Tag Archives: blender

Some new Cycles rendering

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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

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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.

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.