Back from USA, back to work & 2 new Blender 2.5 books

We are back from our USA travel and it is now time to get back to serious things : 3d

If some of you are interested here is a link to the flickr account with some pictures we took:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oenvoyage/sets/72157626969992601/

We have some project at the studio, some 3D anims but a bit stylized, we will see how it comes out. I also would like to remind my blog readers (if there are any) that i have a twitter account, because i am a social person (tweet me at @oenvoyage)

I have also 2 books from Packt Publishing that I plan to read and share my thoughts on.

Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook
by Virgilio Vasconcelos

Blender 2.5 Hotshot
by John Edison Herreño Velasco

I recieved them as e-books so I plan to either read on my phone or ipad (which I dont use much anyway)… I will see how it goes, but there are chances I might end up reading on the computer as most of the time reading blender books (and especially with those recipet-style books) you might want to put your hands and try immediately the learned material.

My FMX experience, Conferences, Blender and Cycles

Hello Everyone !

Mohit Kallianpur @ fmx2011 : Untangling “Tangled”

I just came back from Stuttgart where I attended the FMX 2011 conferences. First of all let me tell you it was amazing!  Not only where the conferences interesting, but also well attended and often full. I did miss some because of that. But well, on the other hand I also saw some great ones like Disney’s presentation on Tangled/Rapunzel lightning and shading, or Pixar’s cinematography (layout & camera) . Special effects were also not forgotten with nice sessions around Harry Potter’s movie and some stereoscopic 3d workflows. The House der Wirtshaft building is a great place to hang around and has good installations. I just wish I could duplicate myself using Shift-D so I could see all the talks and workshops.

A large part of my time was also spend revolving around the Blender booth were we gave out nearly a thousand free DVD’s of blender + tutorials to interested people. I was suprised at the number of people who actually had tried blender few years ago and are still interested. A fun question to be heard : “How can it be free and so powerful? Who pays for all this ? “. We gave some demos and had some afterhour beers. I was very happy to meet Ton again, and of course all the german blender users/guru and say hello to all you guys ! Especially big hug goes to Thomas W who was a great after-work-dinner-relaxation-chill-out-evening organizer. Taking us to typical schwäbische restaurant on first night, and exotic african on the 2nd day. + thanks for the hosting.

blender cycles rendering demo can harm your car

The big attraction (and it really did attract people) on the booth was indeed Cycles, the new render engine work-in-progress. It was my first time see it live, and got a good chance to play around with it. Mostly turning around the viewport and staring at the scene rendering.  We did show a lot the BMW scene from Mike Pan (and I enjoyed changing it live) , and it was fun because a few booth away was Cad Networks (reseller of rendering and vizualization solutions Nvidia partner) and they were showing off some real-time raytracing, but to be honest the speed difference beetween their powerhorse and our modest setup was not big… Of course a lots of parameters has to be taken in account, they use windows (cycles seems 2x faster on linux (due to no win optimization yet i think) and their software to demo is different. So we managed to get cycle win build on a usb stick and plug it in. It was cool and working, but it seems it did not use all the 4 graphic cards in parralel, only one… So we still have to wait to see full parallel CUDA.

The engine also integrates a new shading system based on OpenShading Language (opensource project from Sony). It has some basic shaders that can be viewed in nodes or as property list. More complexe shaders to be added later, or you can create/program  your own ones.

I will definetly be at FMX 2012 next year.

And here are some more photos :

cars, cars, cars....modern art ?

Stuttgart was also hosting the International Animation Festival- With open air screenings !

Aerial view of the blender booth

myself fooling around the booth

Making the robots! (blender conf presentation)

Dear Diary blog,

I have not forgotten you. You are still my blog and after a few weeks of non-updating I think I should let you know what I have been doing lately.

First of all I have been to China for a month during september, enjoying the food and spending time with my family-in-law. A little side trip to Hong-kong was also included. Now back in Switzerland I am working hard on the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève animations for this year. As well as doing some other editing projects.

H7, Bubbletime and Optimus Time

But most important, I will be giving a presentation at this year’s blender conference in Amsterdam. The 3 robots we made at RGBprod will be the subject of the talk. Here is a little image with them. I will be happily surrounded by my good friends  Francesco Siddi and Pablo Vazquez.

We will show some making-of and hopefully have a lot of fun.

I hope to see you there.

Travel in Argentina and Chile

It’s been now about a month that my wife and me are travelling in Argentina and Chile and we simply love it !

First we spend a few days in Buenos Aires, discovering some aspects of the argentinian culture, we also made a little game by counting the national  football team shirts (the blue white stripped one), my wife won me by 28 to 17 Of course we did try a lot of meats and i especially enjoyed the barbeque asados etc with the Licuadora studio team (thanks again guys if by any chance you read me).

After visiting Iguazu falls on a wet day we left for the north-east, region of Salta. Spending some carnaval days in Humahuaca, near the bolivian border. A very lovely valley, quiet and amazing landscapes ! Then heading to northern Chile to the Atacama desert, passing through Iquique, Arica, visiting a bunch of stellar landscapes. Being a very lame writer and images always saying 1000x more than words i will start uploading photos, but our computer’s harddisk broke and we must reinstall it (datas and photos safe on external disk). Right now we are at 4000m high altiplano so I do not expect too many computer shops around here. I hope soon I can upload more

Preparing travel to Argentina/Chile (feb-march 2010)

Hello everyone.
Just a quick notice to let everyone you know that we are now preparing our travel. We will spend 2 months between Argentina and Chile from feb 8th to april 10 and i would be very happy to meet any 3D artist that lives in there. So if you would be interested to meet for a drink and chat about 3d, art, or everything feel free to contact me on this blog or by email at oenvoyageATgmailDOTcom.
Hope to meet you soon.

Let’s meet at the Blender Conference!

Hello all blenderheads!
I would like to tell you that i will be at the blender conference in amsterdam and i will be happy to meet all artists that would like to meet me. I will be there with 2 collegues from RGBprod studio, including my apprentice Andres.

Last year was my first conference and i did meet some very nice people, some with whom we worked together so i want to be sure to reiterate this year.

I would be especially interested in getting to know some blenderheads from argentina and chile, or south america in general, as i will be travelling there for 2 months with my wife in february/march. And mixing 3D/blender with travels is always the most interesting
But of course i will be happy to meet lots of people, you can check what we do in the portfolio & demo section.

so let’s meet there feel free to contact me for a chat rendez-vous.

blenderlogo at the lake

During last blendercamp we had a day off and went to a very nice lake rowing a bit and enjoying the view (although a bit cloudy it was still great). Someone took a silly picture (or maybe it was simply me doing silly) of me and the safety buoy.

After coming back i just potoshoped it in 3 minutes to get this funny useless result:

live from blendercamp

I am right now attending the blendercamp 2009 in Russia. And i have to say i do have a lot of fun thanks to the nice nature environment in the middle of the forest somewhere south of Nizhni Novgorod and to the great people and artists here. We all live together in an old house near a “soviet-time” obeservatory or telecommunication center (or is it maybe a long-range missile station?:-)

There some really nice conferences and artists, including my new friends Valery Grankov, russian master of  physical and mechanical special effects (http://www.grankovsfx.ru/) and Andrey Izrantsev, writer and maintainer of the Vray/blender script. I have to say that i arrived in Moscow on thursday 30th july and stay in Valery’s house with his family and Anrdrey for 2 days before moving to the blencercamp. Needless to say that after few bottle of vodka, we all spoke a mix of russian and english, and 3d with blender was suddenly much easier

They both work on some project of animatronic using blender as a tool to control servo motors, all this to animate some real object faces. They did a great demonstration animating in blender, and then playing back on 2 objects, one head (4 servos, up/down,left,right, mouth movement and eyes) talking to a fan (3 servos, up-down,left-right, and fan speed) adding some funny speech in the sequencer, the effect was amazing. I hope i can post a video of it soon.

Andrey showed how easy and nice it is to rendering using Vray. I am really definitevly going to investigate it. I also really hope he can make it to the blender conference this year.

Other great people include Igor and his good architecture classes, lots of small tips and shortcuts or tips i learned. And Michael, a young designer/animator who did a good masterclass on rigging a mechanical machine, including the chains. I think all these videos will be online after the end of blendercamp. Oh and i should not forget the talented teenager Luba, that showed us great models of dinosaurs,horses and panther, textures and animations. Oh and the great flying dragn. She is the future of blender artists. Unfortunately we could not communicate much as my russian is limited to saying thank you and asking where the bathroom is I should not forget all the other people attending and making the camp so cool, i will definitively come back next year.

Oh and on my side i did show some making-of and production workflow of the H7 robot and New Ingenia movie.

china, korea, great firewall and blender

Finally !
Finally i can post to my blog again…. I am travelling right now in Asia and have been in china for over a month. Unfortunately due to some governemental restrictions, some websites access are refused, including blog platforms like blogspot, wordpress etc.
Now that i just arrived in Korea ( if u are a blenderhead in korea and want to meet contact me at oenvoyage_at_gmail) i can finally post articles again.
Another website that is blocked is youtube, and i have to say i never noticed in switzerland how much i would miss it on a daily work use. With so many tutorials, conferences extracts or short movie around blender on youtube that i could not access in china, i felt i was missing a lot infos to keep up to date.

Amazing Great Wall beetween Jinshanling and Simatai

Except for the limitations on internet useage, china is still an amazing country, full of great people, culture and food ! I love it all and i look forward to come back in 2 weeks for meeting my girlfriend and taking the train to mongolia and russia

Blender & Couchsurfing!

here a short one :
Last night while eating a pizza with Pablo, who is also a couchsurfer, we noticed how we like to travel and meet blender users, or just use blender as a cool way of traveling. To make things more easier we created a group on Couchsurfing for that purpose. The name kind of came out very fast : “blendsurfing”.
and here is a link to it : http://www.couchsurfing.com/group.html?gid=19083