KODA

You’re looking at a little experiment tonight with fluid dynamics in Blender. I had an idea to use the fluid dynamics in the new version of Blender to simulate the grungy paint splashes that are the staple of many modern vector art styles. The premise was, if Blender will let me simulate throwing a bunch of fluid at a wall, it will hopefully come out looking pretty neat. This technique eventually gave some results, but turned out to be both time-consuming and cpu-consuming. Unfortunately, the computation required to achieve the level of splash detail I desired proved difficult to manage. The image above is one of the most balanced and detailed images I got, and yet is still very simplistic and lacks the fineness that makes the style appealing to the eye.

I hope that with some more tuning I might be able to achieve flattened results with the detail of these examples. For now however, it seems that the fastest, easiest, and most beautiful method is also the most simple one — scanning in real paint on real paper.

That red paint got everywhere

Today I went up to the Butte for the first time in a while with a friend. What a great day. We walked down to the field at the bottom of the park, only to discover that it was filled with huge, towering wheat! In some places, the stalks were as tall as I am. In all of the times I have been there, I’ve never seen it like this. It was amazing. I didn’t take a lot of pictures, but here are two that I think came out the best.

Today I worked on an animated “throbber” icon for Qball and the GMPC project. You’ll see it turning up in the SVN Just a fun little Inkscape/Blender project. Sure, there are hundreds out there, but how could I resist the chance to try doing it myself? After recalling reading Jimmac’s write-up of his creation of a throbber in Blender, I set out to create my own in Blender. The method I ended up using actually was much heavier on Inkscape than Blender, which instead became more of a raw animating and compositing tool in the end.

Ta-da:
Just rotation:
With In/Out animation:

The solution I came up quite simply used a single plane with two textures: an Inkscaped shape mask and a Blender conical gradient. Blender is pretty versatile when it comes to mapping, so I simply made the gradient align with the object space, and the shape with the viewing window area. That way, I could just let the camera roll and the coloring rolled with it.

Yesterday, I discovered that the graffiti I found about a month ago has been painted over. Frankly I’m not surprised, but it’s hard to understand how people can take such unique art and slap a dull brown paint over it. It wasn’t even out in the open — you had to look to find it. How much culture and honest self-expression is lost to this “cleaning?”
That image was one of the most personal and raw statements I’ve seen for quite some time, and it is really too bad it had to be painted over. How fascinating that it’s expression should be further emphasized by it’s very destruction.

A walk in the park. You find the most amazing things when you’re not looking for them.

I just discovered Positive Negative… and wow. What a gorgeous photoblog.

I just love how each post tells a story. How each image is just large enough for me to get sucked in. How the site design is simple and clean enough to drive the experience forward. How instead of keeping a schedule, the artist posts when he has something real to share. How it makes me want to go to NYC…

This guy must truly take his camera everywhere. Beautiful, and very inspiring.

Yes! After so much work, Ton and all of the guys in the Orange Project have finally released their baby to the world.

This is incredible. Not only is Elephants Dream a high quality Creative Commons licensed short film (in HD 1920 and Surround Sound!), but it was made completely using Blender and other open source tools. And from the images, and their progress reports over the past year, it looks absolutely gorgeous.

My understanding is that the goal of the Orange Project was not simply to create an “Open Movie,” but to embody a symbiotic relationship between Blender development and real animation project. This has been a huge boon for the open source art community. Over the past year, they have created and documented some amazing new features and improvements to the Blender project, ones that will last far beyond the scope of their production. Which is not to say that their artistic creation won’t last for a long time to come.

Some colors for you to enjoy

Today was one of those days when things seem to flow… creatively and generally. It was a long day, but I feel I got so much completed that in afterthought I’m glad to have done. The lion’s share of the evening was spent making the comic you see in this post.

It was just one of those random ideas I get in the least opportune moments, like mid-running to the dinner table. In spite of this, I guess I managed to keep the excitement of the concept alive until I was free to work on it. It’s been a while since I’ve done some serious Inkscaping, though I did scoop up a development binary from their (recently redesigned!) official site a few days ago. It was a lot of fun to just loosely work on a picture like this… something I hadn’t really done in a long time.