September 26 2005
Well, it’s been a long time without updates! But I wasn’t idle all this time; for one, it’s just another week until I’ll finally receive my diploma in Media Design. My dessertation on nonphotorealistic rendering was handed in two weeks ago, which left me a little time to update Minning.de’s design and content.
This is a rather large leap in terms of design and functionality and I hope that everything works fine now. Some areas are still a little rough, but that’ll be fixed soon… I just wanted to get the update out before anything gets in the way again.
The whole site is based on a highly customized version of WordPress, unlike my previous site, which incorporated WordPress only in the Production Log. I’m not some kind of XHTML/CSS-zealot and, quite frankly, I couldn’t care less if my code validates or if everything is done the “right” way. For me all that counts is that it just works. So the site’s been tested up and down in various browsers, but bear with me if I missed a bug or two along the way — should you encouter anything weird on your visit, please let me know!
As mentioned above, my dessertation on nonphotorealistic rendering is completed. If all goes well I’ll post some samples of what my renderer Panda is capable of. Let me just say that Panda is suited for a variety of different styles and the resulting look is very painterly.
So now that I’m more or less finished with my studies, I’m looking for a job in the CG industry. Contact me if you’re interested!
April 17 2005
The pre-production work on the project I had to squash in between Sleeping Dragon is coming along nicely. This short film is tentatively named “Tea Time”, but that’s bound to change before the film is completed.
So far, the story is finished, the storyboards are almost there and even the characters are mostly done.
And here they are:
Beautiful, the two of ‘em. Rupert and Edward, old blokes as English as they get. I tried to get as much character into them as possible without getting too cartoony, and it’ll be more clear when they’re animated.
It’s nice that I can benefit from all the research and development done on Sleeping Dragon. Although the look will differ slightly from Sleeping Dragon, many elements and especially shaders can will be re-used in this projects. I also intend to once again use 3delight for rendering the characters. The backgrounds will be a mixture of 3D renders and 2D paintings, with the focus clearly on the painting.
Next I’ll be working on the scenery, an old railroad station were the two of them will have their little quarrel. I’ve already tried several different settings, but alas none of them suited the story all that well.
The solution: A surrounding park with lots and lots of CG trees! So I’ll be looking for ways to render a ridiculous amount of trees… as quickly as I can! After all, there’s only a few weeks left ’til the deadline.
December 26 2004
My continued research on painterly rendering techniques is beginning to bear fruits: PainterMan, a NPR RenderMan shader, has been rewritten from scratch and now works properly on any surface using a new and thoroughly optimized algorithm that provides much more control over the look.
Sublte displacement creates the illusion of paint strokes. Support for shadows and multiple light sources of any type has also been added. To my amazement it works best at high shading rates in ranges of 100‑1000, whereby the time to render a frame has gone down a lot more than I could have achieved through code optimization alone.
As a matter of fact, this algorithm produces a look so different from the last version that I decided to keep the old shader alongside the updated one, simply renaming the new version to PainterMan II. Surely both can prove useful for different objects in my film.
Here’s a sample of what it looks like in a rough test scene:
That’s not all I’ve been up to lately… I have another NPR project cooking for use in Sleeping Dragon: Disney’s Deep Canvas technology looks mighty impressive, but there’s very little technical information or even documentation available on the net. A SIGGRAPH paper from 2003 proved somewhat insightful, but lacks detail here and there — not much of a surprise, of course Disney doesn’t want to give away its trade secrets just like that.
From what I gather, it should be possible to create a system similar in look to Deep Canvas using only standard programs and a little scripting. Alas, I don’t have the time nor desire to create a fully working implementation just for my short movie, so I’ll have to make do with a little hack, if at all.
As it stands, only few scenes in Sleeping Dragon would gain from a system like this, so it’s not my main focus to get this running at the moment. I’ll keep working on it alongside the film and post updates if anything noteworthy comes about.
November 13 2004
A little update on my recent post concerning digital watercolor: According to a fellow poster on CGTalk whose opinion I highly value, even the latest version of Corel Painter doesn’t do watercolors very well at all, confirming my suspicions.
Another poster suggested trying the Japanese software Winshodo… alas, the developer doesn’t offer a demo version and I don’t feel like wasting money on a software of questionable value. If anyone reading this has any experience whatsoever with Winshodo, I’d be happy if you’d drop me a line!
In the meantime I’ve found ways to simulate just about all watercolor effects digitally in Painter, the problem being that my workarounds are horribly awkward and cumbersome to produce. Better than nothing at all.
October 30 2004
You may have noticed my studies on NPR rendering techniques, some of which are on display in my Playground. On this project I’ll finally be able to make use of many, if not all, of the techniques I’ve been developing. For Bagel 2 I had various reasons to go with the more common (yet easier to produce) semi-realistic style… but not this time, here it’s cartoon all the way!!
PainterMan
One of my favorite techniques is “PainterMan”, a RenderMan shader I named after the natural and painterly images it produces. I’ve improved some features today to perhaps apply it on a character in my short film.
For testing purposes I’ve rendered the “Stanford Dragon”, playing with various settings in PainterMan to simulate different artistic styles. Note that all these images come straight from the 3d renderer, in this case 3delight, which is to say there’s absolutely no filters, plug-ins or other foul trickery in post involved… Read more »
April 18 2004
This set of versatile surface shaders renders arbitrary geometry in various non-photorealistic styles.
Usage
As the name suggests, PainterMan is intended to simulate painterly rendering effects, such as traditional oils, watercolors or Japanese ink brushes.
A stripped down version of PainterMan is integrated into my After Effects plug-in Normality.
