Bunker Graphic Design / Blog

BBH is live

2008-07-30T06:45:00.000-07:00

After a few intense months from everyone at Sennep, BBH website is finally live !
I had some fun with the globe and sheep animations, especially with the R&D part.
Technically, pretty much everyone I knew was invited: Maya, Houdini, After Effects, MEL, Illustrator Javascript, Flash, JSFL, Python, Lightwave, Blender.

Some clever mix of 3D and video was used for the sheep animations.
For the globe, I did some 3D modeling in Lightwave for the main buildings, mixed with procedurally painted cities in Houdini - a total of 100,000 buildings, enough detail to do some moving image work with - as well as some fluids and particles R&D for the animated blobs.

I also started the development of a vector rendering engine written in MEL, which writes layered Postscript files directly from Maya. The features so far are animation ( frames exported as layers ), and backface culling. I'm still working on the Z-sorting.

Maya batch render log file filter

2008-07-15T04:36:00.000-07:00

Maya batch rendering log files are very long, specially when you turn the verbosity level to 4 ( -v 4 ) to display the rendering times. Sometimes, all you want to know is the filename and time per frame of what you are rendering. Here is a little Python script I wrote to filter out just that. You end up with a file that contains only 2 lines per frame rendered, just like this:

Result: c:/my_project/my_file.mb

RC 0.2 info : wallclock 0:00:01.14 for rendering

Here is the Python :

# open source file
f = open('render1.txt', 'r')

# open output file ( if the file doesn't exist, create file )
o = open("out.txt", 'w')

# create an array to store all the lines for the output file
outList = []

# loop through each line
for line in f:
# split the line using the space character
split1 = line.split(" ")
# split the line using the colon character
split2 = line.split(":")
# test the number of words in the line ( if > 5 )
if len(split1) > 5:
# if line starts by "RC"
if split1[0] =="RC":
# if "wallclock" is found
if split1[7] =="wallclock":
# add to the output file Array
outList.append(line)

if split2[0] =="Result":
# add to the output file Array
outList.append(line)

# write the ouput file
o.write(''.join(outList))

# close both files
f.close
o.close

Houdini 9.5 beta

2008-06-15T15:05:00.000-07:00

Hell, they never stop working! Toronto's mighty Side Effects just released Houdini 9.5 public beta. It's now available for the Mac platform as well, and it's fully 64bits, unlike Maya. I will be very soon starting a new blog entirely dedicated to my studies at Bournemouth NCCA. I will be including some tips, files, and comments on my research on Houdini, Shake, Nuke, PFTrack as well as some Ubuntu stuff...

Nuke 5 review

2008-06-15T06:17:00.000-07:00

An interesting review on Nuke5 from Highend3D.

JSFL

2008-06-12T18:22:00.000-07:00

Not new at all, but still, not enough people talk about, and use JSFL ( Javascript for Flash ) which can save you hours if you're a bit old school and need to put thousand of images in the Library.
3 very handy Scripts for Flash

Checkland plagiarism

2008-06-03T08:05:00.000-07:00

Not as good as Checkland Kindleysides but still very funny indeed, eve images is a group of freelancers from Norway. They do some 3D architecture visualisation, but unfortunately, they are not too innovative in term of web design :)

Gelato Pro for free

2008-06-02T03:10:00.000-07:00

Nvidia's Gelato Pro GPU-Powered Rendering Software is now available to download for free. So you can install it now on a 64 Os ( the previous free release was only available for 32Bits systems ). Quick ambient occlusion for everyone ! well, as long as you have a Quadro FX card :) Some nice hardware accelerated renders in the gallery. Stay tuned for some review on Gelato...

Bournemouth NCCA - MA Digital Effects

2008-05-27T04:33:00.000-07:00

I'll be very busy for 12 months doing an MA in Digital Effects at Bournemouth NCCA ( starting this October ). That course involve intense use of Houdini and Nuke . You can see the showreel I submitted with my application - that involved the creation of a digital self portrait - that's why my 3D face is in it - oh dear ! :)

Lidell live - Genius stroke freak

2008-04-29T17:39:00.000-07:00

Youtube is shit, but thanks to Jamie Lidell it's worth watching. Amazing performance live

2008-04-17T06:56:00.001-07:00

I am applying for an MA in Digital Effects / 3D Animation at Bournemouth University, so my showreel should be online very soon. Stay tuned ...

Seymour Powell

2008-04-17T01:34:00.000-07:00

Just finished that not too long ago at Sennep, Seymour Powell is a UK based product design agency. Sleek design by Lorenzo and flash build by Oli, and fullscreen 3D intro by myself. A bit of Global Illumination and Final Gathering in MentalRay going on there, and big resolution too: 1850 pixels wide.

PIXIE - Renderman compliant renderer

2008-02-11T05:05:00.000-08:00

PIXIE is an open source Renderman® compliant renderer. It's free and there to be downloaded. Have fun with it :) and don't forget to give some feedback to the developers !

Nvidia acquires MentalRay

2007-12-13T13:26:00.000-08:00

Nvidia just bought MentalRay ( available for Maya, Houdini, XSI, 3DSMax ) which is probably a good thing considering that any descent 3D workstations uses Nvidia's mighty Quadro FX GPUs. Also that could mean a serious improvement of the future releases of Nvidia's Gelato, the GPU accelerated rendering engine, which already support Ambient Occlusion, Global Illumination, Caustics, Motion Blur, Depth of Field, and many more features. Nvidia seems to have some serious plans with the release of Plex and Tesla multi-GPU units.

This is also extremely interesting considering that Nvidia just released the Triple-SLI for the GeForce 8800 GTX. Let's hope they will do the same with Professional Card. Also, don't miss amazing bargains on Quadro FX cards HERE ( international delivery available )

SideFX Houdini Aprendice HD

2007-11-23T06:30:00.000-08:00

Well done SideFX ! The new Houdini Apprentice HD is now available for $99. You can also download a free Learning edition ! Very nice !

Realtime 3D textured plane rendering in Flash using Maya animation

2007-10-08T12:13:00.000-07:00

I am working on a flash website that involves animating a pile of cards using Rigid Body Dynamics in Maya. Considering the amount of the animation and the number of cards, rendering as PNG sequences wasn't a viable option.

To save a lot of file size and painful frame by frame hand animations, I combined a MEL script that project a 3D point into a 2D space and a image distortion class found in the Sandy engine.
The result is a simple text file generated from Maya and then read into flash. The images on each cards are rendered in realtime using 4 points distortion (the faces are actually made out of 8 triangles for better display ).

I have also been working on a very simple OBJ file importer in Processing which is a lot more simple than the one done by Tatsuya SAITO . I will post the sources of these two very soon.

JazzMutant - Lemur

2007-09-27T14:17:00.000-07:00

A lot better and more clever than the Tenori-On, the Lemur from JazzMutant is a dream: Multi touch screen with modular graphic interface and built-in 100BaseT interface. Bravo !

CK on FWA

2007-08-24T02:17:00.000-07:00

Checkland Kindleysides has been selected "site of the day" on the Favorite Website Awards for the 25 of August.

Very Clever Image Resizing

2007-08-22T05:48:00.001-07:00

Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing

Sennep Norway trip

2007-08-22T05:38:00.000-07:00

I just upgraded to a Flickr Pro Account. Now fullscreen slideshows! Here is the recent Sennep Norway Trip

Physical Photoshop

2007-08-15T04:34:00.000-07:00

And old link, but it's still nice: Physical Photoshop

Power Google

2007-08-10T02:10:00.001-07:00

Simple, clever, and good for the environment. Nice.
Have a look at Power Google. Another good thing about my site: it's already Black :)

Space Penguin flash animation

2007-08-08T18:15:00.000-07:00

Very cool animation here. Just a shame they didn't use After Effects.

Time Drawer for OSX

2007-07-31T06:05:00.000-07:00

TimeDrawer is a program for mac OSX that automatically save all versions of a file, just like CVS, SVN, or Time Machine in OSX Leopard ( to be released in October ). You can also compare files in a visual way, as you would in Flex Builder and Eclipse. Very useful for developers.

Checkland Kindleysides

2007-07-17T17:36:00.001-07:00

Paper, 3D, sounds, fluid animations, and good projects: Checkland Kindleysides is a pure pleasure for the eyes and ears . We all worked really hard on this here at Sennep. I was involved in the 3D, the paper sounds, and some ActionScript Debugging. Enjoy :)

Myspace music rip

2007-06-19T15:23:00.000-07:00

If you want to rip some myspace music, here is a cool little free software ( PC ) that download the MP3 stream ( 96kbps ) from the 'friend ID'.