotography

Summer is here! Shot on a T2i with 100mm F2.0

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Summer is here! Shot on a T2i with 100mm F2.0

Underwater Image of the Week Two more screencaps from the...

Mon, 30 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Underwater Image of the Week

Two more screencaps 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, 2 month of modelling and animation in Blender, and 1 month of lighting set up and compositing work to get to where we are today.

GameKit: The Most Understated Game Engine Admittedly, the...

Wed, 18 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

GameKit: The Most Understated Game Engine

Admittedly, the Blender Game Engine has its flaws. It’s old, slow, and has some licensing restrictions that makes it incompatible with many of the mobile devices out there. But Blender is such a wonderful tool at creating games, should we just abandon it?

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

But 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.

More Raytraced Cycles Eye candy! Rendered with Cycles by me,...

Sat, 14 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

More Raytraced 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.

Underwater 3D Image of the Week My best imitation of Zack...

Tue, 10 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Underwater 3D Image of the Week

My best imitation of Zack Snyder’s work is apparently too dark for the final cut, and so it didn’t make it into the video.

Created and rendered with Blender 2.5, 6 million faces, rendered in 2 minutes on an Octocore.

Rendering in Cycles In case you haven’t heard, Cycles is the...

Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Rendering in Cycles

In case you haven’t heard, Cycles is the new experimental rendering engine for Blender. It is a physically accurate ray-tracer that is superfast. 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 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 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.

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