IZation Labs

Ambient Occlusion: a somewhat resource intensive way to make things just look better. If you’ve ever visited the Blender Artist forums, you’ll see people posting models that they have put their hearts and souls into for weeks, months, even years! Often you will see multiple comments below the first pictures blasting something along the lines of “TURN ON AO”!

Ambient Occlusion simulates the way light travels and bounces off of objects, especially objects that aren’t meant to be reflective. Describing it would be well and good, but I am a firm believer in visual learning. So instead, here are some video examples.

The first video shows a basic cube, with the inner faces extruded inward to give it some depth, as well as an interesting little ‘nub’ on top. Ambient Occlusion has not been activated, it is a simple render with simple lighting.

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This next video is of the same cube, but with a well lit Ambient Occlusion pass. Notice how much more realistic it looks?

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Here’s the only problem with Ambient Occlusion. Real time AO is extremely resource intensive. Running the spinning cube animation with real time Ambient Occlusion in the Blender game engine is impossible for all intents and purposes. So does that mean we are stuck with unrealistic boxes in our games? No! If they can make it look good in commercial games, we can do it too.

Baking. Not cookies or cakes, come on now. We are talking about Ambient Occlusion baking. We take the cube, and break it down into a flat image made up of it’s faces. We then tell Blender to render the Ambient Occlusion not onto the cube, but onto the flat picture we just made. THEN we re-apply that picture to the cube, so that the faces in the picture match back up to the faces on the cube. Next thing we know, we’ve taken the look and visual qualities of Ambient Occlusion and, in a sense, painted it on to the cube just like we would colors or other images.

Baking the AO onto the cube let’s us do real time animations that look practically as good as the original, resource intensive AO. This video shows a baked form of AO that has been tweaked for even better lighting and shading.

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That lets us do cool things like this in the game engine!
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To see for yourself that the cube animation really does run in the game engine (in real time), go ahead and download the blend file used for this post here. When it opens just hit ‘p’ and watch that cube spin it’s heart out!

For more info on Ambient Occlusions, just check out it’s Wikipedia entry.

Blend on!

–Lace

Blender 2.49 has been released, and the updates look promising. Hit Blender.org for the details and download. Next stop, 2.5!

Expect an interesting post in the near future, as my most recent (and most expensive) project has nearly been completed!

Here’s a neat video that was posted a few days back on BlenderNation. It had ’steampunk’ in it’s name, so of course I had to post it. Nice use of Blender!

Steampunk Mousetrap from Ben Dansie on Vimeo.

Personal Note: The Macbook Pro has been back in my possession since last Thursday. Unfortunately I was unable to have the repairs made AND maintain possession and security of my own data, as Apple has to have the old hard drive back. Upon emailing them, they assured me that data on hard drives are properly expunged before the drives are destroyed or refurbished, so I should have nothing to worry about. As long as I trust Apple. :/

–Lace

So I spent an hour on the phone with various repair centers and official Apple tech support today. I’ve got to hand it to them, Apple’s tech support handled it rather well. I was treated gingerly by the man on the other end of the line until we saw eye to eye on the fact that I actually knew what a Hard Drive failure was and how to identify it. In the end I saved a lot of time because I already knew what the problem was, and only had to do a little checking for him booting from the OS X installer discs.

After a 20 minute or less conversation with him, we had agreed that the hard drive would need to be replaced, and that it wouldn’t cost me a cent, as it is still under warranty. I settled for somewhere between option one and two. Rather than send it to Apple and wait 2 or 3 weeks and never see the broken drive again, I took it to a Apple certified store in Columbus, Ohio, called Computer Site Columbus, or CSC.

CSC was very professional and informative, I was greeted by an open room and multiple people where they took down all of my information, serial number, and Apple support ticket number. The bench time should only be 5 or 6 days, which means I should have it back by mid week. As an added bonus, since I took it to a privately owned store instead of sending it to Apple, I will also get to have my broken HDD returned to me when I go to get my laptop. Possible data recovery, anyone? All’s well that ends well, I suppose.

On a side note, hopefully in a day or two I’ll post a picture of a car model that College-Now grad Matt Spring has been working on in Blender!

–Lace

That’s right, you heard me. Today, to use the words most favored by my College-Now class, “The Macbook’s bust.”

Dead. Came home from a nine hour work day, and the system is frozen, the little spinning umbrella staring insistently at me, as if to say, “Just two more seconds, I promise I’ll start working again soon!” I let it sit for awhile, eventually become frustrated, and then hard reboot (hold the power button for 5 seconds).

First sign of trouble:

“Uh-oh. What’s that sound? Oh crap. No, I know that sound.” *smacks forehead* “No! NO! Come on!”

What was it I was hearing? It was the hard disk drive. Making the same sounds as a floppy disk drive out of the 80’s and 90’s. (I’m dating myself with that comment, but still.) A few loud crackle/scratch/grind sounds followed by the sound of a short, thin piece of metal ‘pinging’ once or twice.

“Well,” I think, “at least the screen is blue, like it’s going to boot. Wait. Oh no..”

Second sign of trouble:

This is it. This is all the Mac had to say? Not even a cryptic error message? I can just IMAGINE the confusion that would ensue if a typical, non techy Mac user (such as one portrayed by the…ahem, person in the Mac commercials) came across this image, blinking incessantly on screen where they expected their beautiful background and dock to be.

So I rebooted, knowing already that I was most horribly, utterly, (again, to use a common College-Now phrase,) hosed.

Third sign of trouble:

Upon reboot…
Oh well now we’re talking! This is much better! So informative and explanatory!

So the system is kaput, and I’m not sure what my next move is. I figure that I have two options, however.

One: I fix it myself. Who says Macs are inaccessible? I remove a (good few) screws and pop out the hard drive, then give data recovery a shot on my own, replacing the dead one with a bigger, hopefully more hearty MBPro compatible one. The con, however, is that it will void my warranty, which would be a shame, as the fans already need replacing because I’ve run them on full all the time due to the heat generated by rendering in Blender.

Two: I send it in to a (cr)Apple repair center. They fix it under warranty and two weeks later I get my system back, with no idea if the data would have been recoverable, or the security of the data that was on the hard drive, or really any information or guarantee that it won’t happen again. Great. At least I only lost about 2 weeks worth of data, the rest was backed up. Unfortunately, that two weeks included ALL the work on WNBG, as well as a bunch of daily models. :/

Opinions?

–Lace

As is the norm, I’m up late, blending. A College-Now grad (and good friend of mine), Matt Spring, is passed out on the sofa next to me. He and I have been hanging out just about all weekend. I’m too tired to be too talkative tonight, so instead, here are some late night renders that I’ll post while I’m waiting for my newest one to crank out.

The sword pictures will be explained in the next post, when I have the final image rendered. Night, all!

–Lace

Normal mapping is quite possibly THE coolest thing I have ever done in Blender. I absolutely love it. I just can’t describe how awesome it is. But I did come up with a decent way to help one visualize it.

Imagine you have a regular piece of white printer paper as well as a pencil at your disposal. You sit down and scratch out a decent, well shaded drawing of whatever you like, say, a house, for example. Now, that well shaded house has light and dark sections that make it look much more realistic than if it were just a two tone sketch, right?

Now imagine that when you hold the paper in front of your face and turn it left and right, the shading changes! As if it were a 3d object, the ‘lighting’ of the scene you scribbled on paper magically changes, and it’s only a drawing, on a flat piece of paper! I know it’s not perfect, but that is in a sense a good visual way to describe what Normal Mapping can accomplish, at least in the case I am describing.

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This video depicts a flat plane. Four corners, and a image mapped to it. That’s it. There is no high level of physical detail, no bumps to make the light shine differently. But it sure looks like it, doesn’t it.

Here’s the blend file if you want to see for yourself, or play around with normal mapping. The texture and tutorial I followed to get the concept down can be found at tutorialsforblender.com

–Lace

I’m writing this at 12:50 in the morning, and I need to be up in 7 hours for work, so I’ll try to keep it short and sweet.

The newest build of WNBG is working for both Mac and Windows now. Primary updates include a scrolling cautionary opening, an audio test, and some UV Mapping tests on background textures. I’m getting close to the point where I need to start coding in python to keep up with the game logic. I’ve got a good friend of mine who should be able to give me a jump start, though. Make sure to leave your constructive criticism and comments below the post!

(Don’t forget to right click and save.)

05-04-2009

Mac Build — [Build 0.2]

5.7 MB

Windows Build — [Build 0.2]

8.1 MB

–Lace

Today’s post is a double whammy. Not only did I find a nice old animation of water falling into a ceramic bowl that I have never posted on IZL, but I decided to post it without going through Youtube, Vimeo, or any external hosting site! Great thanks go out to the mac-dev.net for creating such a nicely little flash video player plugin for Wordpress! So here it is, in all it’s glory. The first totally independent IZationLabs video.

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–Lace

I finally started doing some reading, and some playing around with the Blender3D Game Engine, and this is the output of a few hours worth of learning experience. This Game is Alpha. Pre-pre-release. Read, “were this an actual attempt, the game would probably never be shown to the public on this level”, so no need to tear it apart, it’s a work in progress. I’ve already learned a lot, and I hope to have a nice little game developed when it’s all over.

The game is being produced under the codename WNBG. At this point, there is only one rule. Knock down the green one! Post your comments on bugs (there will be tons) and constructive criticism in the comment section of this post.

(Make sure to right click and save.)

05-01-2009

Mac Build — [Build 01]

8.8 MB

Windows Build — Not up yet

?

Blend File [Build 01]

3.4 MB

– Lace

Same video, higher quality.  Rendered using the Internal Renderer instead of just OpenGL. I think the next thing I would like to do would be to break the leg away from the round section on top, and make it pivot at that point. Then, that round top section will go up inside the machine where it can turn on circular tracks to change the angle at which the leg points.

While purely asthetic, I would also like to add some working hydraulic pistons.

–Lace