Doesn't necessarily make sense

New room colormaps

Starting to look like a hospital. These are the colormaps, except for the wiggly pattern in the middle, that’s a displacement map. Need to add grime, specular and displacement. There’s quite a few closeups where the “prisoner” is sitting on the floor and next to the wall. Can’t get away with Depth-Of_Field there so will need to have a good displacement map. 3Delight will help out there.

Will also need some Final Gather style bouncing light – or indirect diffuse reflections for all the nit-picking geeks out there. Ambient light shaders in combination with Light Categories are an easy way to add this. This workflow supports fast hacks like hiding lights to prevent generation of point clouds etc.

Simple to test to see if bouncing light is working. Seems ok. Rendertime for the picture above is something around 6 seconds. Not too expensive.

Something half decent

Not exactly original but will work perfectly. Went through some movies last night for references – Cuckoos nest, Shining and similar ones. After some browsing I remembered 12 Monkeys had exactly the right thing. Not so much in terms of shape but more the cracked hospital tiles and so forth. Will texture it today but here’s the model. Really simple low-res geo.

Lighting this thing is quite difficult since it’s a symmetrical room with no real lightsource apart from the circular light in the ceiling which is quite boring. Might replace it with some skylights but that would break the isolation theme that I’m aiming for. It’s not supposed to be very dark either so we will see what happens.

The original idea was to have a fake moon in the ceiling… we will see how that will look. Casting kindof an uneven eerie light. The character will have separate lights, probably some strong rims… it will be graded to almost black and white so the lighting will be all the more important.

Laptop improvement - WUXGA rant part 3.

Here’s a not so novel idea for all laptop manufacturers that
seem to favor HD resolution over WUXGA.

Now that you have some extra space to spare around the screen -
why not take advantage of it and improve the cinema
experience on laptops – namely sound quality.

The idea is to put electrostatic speakers into the screen.
Shouldn’t be too much of a problem. It’s not like they are
too big.

This is a good source for revenue since all Hifi enthusiasts
and other Apple fanatics would sure buy them for a
premium price.

Fig 1. Sample HP NW9440 modified

The above laptop has used the black bars everyone hates to incorporate
electrostatic loudspeakers.

So there we go. Better sound for everyone.

Oh, and I wonder what will happen in the coming anamorphic war between cinema and consumers. You see anamorphic has a ratio of 2.40:1 or 2.35:1. Alot wider than 1.778:1. This will make for interesting laptops in the future. Or better speakers.

Imagine a 20 core cpu, nvidia tesla and a screen resolution of 1600 by 680. You could just about get the browser title on the screen, maybe even the location bar. Really useful device. So don’t steal this idea

Work in progress #?

Here’s some early work in progress for the first sequence. The room has gone through many revisions since this image. It started out as a cylindrical room, then became rectangular, then pentagonal. The idea was to incorporate themes such as prison, hospital, boring etc. At the moment it looks like it will be a hospital ward, with 5 doors, each representing the five senses.

The character still needs some work, detailing around the eyes. I am doing the facial animation test next week so that will show how much/less detail is needed. The skin wrinkles might need a workup or two… hard to say at this stage. I was aiming for 2K resolution for the final image which is probably overkill since not many festivals screen at that resolution. Then again, things have a tendency to change.

The main character in the first sequence. This dude will perform some meditational KungFu and escape the prison. At least that’s what the script says…

The old room that was really really boring. The columns in the corners don’t really fit either. Was trying to get something mandalaic into the image, but unless it is rendered with a panoramic camera, it doesn’t come across. So will go with a more “realistic” design instead. Will save the hokus pokus for later.

That’s about it. More updates after the weekend.

Anarchy Religion and Ryan Bingham playing on the Harman Kardon...

Why Anarchy is
fucking
beautiful
.
period.

How else am I going to start this
chellos,
.
Everyone knows that that anarchy
is the system for personal
responsilibity,
ultimate sacrifice,
and did I say it before,
responsibility.

that’s about it. In a
nutshell.
scratch some DJ at the side.

So, where’re were wewre we,

too many typos, too hard to type after
so maybe baby is sleeping
,
but ICE T is the KING after all,
Elvis… yes. And Johnny cash of couriers of messages from god.

Wait a minute, I had a thread going on somewhere.
Have to cut a fingernail… too hard to type with
the built-in pick…

Ok, we’re good…

Popped a cold one.

Where were we?

Yes, Anarchy, I was writing something “intelligent” about the
most
hated
and
loved
phenomenon
that is IF I must be comepletely thruthful about it,
the most honest system,
that NO serial killer
has ever understood. Never mind the bleeding innocent victims.

So, scratching intersticial aside,

Having a political, social, religious, and shoot me here
moral,
system,
where you actually decide for
YOUR
SELF
if you want yo hurt another person
OR NOT
instead of someone mother
fucking blue wanna-be patriotic
suit wearing bastard
telling you what to do
so, what do you do,
.
.
.
well, you do what every SINGLE
person
in the HISTORY
of
MANKIND
has done
.
.
.
you make the best of it. As often
as
you
can
.
Dot.
.

Thank you.

So, to the point, living in Finland,
or as we NATIVES say it,
Suomi, or “My Swamp” pretty-accurately-
translated.

We have a whole bunch of people just going
about their business aSS everyone else…
just because that’s how you do it.
BUT no, that’s not how you do it.
When I lived in TEXAS, yeah, that’s right,
the LONESTAR state,
I had the Rare opporunity to meet a real SHERIFF,
John Wayne Style MF, sixshooter hanging on
off a loose belt,
made from real leather,
for all y’all green Freaks.

We have alot to learn about the
wild wild
west.
that has lost so much.
so be it, but the fact of the matter is,
that ANY
LAW ENFORCER,
that uses his
COMMON SENSE,
and is connected to his COMMUNITY,
instead of a SCRIPTURE, written,
GOD,
knows how long ago,
is far better suited to HELPING the people
in his community, replace by jurisidiction, where
YOU
feel fit.

It is so simple, the person appointed to take care
of you
and your family,
should know YOU, and where you came from,
know your environment,
and most importantly,
KNOW YOU.

There we go, unless the state knows
who you are, and we’re not talking about a
SIN 318-505-05478
but who you really ARE,
then they are in no position to help you.

My old Neighbour Johnny, was constantly
HARASSSSSS….ED
because of this.
There was no sense of history there.
Only the letter of the law.

WTF, no let me spell that out for you,
what the fuck, I keep forgetting this is my
page,

too much indoctrination,

so, Anarchy is beautiful,

it does NOT, mean,
chaos, violence, murder, raping and whatever other
nice adjectives to get the point across,
that I can’t think of at the moment.

IT, does, however, mean the following,

Take responsibility for YOUR Actions.
Do whatever YOU want.

and all you
historically bloody,
christians out there,

If this sounds too close to the Satanic Bible,
which isn’t a bible but a loose copy of
looser copies of even older ideas,
too BAD.

BAD is just a word. Monkeys could write it,
my cat Minkey sure would.

This one is for you.

.
Dot
.

Nokia, we've seen it before

Fig 1. An illustrative picture of something Kick-Ass.

Ladies and gentlemen,

We have seen it before. And it happens again.
A not so long ago, on a lot that Google now inhabits,
there was small company that changed the world
as
we
know
it.
That company was called SGI. That would be Silicon Graphics
if you remember the

Indigo.

If you recall, SGI brought in a CEO, can’t remember his name,
but he merrily walked over from Microsoft,
and happily plowed the company into the ground,
where it was picked apart,
piece by piece,
some ending up in
Crossbars,
some in,
Quadros,
and the remaining bits in
mine hunting fluid solvers,
that might have had something to do with
Navier and Stokes,
or maybe not.

So we walk into the present,
to the
less cable inclined world,
where almost inaudible chirps,
burn our ears at night,
at the threshold of the dreaming,

Here we see a small company,
gathered around the swamp of Nokia,
wondering what else might
be gleaming
in the slow burning cinders rising
up
into the air.

They too, were taken on a ride,
by a benign ambassador from the
far West, from a land called Microsoft.
He pushed Windows into worlds they,
and others depending upon them, did not want to see,
and eventually ground them into the ground.

Their starcharts exhibited similar signs,
yet they did not believe that time
is
after
all

cyclical.

The party disbanded and the travelers walked
into the darkness. If one looked
closely through the dark blue
foliage, mirage or not,
there was something illuminating
the way.

Canvas look development

One of the things that I had to leave out of Last Chance was the canvas simulation. This was mainly achieved through embossing and/or displacing the rendered image – not exactly ideal. The displacement worked in certain parts so we will reuse that later.

I was digging around some old documentation and decided to revisit it for MOP. Additionally some new source material had to be painted last night to see the effects more clearly. I used some thick oil based crayons to draw some strokes on canvas to see the layering effect.

The layering of paint is neat in that it introduces depth into the canvas. This depth is indicative of the quality of a painting, how much space is revealed so to say.
But more of that later, in the philosophy section.

The first thing to address is the paint amount on the canvas. This goes from nothing, to little (small dots appear on the ridges) to fully covered. The first test was done using isosurfaces (metaballs), which gives really neat colorblending effects, but the setup was too clunky. Adjusting the shape of the metaballs also proved to be a little tricky. Flattening them out and using a volume shader seems promising.
The latest technique uses an rsl shader utilizing bombing to splat little dots on the canvas. By scaling the dots the gaps will be filled in.

The canvas I used has roughly 11 ridges per centimeter or 28 rpi. This would give a rendering resolution of roughly 2800*1575 pixels, assuming the canvas is 55 cm wide, viewed from a distance of 50 cm. Afterwards it will be scaled down to hd/hd720 res as needed.
This is partly the reason to go with a shader bases approach as evaluating so many points would otherwise take too much time. 3delights disc particle type would also work really well since it renders so fast but requires an extra step which isn’t needed here.

Will post some work in progress later today, in the meantime, here is one of the shader based buildingblocks – an IPS monitor

New toys to play with

Just tried out the new Piranha, from IFX. Very nice. Runs extremely well on older hardware in Linux. Been looking for a video editor with good color correction tools – there’s not many around.

The color correction runs in real-time on video footage in HD resolution which is seriously nice. Timeline and EDL’s are all there so integration into 3D packages should be a breeze. The plan is to shoot a bunch of stuff for MOP on DSLR so being able to do effects work in the “field” is very welcome. Getting decent rates on the WIFI around the house as well – so the fileserver can be used directly from the laptop even on the patio (pictured below).

Very happy!