Digital Anthology

Depth of Field

Teasers first, details will emerge shortly.

Rest assured what you are seeing is REALTIME and running under Blender 2.46 SVN. Sample files, videos, and source codes to follow.

Video of OceanViz in action

Sorry I've been pretty busy recently and hence did not find many opportunity to post new entries. Meanwhile, here is a video that documents the OceanViz project using the Blender Game Engine. Direct MP4 Download

It goes into the backend of the visualization quiet a bit, and you can see how everything fits together nicely. What you are seeing is a rather old iteration of the release, the current file already looks and performs so much better.

random thoughts on the OceanViz project

On using beta software:
As any seasoned Blender user would know, the Game Engine is in a constant state of flux, between the sporradic, and often poorly documented, improvements and the long promised overhaul, it is sometimes difficult to keep up with everything that is going on in the source code.

Because of this, for the OceanViz project, we decided early on that we would stay on top of things by developing the game on SVN and RC builds. While the decision will certainly be frowned upon by any 'real' developers, this is a concious decision that proved to be beneficial so far, as there is some significant speed/feature improvement between version 2.45 and 2.46. Plus, doing a lot of small changes to make sure the blender file is up-to-date with the latest version of blender is always better than trying to resolve all the new issues in one go.

Hey, if Apricot is developing codes as they go, maybe using RC release for real work isn't that dangerous after all.

Screenshot of the work-in-progress OceanViz.

On version control:
Blender file is a self-contained binary file that does not work very effectively with revision control systems such as CVS or SVN. With several people having write access to the blender file, we had to improvise and pull out as much stuff as possible from the main blender file. Textures, Video and Audio are the first to get pulled out, packing is somethine one should do only for a real release anyways. We also decided to seperate all the python scripts from the blender file, and use a simple 'hook' to load the scripts:

import myscripts

myscripts.run()

then the external scripts (myscripts.py) will look like this:

def run():

     print "foo"

     print "bar"

I guess we could have gone one step further and utilize the 'Link' Function to dynamically merge several files into the main blender file. But so far, that doesn't seems to be necessary.

It would be interesting to hear what professional studios like the Blender Institute do to manage large projects.

What I am up to

What do I, a Computer Engineering Undergrad from Canada, and an architecture and urbanism undergrad from Brazil have in common? We are both working at Canada's University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre doing data visualization using Blender:

This is no Finding Nemo, but hey it is in realtime!

BlenderNation ran an article on this project a while back, in a nutshell the Fisheries Centre wants to use scientific simulation data to drive a realistic 3d visualization of an underwater ecosystem. A complex simulation program provides Blender with the fish population and other environment variables, Blender uses this data to display an animated view of the ocean in realtime. A team of 6 had been working on it for the past few month. Dalai Felinto and I are fortunate enough to step in and take over the Blender component of the project.

I have worked with UBC for just over a week on this project, but I am developing even more respect for the do-it-all philosophy of Blender. It is a joy to have the prototyping, modeling, texturing, animation, game design and python scripting functionality all accessible within a single UI. I am happy because I don't have to learn 20 different applications. My employer is happy too because productivity is through the roof! I don't even think Hollywood production is this streamlined.

Another aspect of this project that excites me is the fact that I have never seen the Blender GameEngine pushed so far. AI, culling, flocking, GLSL, LOD, network, UI, sound, XML parser, we got all that.

Swimming in dangerous water

Blender is without its flaws. Because of the nature of this project, the focus is on automation and dynamic generation of entities. With about 2000 lines of python code that is executed roughly 30 times a second to ensure an independent AI for each fish; ~100,000 triangles on screen at any given time; we are seeing some serious performance bottlenecks. Python can't be easily parallelized, duplicate objects can't be batched, and there is currently no support for DDS texture compression. So far, we are managing fine, but I can't stop asking myself the 'what if blender...?' questions.

Of course, with all the features that Project Apricot promises to deliver, we will definetly see significant improvement in the Blender GameEngine before the end of the summer.

And lastly, here is a video teaser of what we have done. Remember this is REALTIME stuff!

Stay tuned. I'll keep you informed!

Looking for talents

Recently BlenderNation ran an article on University of British Columbia's (Vancouver, Canada) data visualization project that uses Blender as the main tool to render a dynamic fish population based on scientific driven simulation data.

At the time, they were looking for a summer intern to to oversee the Blender - EwE integration, and I was fortunately enough to be that person. Now UBC is expanding the arena to render terrestrial aspect of the data visualization and is looking for more Blender experts to coordinate this effort. The University is looking for people to work full or half time experts for this summer who are proficient with Blender GameEngine and Python. Understanding of VB.Net is a bonus.

Based in Vancouver is a plus but not necessary. If interested, please send an email to me at madonions@gmail.com

no time for haiku.

Most of the time I come up with a scene idea, put it off for 2 month. Get half-way through. Stops. Resuming working on it a full 6 month later, and grind out the final product after the earth has completed a full rotation around the sun. Very occasionally, the celestial bodies just line up for the perfect shot, without any earthly intervention.

This is what I set out to create(and I did, in the end):

But this is what turned out first when I changed the color of the sky and added a halo lamp:

Don't you miss winter already?

Even faster Blender.

Now compiled with VS9 (aka Visual Studio 2008).

Get it from Graphicall.org

Site Migration (again)

Hello all. I was bored enough to go through with another website re-design this week. As a result, many pages might get displaced or deleted. I tried my best to minimize navigation problems, but if you find anything strange, please drop me a comment.