Matt Ebb

Related to this earlier experiment, I’ve ventured further into the scary world of 3D math and OpenGL, re-doing the 3D visualisation of lamp objects in Blender. There were a few problems with the previous versions which I hope to have addressed in this little rejuvenation project.

(MPEG4 video, 3.5MB)

Copenhagen photos, now online.

f you like the French tech-funk-house duo Daft Punk, or retro 80s anime, the combination of music and image, or even just innovative uses of media, then you’ll probably like Interstella 5555, a DVD I picked up quite cheaply the other day. It quite correctly claims to be an “animated House Musical”, depicting the story of a group of four intergalactic musicians, captured by a scheming manager to be transformed into a manufactured band on earth.

Photos from a little 2 day side trip to Belgium I took from Amsterdam. More to come of Scandinavia and Russia.

Slowly sorting through these photos now.
Here’s Amsterdam.

Today I went to have a look at the Digital Imaging Exhibition (part of Digital Media World magazine’s Digital Media Festival at the Sydney Convention Centre. While I was there, I managed to have my first try of Apple’s relatively new compositing/motion graphics app, Motion. When the first images of Motion were released (roughly a year after Blender’s UI update in version 2.30), Ton and I were joking and pondering about the similarity of their ‘Dashboards‘ to Blender’s floating panels. Today I found another very uncanny similarity in their number field controls, which I took a little video of on my camera.

Yesterday I had a first glimpse of the work of Lee Bul, a South Korean artist currently exhibiting at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. I wish I’d heard of her before, because her work is quite incredible. Lee’s work spans a few different genres including performance, video and interactive media, it’s her super-futuristic sculptures that have made a name for herself, and it’s those that are mainly on exhibition at the MCA.

Hooray! I’ve finally got my act together and now have the first of my photos online. Of course, it ended up being much more than just the photos – I wanted to have a nice reusable system that would do some of the work for me, so I got really carried away and completely re-wrote a PHP image gallery script that I’d made a few years ago. All I need to do now is drop my high-res images in a folder on the web server, and it automatically creates low-res thumbnails and generates an XML file, used to store metadata such as descriptions, locations, places, etc.

There are still a few things I’d like to add, such as editing the metadata within the browser via a login and metadata about each gallery so I can make a nice automatic index page, but for now, at least it’s ‘finished’ enough at least for showing the results of it. I’ll release the PHP source code once it’s more complete and cleaned up. Anyway, for now, enjoy the 2004 Blender Conference as seen through my camera.

Blenderheads infiltrating Amsterdam