Physically Based Rendering

After learning about Physically Based Rendering (PBR) in Houdini, I realized it is cool and useful, if one knows how to use it. PBR uses to physical properties of light, hence its name, to render scenes. This allows it to render with caustics and global illumination by the use of "photons". I knew how to do caustics before this, but using PBR makes it more straightforward. After reading up on PBR, I know most of my way around it, so for the past few days I've been messing with it, and here are the results all smashed into one image. All of these are low resolution and low quality renders, because I was just experimenting and didn't want to spend a lot of time rendering.

http://flickr.com/photos/heydabop/3252569754/

Match Moving

Due to my current sculpture project being harder than I had expected, I have taken a break from it, and instead tried some match moving. For those of you who don't know, match moving is taking film of (usually) a real scene, such as a road or a room, and analyzing it to create a virtual camera to put in a 3D scene. This allows the 3D program to render its model using the virtual camera, and the end result is a model that will fit well into the original footage since both the model and scene are being viewed from the same perspective. The result of my attempt to do this is this video. http://vimeo.com/3008967

Desktop; Twisted

Still no sign of my laptop, last week I was told the guy repairing it still hasn't gotten in contact with the people who gave him the motherboard last time. I have not heard anything since then so I have no idea when I'll be getting it back. In the mean time however, I have managed to get a 4 year old desktop from my friend. It is not exactly fast, but it is capable of doing what I want it to do until I get my laptop, and will be useful as a render farm node once I have my laptop. It has a 2.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading, 2GB of DDR-SDRAM PC-2700, an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200, and an 80GB 7,200RPM EIDE hard drive. So although I won't be doing any gaming, it is not much worse than my laptop, it is however good enough for SideFX Houdini 9.5. This brings me to my next subject, Twisted.

After I set the desktop up how I wanted it and installed the Windows 7 Beta, which I must add works very well and fast, I decided I'd install Houdini and mess around. I had a couple ideas, but most of them included dynamic simulations, which I didn't feel like using on this machine due to processor speed and memory constraints. So I just made a simple curve, copied it four times, rotating 90 degrees each time, added a PolyWire node to it, and subdivided it, which resulted in an interesting looking "sculpture". Once the model was finished, I gave it a silver material, and created a floor with a slightly modified cirrus marble material. I then set up my camera, added depth of field effects, and did some draft renders. Once I thought everything looked nice, I added an area light, and left my computer to render for five hours. The end result was what you see below.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/heydabop/3231694220

I am currently working on another scene with a similar base idea. From the picture I have in my head, the new one will look better and have more detail than this one. I cannot take all credit for the new one, because after discussing this current one with my friend, he gave me some ideas for the new one, which I hope will come out looking very nice.

Ideas

Well it may be longer than I had expected until I get my laptop back, which is quite annoying. I have all these ideas of things to do in Houdini and Photoshop, but I can't do them until I have my laptop...

Void

Yes, I'm aware I have not posted anything for at least a month, I'm also aware this is my second post about how I had not posted for a while. My laptop was broken (fried GPU, and lucky me it's integrated into my motherboard) for almost a month from November-December, and it then broke again about a week ago, and I never started posting in the time it worked. I plan to resume regular posting once I get it back, which will hopefully be in about 2 weeks.

Killing Just to Save a few Bucks

Yesterday morning, Black Friday, as Wal-Mart employees tried to hold sliding doors back against a crowd of near 2,000, an employee was trampled. Multiple employees were holding the doors against the unruly crowd right before opening time, but the crowd burst through the doors, and in the process threw all of the employees back, and one to the floor. As the crowd ran by the employee struggling to breathe, other employees tried to get to him to help him. The man taken to the hospital, and died an hour after the crowd first came flying through the doors. Full Story

Is this what the American life has become? Groups of people willing to kill just to save some money on a Friday morning? What must other countries who already think we are unbelievably greedy be thinking of us now? I hope people realize that a person's life is priceless, and that destroying one to get a better price on something is an unbalanced, heartless decision. My heart and prayers go out to the family of this Wal-Mart employee. Bless them Lord.

Glow!

Glowing stuff seems to look nice most of the time. Therefore, it is nice to be able to make some. I just made some simple glowing spheres, and put them in a dynamic simulation so I did not have to worry about positioning them myself. The only thing I had really trouble with in this scene was parenting a lights to each of the dynamically translated objects. But thanks to the varomix on the SideFX forums, I was able to solve my problem. So I was able to create a decent quick animation, and a higher quality frame from it with global illumination.

Animation: http://vimeo.com/2133774

Frame: http://flickr.com/photos/heydabop/3000358717/