Marc Pampols - personal website, blog & 3D artist portfolio

Here is a nice video from BBC Horizon podcast, that explains how the CERN’s LHC (Large Hadron Collider) works:

Some days ago I had to move a Plone Site from one filesystem to another, both in the same Zope instance in a linux PC with Zope 2.10.6-final, python 2.4.5, and Plone 3.1.2

Everything seemed to go well, I made a cut/paste from an entire Plone Site that was in the main Data.fs because I needed to put in another database, called Data-sitename.fs and after that, the site worked perfectly, but… some hours later I made a database pack in order to clean all the Plone instances removing old objects.

Just after pressing the pack button in the new Data-sitename.fs, ups! something went wrong:

Error Type: POSKeyError
Error Value: 0x484b

As a result of that, the new Data-sitename.fs was corrupted and the Plone Site inside was gone :(

Be careful! do not cut or copy/paste a Plone Site from a filesystem to another one in the same Zope, instead of that, do a Export/Import and it will work :)

More fun from Siggraph 2008!

This is the new stuff coming out from the Microsoft Labs:

Link: Unwrap Mosaics: A new representation for video editing (Microsoft Labs)

Oh god, it’s Siggraph time, lots of new CGI things are coming up… and now I thing that the end of pure reality in TV and movies is coming really, really soon.

OTOY, “The 3D engine that renders graphics in the cloud”

Unlike AMD’s Cinema 2.0, the OTOY technology allows weak computers and mobile phones to render a very detailed and realistic 3D scenes by sending the data to a server and receiving the rendered result.

OTOY Render engine

Link: OTOY Developing Server-Side 3D Rendering Technology (TechCrunch)

Link: OTOY Website

AMD is creating a new interesting technology to achieve the quality of a movie in real time 3D rendering, like it happens in games, where every scene and action performed by user is interactively rendered by the GPU.

Actually the 3D effects in movies are more complex that the render used in games, a LOT more realistic and detailed, and that’s because in the film industry every frame needs a lot of time to render, like 4 or 5 hours for example.

With Cinema 2.0, AMD wants to take the same quality that we can see actually in film and bring it to real time and games, achieving 24-25 rendered frames per second. 

AMD Cinema 2.0

That could be dangerous, imagine that in a near future you can not distinguish reality from fiction, for example, in the TV news… oh wait!

Link: AMD shows off Cinema 2.0 (Slashgear)

The CERN LHC (Large Hadron Collider) will start launching the first beam in 26 days, the next September 10th and exactly at 9:30 CET

LHC Hall

What do you think? we’re all gonna die? some scientifics said that the earth can be destroyed… in fact, nobody really knows what is gonna happen, so… ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seat belts!

Link: More information about the LHC project (wikipedia)

Link: Official LHC First Beam website

MILapse has posted some beautiful HDR timelapse videos in Vimeo, if you like HDR this is a must see, congratulations MILapse, that’s a brilliant work!

HDR (High Dynamic Range) is a technique that allows you to make a bigger range of exposures between light and dark areas in images.

Link: MILapse video gallery on Vimeo

Ultra Wideangle HDR Timelapse from MILapse on Vimeo.

ProMotion Studios has finished a new 3D short film called Lighthouse, Directed by Charlie Short & Ming Hsiung, created using 3dsMax and Blender, and made for the American insurance firm Liberty Mutual.

Its a short (3min) film with a great animation and rendering, the overall quality is very nice.

Lighthouse shot

They have also developed open source tools that will be released in the next versions of Blender, a software that is growing fast and it has been used in some very interesting and successfull projects like “Elephants Dream” and “Big Buck Bunny”

Click in the image below to watch the film (flash video)

Link: Original CG Talk thread anouncing the film

Link: Making of (Flash movie)

Guillermo M. Leal, a 3D artist from México, has released a great new script for 3dsMax 2009 called MultiLight, a script for VRay that lets you interactively change the parameters of the lights in your scene, like intensity, gamma, tint, etc…,  modifying the resulting HDRI maps.

I have seen the first post at CG Society (CG Talk) where Guillermo showed some details about the project and many users quickly became interested, if you are, more details and price is available at the author’s homepage.

Now it supports VRay, but the author says that Mental Ray and Final Render support is in development.

Have you ever heard something about the ”greeble” effect ?

“A greeble or nurnie is a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object to add visual interest to a surface or object, particularly in movie special effects.” - Wikipedia

Here is a nice example of what does this effect:

Greeble example, Rendered by Gargaj / Conspiracy.

I discovered this effect some time ago with a plugin for 3dsMax called “Greeble”, a funny plugin that generates random detail in objects simply by adding a modifier, it was available since 3d Studio Max version 3.

Another great resource for greeble fans is Greebelicious: http://www.greebelicious.com, a forum-gallery where users post their artistic creations with various greeble tools available for 3d software.

Render by "pure render" from Greebelicious

If you like it and you want to start greebling, below is a list of plugins available for various 3d packages, and if you don’t have any, I recommend you starting with Autodesk 3dsMax (trial demo available), or if you like open source software, Blender is a good choice.

Greeble plugin for 3D Studio Max (from R3 to the actual 2009) - Tom Hudson website
Discombobulator, greeble script for Blender (working version is for 2.40, latest release of Blender is 2.46)
LW Greeble & Nurnies, script for Lightware - Download