Another Semester Done

Another year over, a new one just begun. Or semester, season, eon. I have been busy, one of the things I completed during the last semester was my first VR piece. Here is the trailer:
 

Multi Dimensional Eye Virus VR - Trailer from Wobbe on Vimeo.

Twodimensional Eye Virus version 0.0

 

Dug up the old javascript files used to create the first of the Multidimensional Eye Virus animations and adapted one for HTML5 canvas. Most of the work was done on the train in and out of the City to teach at PRATT. On a netbook.

Sit back and enjoy!

Version 3d DONE!

Finally, finally I have finished the third and final animation in the Multidimensional Eye Virus series. The images were finalized a few weeks back. The audio track is an essential part of these works and now that I have labeled the mix "Final" I can start sending it out into the world (animation festivals and the like).

For the second time I have relied heavily on freesound.org for source material. What a great resource! As Adobe Audition has been discontinued and replaced by Soundbooth which does not lend itself as good to experimenting with individual audio clips I have this time messed with the sound recordings in Audacity, the open source audio tool. My (audio) editing I have yet again performed in Adobe Premiere.

She stole my audio!

Well, not exactly. Through YouTube I received a message from Poland with a request for permission to use audio from my "Multi Dimensional Eye Virus 2.2" animation. It is always nice to hear someone likes your work, and I take it as a compliment that she refers to the soundtrack as music. This is the project in question, like most her work with some quite suggestive imagery:

wro2011 / SPATIAL MULTI CONCEPT PROJECT from Agnieszka Maria Kalwinska on Vimeo.

She saw my animation at the WRO Bienale 2009, and alerted me to the extended deadline for the 2011 edition. I just entered my latest video there.

Wrapping up

This semester has been a busy one. With the addition of a course at Pratt to my half time job at Montclair State, I have basically been teaching a full load. Only one more class session to go, and then its finals. Pfew…

I think I have also finished main part of the latest rendition in a series: "Multi Dimensional Eye Virus 3d". I need to add title, credits and (very important!) sound. So it may be 2011 by the time it is completely done.

I have also finally finished reading Spinoza's "The Ethics"

A neat mess

Moving along, way slower than I would want of course. Hit another snag last night. It turns out Mental Ray does not like to render a few hundred interpenetrating polygons. Gee!

One neat, one messy

Judging by this blog it might seem that I have not been that busy, but I have been creating quite a few intermediate renders for my next Multi Dimensional Eye Virus animation. The process involves a lot of image textures rendered into image textures rendered into&hellip ad infinitum (well, not quite, though that would be great)

I just rendered the first tests for the next dimension. To the left you see a neat version, to the right a messy one. The final shot is probably going to be somewhere in between. And with more lights and some unexpected action.

Normal Issues

Because a Plug-in I'm using does not work on my 64 bit laptop, I changed a shader today without being able to actually render it. Looked pretty good at first when I could render it tonight on my desktop (running 32 bit XP) but I have the feeling something is off. Will figure that out tomorrow.

Gave my desktop a task to render. Went to check a few minutes later and was confronted with the blue screen of death. Maybe it did not like me pulling out the network cable. Oh well. Restarted it.

BSOD BS Update: And it crashed again. Not at frame 4, but at frame 49. Another nice Blue Screen starting Memory dump. Restarted it from frame 49. Still going strong at frame 63. I had rendered the same scene at draft quality before, with no problems. What the Fietspomp!

Frame 163

Just checked: the render is now at frame 163 out of 192. For some reason what should be the easy frames take way longer that the complex ones. I think I have a fix, but I am letting the current render run for another day. Total render time will by then be four days. Resulting screen time: 8 seconds. At this pace I will surely finish the animation by the Dutch holiday "Sint Juttemis". Optimize I must! Yeah, yeah, I said that before.

Update : Finished today, hurray! Too bad I do not have the next scene ready to render yet. Close though.

Half res test

Tonight the test I am rendering will be at half resolution. Will probably still take quite a while since I now put four lights into the scene. The result will be dramatically different!

If this turns out well, my computer will have something to do for Memorial Day Weekend.

Update (the next morning): rendered in about five hours and actually looked rather good. Rendering full res at production quality right now!

Update #2: Oops, those frames were taking at least 45 minutes each. For the easy ones! Changed the sampling settings and brought the render times down to 15 minutes per frame. Could be done in two days now.

Not quite half res test render

There is so much stuff in Maya that you learn something new every day. You can test render at half resolution by selecting Rendering → Render → Test Resolution → 50% Settings. Real handy. So why does the batch render of the entire scene is still take more than 12 hours? The batch rendered at full res. Here is an image from last nights render (if you click on it you can see it bigger but scaled down to half res).

All progress is slow. But we should hit the next dimension in about a week.

Maybe I need to do some optimization.

After three and a half days of pumping bits to and fro my computer finished rendering a first scene of Multi Dimensional Eye Virus 3D. A little over 300 frames or almost 13 seconds. The result is not half bad if I may say so myself. Inspired to move on but at this pace it will be a while before I finish…

Testing, Testing, Dimension Three

Seriously moving into the fourth dimension with my new Multi Dimensional Eye Virus animation.

A lot is fixed. Found more room for improvement, which will unfortunately involve more scripting. Oh well. But I am NOT a geek!

Into the Second Dimension (again)

After working hard for a day and a half, briefly interrupted by an only seconds long power outage that shut it down none the less, my desktop computer finished rendering a HD test of the second dimension for Multi Dimensional Eye Virus 3D. It did not quite turn out as I had hoped:

Too much camera movement, too much moment overall. At least now I know what I need to change! At production quality the render times are about 13 minutes per frame. And that is with just one of these objects... may need to look into some scene optimization.

Update from the Fourth Dimension

The recent blog silence was mainly due to the fact that the semester started and classes took up most my time not spent caring for my son now that my wife is in the Antarctic. But I also did not have much to show for the progress I was still making on a 3D version for the Multi Dimensional Eye Virus series. I have been scripting stuff to get Maya to do what I wanted, which it now sort of has:

Would love to write a few more words now, but the human alarm clock will sound in about seven hours so I should really call it a day.

Next Dimension Test

Trying to figure out an interesting way to create the next dimension by relighting on image of the object now flat on a plane, using a normal map. Needed to install Mental Ray nodes to get it to work, from Jan Sandström. Unfortunately there is no 64 bit version for my laptop. The source code is included though... time to download Visual Studio? Do I really want to be that much of a geek again?

Another test

The thing to do now: take this into the next dimension!

Back to Basics

After loosing myself for a while in vector math, trying to make the generated line not to intersect itself while moving in interesting swirls, I went back to basics. Sine curves that is. By generating a couple of these lines with the same amount of points, they can be morphed into each other (shape blending) and made to move.

Maybe this is the first real test for a new rendition of an old series: Multi Dimensional Eye Virus 3D!