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Tradigital Blender wins 2011 PROSE award

admin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:39:02 +0000

I just got word from my contacts at Focal Press that Tradigital Blender has received the 2011 PROSE award in the Arts Technique category. They are the American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence.

Link to the winners is here.

Needless to say, I am geekfully happy.

Snowmen Will Melt Your Heart

admin — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 22:57:54 +0000

I’m completely out of time, so I’ll call it done. Below you have HD embeds of Snowmen Will Melt Your Heart on both Vimeo and youtube. Pick your favorite.

I also made a 1920 x 1080 render of the coda shot for my desktop backgrounds. Gets me in the holiday spirit.

Cheers!

Vimeo:

youtube:

And finally, the 1920 x 1080 still:

And one more…

admin — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 15:42:07 +0000

Moving ahead, I’ve added the snow to the first shot and begun to experiment with ways of doing the tree line. This method isn’t horrible, but it needs some tweaking. As a proof of concept though, I consider it a success as it gives the correct overall effect. Note that the kids in the background are currently dupe models of the boy, but will be replaced by other kids later.

Falling Snow Effect

admin — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 14:18:34 +0000

I’ve gotten this almost to where I think I completely like it. Blender particle system, using a very light-weight snowflake mesh (24 faces) as a dupli-object. I got the motion going pretty well, but the material on the snowflake makes it, I think. Of course this morning, I looked out the window after I fired up the results of last night’s render to see… snow falling, first time this year. (Recommended to go fullscreen and HD!)

Falling Snow Effect from Roland Hess on Vimeo.

New, Faster Computer

admin — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:01:09 +0000

Last weekend, I built myself a new computer. I’ve been using my Athlon X2 box running Windows XP (and occasionally Ubuntu 8.04) for several years. It wasn’t like it was getting horrible, but I felt that it was time for an upgrade nonetheless. So, I built a Phenom X6 machine with 8GB of RAM, and slapped Ubuntu 11.04 on it. For my current project, render times have dropped by almost an order of magnitude, a combination of the higher RAM ceiling, 4 more processor cores, three years better overall architecture and the move to a 64-bit OS.

Last night, as I was working on some sculpting on one screen and keeping tabs on myself in Glitch (http://www.glitch.com — I’m “harkyman” there, duh) on another, I decided to pull down the Blender sources and start building my own on the new box. I compile using scons, because it’s what I’m familiar with, and once I got all of the right packages in place, I started the build with the “-j” flag to tell it to multi-thread, assigning four of my six cores to it.

So, I went back to work (er, MMORPGs are work right?) and Blender built just ridiculously quickly, without even slowing me down in the web browser or hitting my performace sculpting.

Overall, between the render speed increase and the en fuego build time, I’m extremely happy with my upgrade. I know that it’s not news that newer, faster computers are… faster, but it’s fun to see it in practice.

Cheers

Snowman and Boy

admin — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 20:03:20 +0000

No real posing yet…

More of the kid…

admin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 03:08:56 +0000

Boy character model, mark I

admin — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 21:35:00 +0000

Based on the public domain Cartoon Guy character head. I’ve decided on no nostrils.

Sketch from “Snowmen”

admin — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 00:13:53 +0000

I’m working on a new animation project called tentatively called “Snowmen”. Here’s a pre-production sketch.

Former Human Contestant vs. AI Software Developer

admin — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 20:48:18 +0000

As someone who was both a human Jeopardy! contestant, and who has also developed AI software, I have to throw my loyalties with Watson. He crushed his human opponents. Perhaps my pleasure in his win was increased by seeing the champs shaking their heads in frustration as they obviously knew the clues but lost to Watson’s amazing buzz-in technique time and time again, much like my own feelings when I was on the show.

Overall, I am astounded at the progress that has been made in the codification of general knowledge and natural language processing. Watson was simply amazing.