BBH is live

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.

Houdini 9.5 beta

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...

Bournemouth NCCA - MA Digital Effects

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 ! :)

Seymour Powell

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.

Realtime 3D textured plane rendering in Flash using Maya animation

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.

CK on FWA

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

Physical Photoshop

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

Checkland Kindleysides

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 :)

Open SuSE 10.2 on Macbook Pro

Macbook pro users, have a look at this excellent tutorial explaining how to install OpenSuSE Linux on your laptop with dual-boot via rEFIt. You can download the DVD for free here. You can also setup a Tri-Boot ( MacOS + Suse + winXP ) as shown here. Autodesk Maya is a lot faster and more stable on Linux. See what ILM says about it.

Papervision : realtime 3D in Flash ( AS3 )

Some very nice and fluid realtime 3d demos in flash ( at the bottom of the page )