Matt Ebb

christchurch art gallery

Janet Laurence
A Medicinal Garden for Ailing Plants
installation, royal botanic gardens, biennale of sydney 2010

Janet Laurence
A Medicinal Garden for Ailing Plants
installation, royal botanic gardens, biennale of sydney 2010

Recent jobs – quick lighting/setup on a couple more Bridgestone Gecko TVCs in blender 2.5:

In Japan I bought issue 25 of otona no kagaku (loose translation ‘science for adults’), a very cool magazine that comes with a DIY project attached to each issue. Issue 25 features a 35mm TLR camera, in parts, to be constructed from the shutter mechanism and lens assembly all the way up.

It’s basic and fully manual – fixed shutter speed (determined by the strength of the internal springs, around ~1/150 apparently) and fixed aperture, though you can change it by disassembling the lens and rearranging some elements. It’s lots of fun though, much lighter than the mamiya c330 ;), and at around AUD$30 was a decent price for a plastic toy, compared to the ridiculously expensive hipster ‘blackbird fly’ which doesn’t even have live focusing through the viewing lens.

Some first shots on bw:

For a little while now I’ve been working in my own time on a renderman connection for Blender 2.5. The new render API, while not fully complete and stable, makes it much easier to connect Blender’s scene data to external renderers, via python.

I’m aware that other people are interested in this topic too, but so far I’ve been doing this for my own use – to get more familiar and experienced with renderman in practice (by diving deeper in head first), and to develop something I’d like to use myself as a lighting/shading artist. I’m also concentrating on the 3Delight renderer at the moment, since it interests me most and provides a free single license.

It’s still quite a work-in-progress, and by no means provides exhaustive support at this point. I’m tackling this from a pragmatic angle, with the priority of implementing things I want to use myself first and making that easy to use rather than trying to supporting the entire rispec from the start. I’ll probably release the code very soon, but I would like to clean it up a little bit first.

Here’s a test I rendered out last night, with a model by my mate Tristan Lock:

Anyway, currently it supports: polygon mesh, subdivision surfaces, uv coordinates, depth of field blur, motion blur, surface/displacement/lightsource shaders with parameters available in blender material properties, simple conversion from blender’s lamps to renderman lightsources, shadow maps, raytraced shadows, built-in indirect lighting and environment lighting using 3Delight’s ‘indirectlight’ and ‘envlight2′ shaders, and shader editing and compilation from the blender text editor.