mike's digital anthology » me

Photos from Italy

mike pan — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:43:34 +0000

More on what I am doing in Italy later. For now, enjoy these on Flickr:

Blender, that elusive free 3d app

mike pan — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:35:53 +0000

A while ago, I was invited to give a short talk at a small gathering of CG professionals in my hometown Vancouver, Canada. My 20-minutes presentation is suppose to be a show-and-tell that gives people an overview of Blender, a software that almost everyone in the room has heard of, but has no real experiences with. Most people downloaded it and ran it at one point, but admitted that they didn’t invest too much time on learning it.

As some of you might know, Vancouver is a pretty major hub for media and film production. It’s home to Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Rainmaker, a whole slew of movie and TV VFX studios, and more recently, Pixar. The ~30 attendees all had very strong industry background, except me. (To my disappointment, no attendee has worked at Emeryville) But more importantly, it was apparent that they all consider Blender to be immature, with limited features, and see it as a toy more than a production-ready tool.

Blender: Just a toy

To be fair, this view on Blender is not surprising to me. But I was surprised by the overwhelming positive response after the talk, people were impressed with what Blender can do, they did not seem to expect a free software to be able to do so much, so fast. I demoed with a pre-release Blender 2.5, showcasing sculpting, compositing, rendering, the game engine, as well as some of my previous work. People were positively surprised to see what Blender can do, and few perhaps would even start to see Blender as an alternative to Autodesk’s offerings. Of course, no one in their right mind would change the production pipeline overnight from Maya/Max to Blender, but establishing Blender as more than a toy in the industry is good enough for now.

oooooooooo

What I realized from this presentation, and the point of this post, is that if we want to get more people to use try out Blender, we need to show them what it can do. Listing features, talking about code refactoring, or focusing on the open source advantages, is not going to sell the product. We need to inspire. Let’s show people what Blender is capable of through artwork and video demostrations.

Show. Don’t tell.

Art Show in Kingsport, Tennessee

mike pan — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 02:00:20 +0000

Byron Kindig once again pulled it off! Showing off more than 70 piece of artwork (mostly created with Blender) at the Kingsport Renaissance Center, on display until December 22. Kudos for putting this wonderful show together, I would love to see this, too bad I can’t be there in person, but at least I am proud to say some of my work are on display.

Edit: The event was apparently very successful. Photos and proceedings here: byronsdesigns.com

Project Durian, aka Sintel, is gaining momentum!

mike pan — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:00:20 +0000

Movie making is an expensive business. Blender Foundation’s upcoming short film Sintel is no different. Luckily the Dutch Film Funds had just approved another grant to help extend the project to June 2010, this much-needed funding might even allowing them to hire more artists.

Seriously, if you haven’t pre-ordered the DVD, do it! For 34.00 Euro, you get not only the movie, but every file, texture and asset that is used to create the movie. Isn’t that super cool? This DVD will probably be the best (and cheapest) learning resource for Blender you’ll ever find.

Blender source file pack

mike pan — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:03:46 +0000

I know I will never be a great writer, so instead of doing tutorials, I have decided to release some of the personal project I’ve worked on. The result is a 300MB folder of 22 project, including a lot of the things on my portfolio and demoreel.

When I was learning Blender, I start a lot of personal mini-project that I never really finished, so instead of having them just sitting on my harddrive, perhaps others can find them useful in some way. The pack contains animations, stills and a realtime game project.

=======================Download=================== ====

Mike’s Blender Pack v2 Zip (175MB Compressed)

Mike’s Blender Pack v2 Individual files

=======================Download=================== ====

File listing of the Blender Pack content.

I’ve tried my best to make sure everything is packed and ready to go. All files should work in Blender 2.49a.

Hello World

mike pan — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:41:11 +0000

I am a horrible person. I would publish stuff (sometimes even useful stuff!) on my website, build up links, and then 6 month later wipe out everything with a ‘website redesign’. Every since the redesign, I’ve been getting emails requesting files, information, or how-to’s, some of the letters are impressive in length. Personally when I encounter a website that returns 404, I hit the back space as fast as possible and carry right on, writing well composed emails requesting content from the site author is just so genuinely human that I can’t stand not answering them.

So, my minimalist my portfolio stays, and this blog is created to refill that information void. Don’t count on too much updates though. If you need some things to pass the time, I frequent these website:

Blender news: blendernation.com

A software engineer’s insights: codinghorror.com

Inspirational short talks: ted.com

Amazing photo-journalism: boston.com/bigpicture

xkcd needs no introduction: xkcd.com

You think your IT job sucks: thedailywtf.com