DIARRHOEA - SUPERRUNE BLOG Scripting and cutting up heads It's been four months since I turned self-employed, and I cannot remember having such a good time in years. The only negative thing is that I have been experiencing severe wrist pains since january, sometimes forcing me to quit working for weeks. But I'm learning how to control the pains now, and they are slowly going away. I will take two weeks off from the computer now in July, so that I can return with full force after summer. So what have I been doing? Mostly illustration, actually. Above is a teaser on a series of illustrations I just finished in June. I find illustration to be a good break from the stress of post-production that I was used to in my old job. Post-production is not good for your health, period! I've also been scripting a lot, and preparing a toolset that will make it easier for me to do character work. I have been focusing on three areas; rigging, shading and helper tools. For rigging, I am making a setup where I can click a button to put point objects in the scene, then these can be put inside a character, and press on a new button will create a rig between these points. Also, my quest continues for the fastest and best looking way of doing scattering, so I am programming a system that use vertex colours to spread light through a mesh. I've also written a simple shader that will combine the scattered light with the regular shading in a non-additive way. And finally I'm scripting tons of minor helper tools that speeds up other parts of the process, such as splitting facial morphs into left/right components. The image below show a fragment of the stuff I am working on: I have some fantastic offers for projects after summer, from animation direction, television animation design and game teaser animation. All of them are character animation projects. For the first time in years, I am relly looking forward to what I will be working on in the months ahead. I will use these projects to finesse my tools and get prepared enough to do my own animated shorts. So have a nice summer, everyone. I will keep you updated :) 30 Jun '08 - 10:33 | No comments yet Time for some changes Finally, we're done moving to the new apartment, after having worked pretty much non-stop from June to December. We had one week off in summer, and one in september, but apart from that we've been stuck with two unfinished apartments that needed attention. It's nice to finally have just one place to concentrate on, and no longer sleep in one part of town while refurbishing somewhere else. Here's a little peek into our new place. I took a quick photo of what will be my new home office: There's still a lot to do, and (plenty!) much to unpack. But we're taking a break now, leaving these boxes floating about for some time. We will probably get our energy back in a month or two, and then I think we will get settled in by summer. Another big thing is happening. I haven't been happy with my professional life the past years, I've felt stuck at work and haven't met any of my creative goals. I have been working crazy late trying to do stuff in my spare time, but that has left me with little time for anything else - such as just relaxing. Before christmas I decided that enough was enough, and that it was time for a change. From the first of March I will leave Toxic, and return to freelancing! That means I will finally get started on all the cool, personal projects that I've been itching to do. I'm really, really excited about this! I'll keep you posted! 09 Jan '08 - 19:00 | two comments Anybody doing panoramas out there? I'm on my summer holiday now, three weeks of sun, relaxing in cafés and building legos... Well not exactly, we've just bought ourselves a new apartment, so I will be laying down a new floor and doing some hardcore painting for the unforseeable future. Anyways, I've spent a couple of evenings tidying up my panorama workflow. One thing that has annoyed me is the endless converting and jumping in and out of software you have to do in order to create a good looking panorama. Thanks to FilterMeister, I managed to create a simple Photoshop filter that will remove at least a couple of steps from my workflow. Click on the image below to take a look, I hope you like it. Have a nice summer intil next time :) 11 Jul '07 - 00:00 | four comments Eye study and growing trees We've been stuck in a heat-wave here in Oslo the past week. It's been 32 degrees celcius in the shade today, which is quite extreme for a norwegian early summer. I checked the temperature against the global weather on my Nintendo Wii, and we're five degrees hotter than most of Africa! Who said Norway was a cold country? I got signed up to Facebook a couple of weeks ago, and inbetween updating my Flickr account, Youtube account, my two websites and my blog, I feel like managing my own media company! Then there's the iPod syncing, managing my Wii photo album, my multiple email accounts and endless MSN chatting... There seems to be no end to this computer stuff. Inbetween all this, I've found some time to work on my tree script. Actually, I've been reading technical papers and biology books on trees more than I've been doing any real programming. The script can do some simple trees at the moment, but I need to read about the subject some more before I decide when to move next. Above you can see some trees that my script have generated. There's even some animation on the branches, but it looks more like tentacles grasping the sky than anything else! We're just about to do an animation job for a german company here at Toxic, and they want something inside a park. If I am lucky, that project will give me a chance to develop the script even more. After I did my first 360 HDRI panoramas, I went back to this eye model I started on about a year ago. I've wanted to do a realistic eye, with correct internal anatomy. Thanks to the HDRI images, I don't have to think much about the lighting, that pretty much comes out realistic straight away. But I will have to work a bit more on the model and textures themselves, they look a bit prosthetic-ish at the moment: I've got the eye animated, the above renders are two frames out of an eight second sequence. The animation rig is quite nice, with all the fleshy bits moving together with the main part of the eye. There's no textures yet, not on the eye or the skin around it, it's just the displacement from Mudbox that you're seeing. By the way, I'll be having two talks at this years End User Event 2007 in Utrecht, Netherlands. Check out the site for more information. I'm looking forward to visiting the Netherlands for the first time, please stop by if you are in the "neighborhood" :) Rune 11 Jun '07 - 02:11 | No comments yet Visuelt, Trees and Panoramas This has been such a great week. We just had the Visuelt 2007 seminars and award shows here in Oslo, with a selection of truly insipiring creative people visiting and giving talks. Me and Cecilie had a great time meeting some of the lecturers, and would especially give out a huge thanks to Steve, Rilla and Genevieve who really made this weekend a lot of fun! Hope we see you again sometime :) I've spent the past weeks spare time doing a small cartoony character, and it's almost ready for animation. I've decided to take a small pause in that project to get some work done on a couple of programming projects I have waiting. I'm trying to script a procedural tree/organic thingy generator inside 3ds max, using theories I read in this book I got on environment sensitive automata. It's real tricky work with the limited math I know, but I hope I can have some nice images to show soon. Also, I found a clever way to do 360 degree HDRI panoramas with the minimum of photos - and then using gamma look up tables to condense them into a 16bit image that's easy to edit in Photoshop. This image can then be converted back to HDRI with no loss of detail, which is a great workflow for retouching away stuff and doing colour adjustments. If I find the time I will do a small tutorial on the process, I would really like to hear some input on the way it works. I uploaded some of my first HDRIs to Turbo Squid. So click your way over there and have a look. Here is one of them, tone mapped for clarity: The resolution is about 6000 by 3000 pixels, which makes for a lot of detail. I think I priced them fairly cheap, so please buy one if you think you could use it :) My Turbo Squid account was full after loading up these first two images, as soon as I am given a larger account there will be more panoramas there for you to look at. Rune 13 May '07 - 15:53 | No comments yet What a wonderful week! It's been one hell of a week. I'm working on two projects in parallell, doing a commercial in the normal working hours, and then preparing a lecture in the evenings. There's not enough time set aside to do both, but they both has to be done. Just as the week was about to end, my 4000-member webforum decided to die on me. The server finally gave up, with so many disk errors I got BSOD by just opening any kind of program. On saturday I was so tired it felt like my eyeballs were bleeding. And on top of that, spring is here and my allergies are really going crazy. Now the sun is shining outside, and even though everything in my body says I should stay inside, I'm going out to get some hours in the sun. I just need to get away from computers for at least one day now, even if it means working staying up all night next week. By the way, I added a recent (although small) project to the 3D gallery this morning. Click here to have a look. 15 Apr '07 - 14:26 | one comment A little side project I've decided to try and finish off my Stormtrooper model that I started in 2002. Progress is slow when I only have a couple of evenings per week in front of the computer. But the model is shaping up quite nicely: It's hard finding good research, and I am now at the stage when I'm fiddling with details only hard-core Stormtrooper fans will be able to pick out. But that's what its like being a Star Wars fan :) 27 Mar '07 - 22:20 | one comment It's official! Finally finally FINALLY! After one month of downtime, and after two weeks of waiting for my internet provider to setup my new home - my new website is finally up! Take a good look around, there's plenty of new stuff inside :) 16 Mar '07 - 15:36 | No comments yet Archive: 01 Jan - 31 Jan 2006 01 Feb - 28 Feb 2007 01 Mar - 31 Mar 2007 01 Apr - 30 Apr 2007 01 May - 31 May 2007 01 Jun - 30 Jun 2007 01 Jul - 31 Jul 2007 01 Jan - 31 Jan 2008 01 Jun - 30 Jun 2008 Search archive: Search for words used in entries on this website Enter the word[s] to search for here: All the images on this website are (c) copyrighted Rune Spaans and their respective owners. Any use of the materials on this site other than for private, non-commercial viewing purposes is strictly prohibited. If you want to use some of these images for promotional or editorial reasons, please contact me.