Assembly: Life in Macrospace
Done for Gecko Animation Ltd, which I am now a part of!
A short experimental piece featuring a blend of Macro Photography and CG Animation. It started with an idea from David Parvin, of Two Rivers Partnership, involving abstract forms and macro photography. With the footage shot, Jonathan Lax and myself worked on constructing a narrative from the forms we saw by combining CG elements with the original footage.
The CG elements were all done in blender (though some of the fluid sim stuff was done with RealFlow) and rendered in BI. Lots of animated node materials for the shifting surfaces and displacements.
Credits:
Director of Photography – David Parvin
Live Action Shoot – David Parvin, Jonathan Lax, Tobin Brett
CG Animation and Effects – Ben Simonds, Jonathan Lax
Editing – Jonathan Lax
Music and Sound FX – Alistair Lax
Family Crest
For my fathers birthday this year I created a model of my family crest and had it printed in 3D by Shapeways. The final model arrived the other day and I’m pretty pleased with how it looks. Unfortunately I only have a point and shoot camera with fairly limited macro capabilities, so the photos don’t look that great, but I include a Vray render to show the details too.
Painting With Polygons
Here’s a great technique that popped up on the forums, based on a siggraph paper by Isaac Botkin (link), here’s their video:
What intrigued me about the technique is that it doesn’t rely on any fancy algorithm, plug-in or rendering technique. Instead it uses displacement mapping to perturb the surface of the model and then motion-blurs the results of several displacements per frame to give the result. If the displacement is applied cyclically, i.e. it oscillates once per frame, then this is consistent over multiple frames and can even be used for animation. I’ve been having a play at doing this in blender and here are the results I’ve had so far:
For the truly interested, here’s a blendfile. More after the jump…
