Tracking Experiment

Azman, Nadia and I are working on a VFX short, so there's definitely a lot of tracking work ahead for us.

I was trying to think of a practical method of tracking everything that :

• didn't rely on auto-tracking [too many points, accuracy is suspect + too hard to make precise corrections]
• doesn't require a whole lot of measuring work for survey data [too tiring and prone to errors if measurements don't match up]
• doesn't depend too much on different perpendicular planes to define spatial dimensions [limits the locations/settings that we plan to shoot in]
• uses tracking points from whatever's already in the scene [no need for manual tracking markers, minimizing painting and post-work to cover them up]
  

After a night of experimenting, a little trigonometry, and a little help from Nadia, I think I've managed to come up with a low-tech solution that might work. Here's our first test. A bit shaky [the measurements were done very carelessly], but I think we proved the technique works.

Insight3D - Open Source Image-Based Modelling Tool

Continuing my obsession with interesting free stuff...

insight3d lets you create 3D models from photographs. You give it a series of photos of a real scene (e.g., of a building), it automatically matches them and then calculates positions in space from which each photo has been taken (plus camera’s optical parameters) along with a 3D pointcloud of the scene. You can then use insight3d’s modeling tools to create textured polygonal model.

If this works as well as it says it does [I haven't tried it out yet], it could prove really useful in collecting survey data for tracking purposes really really quick... we could totally skip the process of measuring everything in detail.

More info and download links HERE and online tutorial HERE

Kreatif 2010 Program Schedule

It's out!

Short Film - Sintel

Something worth sharing. Funded by donations, and created through FREE software [Blender]. You can read more about it here and watch the full HD version on Youtube.

Calling All Aspiring Artists and Painters

Maybank is organizing a painting competition for young contemporary artists and painters aged 18-35 years old. All you have to do is submit a 2D artwork of your artistic interpretations of 'Expressions of the Malayan Tiger'.

More info on this here.

Competition ends Oct 29th 2010. Miracle of time needed.

Kudos to Roze, a friend of mine and fellow artist, for sharing this info.

Film Fests

Two film fests to look forward to this Friday and weekend.

Films on 8. Organized by the Junior Chamber Society (JCI) Taylor's University. They look forward to have a weekly film fest every Friday nights and decided to start off with French films.

Venue: University Square, Taylor's Lakeside Campus, Sunway
Date / Time: Oct 22nd 2010, 1930 - 2200
Fee: RM5 per person or RM8 per pair.

More info on this here.

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And to those who perhaps prefer an unconventional or different approach to film-making.

The first Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Video Festival 2010 (KLEX 2010) starts this Friday (Oct 22nd - Oct 24th 2010) at The Annexe Gallery, KL and a night event at the HELP University College on Monday (Oct 25th 2010).

More info on this on their Facebook and their blog.

More Sculptris

Talk about Sculptris. EASY to use is right. It's FREE and no installing needed. This was done a couple of months back when the freeware was just released. I decided to have a quick doodle with it. No Wacom. Just fully mouse-drawn.

This post was originally published at Senimitos.

Sculptris

Also old news... but this is too good to not share.

Couple months back, Pixologic [the makers of Zbrush] released the alpha build of Sculptris... for free.

It's essentially a stripped down version of Zbrush, but still really really amazing - no knowledge of 3D modeling necessary to have fun with it. Just download it from here (it's only 3MB), unpack it, and run it... no need for installing.

It's pretty easy to get into [the 1-page help menu pretty much says it all], but for extra help, you can always go to the Sculptris forum on ZBrushCentral.

This is especially cool for the members of the group who've always wanted to jump into 3D modeling without worrying too much about the tech stuff, and just want to draw in 3D. Try it out! It's awesome and FREEFREEFREEFREEFREE.....

GPU Rendering Solutions

This video shows some of the capabilities of DX11 - and it really shows off how good things can look in today's games. The amazing thing about this is that all this looks this good in realtime - no need for hours and hours spent on rendering.

Which makes you wonder... how come it takes so damn long to render good looking stuff in our 3D software, if you're using mental ray or any other renderer, when all the games do it on the fly?

Recently there've been a lot of advances in GPU rendering [rendering using the power of your graphics card, as opposed to the normal CPU-based method]. This used to be reserved only for those who had the extra cash to spend on workstation-level graphics cards... but now those techniques are available and working on normal gaming-class cards as well!

These are some examples of realtime renderers:
http://www.mentalimages.com/products/iray.html
http://furryball.aaa-studio.eu/

It's nuts... you can render reflections, refractions, soft shadowing, render passes, ambient occlusion, global illumination, etc, etc... all with your graphics card, sometimes 300 times faster than a normal CPU renderer. I've only tested Furryball for Maya, and it works great.

Here's a good link for reading up on realtime and offline rendering advancements.

And those of you who are into the hardware tech stuff, check out Nvidia's new line of Fermi & Tesla based GPU-based cards, and what they can do. That's the future right there.

Vector Displacements & Texels

This is pretty old, from a couple months back, but there's some really interesting stuff in here.

Highlights :
- The use of the new Vector Displacement Maps, which you can export out of Mudbox (which can also be viewed in realtime, if you have DirectX10 enabled!)
- Texels vs the old UV+texture maps method we've been using for years (on the bright side, no more UV layouts or seams.. on the down side, probably more resource usage)

Who knows, these techniques could be standard procedure in coming years, the same way sculpting and normal maps changed the way we model and render.

For those who have no interest in the technical bits, you can always watch this just for some Behind-The-Scenes stuff for Toy Story 3 :) Enjoy!

Autodesk Panorama 2010 Competition

I got this e-mail from Idarahayu from MDeC [and I think Faizal forwarded it to the faculty too].
_____________________________________________

PANORAMA is back again this year and Cyberjaya will be the final battleground for finalists from Asia Pacific region for Animation and Innovation & Design categories.

MSC Malaysia is calling for your institution to respond to the challenge! Please submit your students’ work for this competition and let them be recognized outside Malaysia.

Excerpts from website :

3D Animation Category
Description: Create a rendered shot, between 30 seconds and 2 min max in length, illustrating your interpretation of the subject matter “Change Your World” using Autodesk 3D animation software.

Software Requirement
Autodesk 3ds Max, Maya, Mudbox, or any combination thereof.

Design Criteria
Overall Design
Creative Ability
Innovation
Technical Excellence

File Requirements
All entrants must zip the following elements into a single ZIP file:
Three (3) .jpegs or pdf of different design stages (one must be final design)
Windows Media or Quicktime video file
One (1) PDF of final design

Qualification for Entry Submission
Only projects completed on or after January 1, 2010 will be accepted
Only projects completed by using Autodesk software will be accepted
The production team should not exceed a total of 3 members, all team members should currently be a student or graduated in 2010.
All items under the Submission Checklist must be fulfilled in full, or else entry will be disqualified

Submission Closing Date
Competition Submission Closing Date – 31 Oct 2010

Return of Submission
The submitted animation and all the submitted materials will not be returned.

Prizes for the Panorama APAC Design Challenge for the 2 categories

Innovation & Design Category:
1st prize winner – USD $1200 for the team. Plus Autodesk Education Master Suites software and a certificates for every team member, A champion a trophy for the team
2nd prize winner – USD $800 for the team. Plus Autodesk Education Master Suites software and a certificates for every team member, A trophy for the team
3rd prize winner – USD $500 for the team. Plus Autodesk Education Master Suites software and a certificates for every team member, A trophy for the team

3D Animation Category:
1st prize winner – USD $1200 for the team. Plus Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites software and a certificates for every team member, A champion a trophy for the team
2nd prize winner – USD $800 for the team. Plus Autodesk Education Creation Suites software and a certificates for every team member, A trophy for the team
3rd prize winner – USD $500 for the team. Plus Autodesk Education Entertainment Creation Suites software and a certificates for every team member, A trophy for the team

For more details, please visit http://www.autodesk.com/panorama

Maybe some of the students might be interested?

CGX Page up and running!

Alright! Time to start posting - share whatever you feel might be of interest, updates on what you're working on, or any random experiments or doodles you've been banging out lately :p