Diarrhoea: superrune blog
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3D printing fun!
Posted: 02. Nov 2008
I am in the process of updating my panorama-plugin. It's not a huge update, mainly a recompile with a slightly improved memory overhead. I have been able to convert panos of resolutions up to 40.000 pixels wide on my machine, which is five times as big as the previous version. I also figured out a workaround to make it convert float images, using look-up tables and a clever gamma conversion. With that I've managed to shave two steps out of my pano workflow, and I'm now able to do a high-quality full 360 HDRI pano in a matter of minutes. I'll try and get tutorials up before the end of the year that detail my pano workflow, as I think I've managed to come up with some stuff that might be interesting to others.
Work is real good these days, despite the economic turmoil around the globe. I will post some projects soon, as soon as I am out of my NDAs. I have been researching 3D-printing in my spare time, and have compared different printing vendors to see which one has the best compromise between quality and price. If you're interested, you can see some high resolution photos on my Flickr-account.
Scripting and cutting up heads
Posted: 30. Jun 2008
Life is good
It's been four months since I turned self-employed, and I cannot remember having such a good time in years. 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.
A glimpse into the future
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 really looking forward to what I will be working on in the months ahead. I will use these projects to polish my toolset and be prepared enough to do my own animated shorts. So have a nice summer, everyone. I will keep you updated :)
Time for some changes
Posted: 09. Jan 2008
A change of location
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.
A change of vocation
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!
Anybody doing panoramas out there?
Posted: 11. Jul 2007
Super Cubic released
I'm on my summer holiday now, three weeks of sun, relaxing in cafes 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 until next time :)
Heat wave
Posted: 11. Jun 2007
I like 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. Despite 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.
Below 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.
Upcoming talks
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" :)