Tag 3d

Mango / Tears of Steel

Tears of Steel is the fourth film (and the first live-action short) by the blender foundation and a giant leap forward for the community and the software. It is a sci-fi film that showcases recent work on blender, including Compositing, the Cycles render engine and many of the features introduced in the blender 2.6x series, […]

Unbiased.

Recent developments on physically accurate, unbiased raytracers --- and more to the point, GPU powered raytracers that provide near real-time, interactive manipulation of fully textured and shaded models and environment --- promise an unmatched workflow that makes the creation of super-realistic images and animations very easy. I won't write much about the technologies behind them, but I think the video below is a great example of some of the things that become possible for a single person using commodity technology and hardware --- in this case Blender and Octane Render (one such raytracer), especially given how much of the lighting setup and performance trickery, that would otherwise be absolutely necessary, are 'handled for free' by the renderer.

Blender 3D. Professional 3D graphics commoditisation in progress.

I’ve mentioned blender before; it’s one of the open source projects that I’ve followed for years, a project that I love and one that’s has consistently impressed me since I spent a weekend learning the basics of its operation in 2002. At Cosmical Technology, we’ve been using blender for quite a while; some of the […]

Printing Buildings

This is not the first time I'm reading about this; some five years ago I remember reading a related article online or in IEEE Spectrum. I'm somewhat hopeful that the technology will mature soon enough for mainstream use and will be affordable in the parts of the world that proper housing is desperately needed (e.g. Africa, India). It goes without saying that the newly found ease of building should be accompanied by renewed building regulations in order to avoid cases where buildings appear 'overnight' without any building permits authorising their construction. Another concern might be whether architecture could be compromised by the technology in the long-term leading to the replication of a single or few designs destroying the feel and character of cities or regions.

VMWare Workstation 6.5β

VMWare has a beta testing programme for its venerable virtualisation software VMWare Workstation. Version 6.5 is going to add a number of very impressive and long-awaited features such as the Unity feature (pioneered in VMWare Fusion on the Mac), proper 3D acceleration support for Windows machines (yes, this means Direct X 9.0c and most probably, yes this means games and a whole slew of applications previously impossible to run under VMWare). I'll be giving Beta 1 a try in the next few weeks and I'll report here if anything worth mentioning comes up. I'd be very much interested to find what the pricing of this upgrade will be for owners of Workstation 6.0.

Who needs actors anymore?

I really have no words for this. One of the most impressive videos on computer graphics I've seen in years. And I guess the guys and gals at Tübingen are not the only ones working on such models. Let the good times films roll.