ROGERS » 3D

Cameron on dimension…

Mr Rogers — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:41:53 +0000

There is a great interview in Variety with James Cameron and his perspective on 3D films (pun intended). Of course, what he says is quite convincing, and salient. I met him once. He made some convincingly salient points then too. Via Daring Fireball, via John August.

Lovely

Mr Rogers — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 02:04:51 +0000

It is always interesting when you take a diversion from concentrating on "visual effects" and go see what other people are doing with graphics technology. In many ways, the SIGGRAPH conference is a yearly fix of all things interesting, but you have to stop working to get there, and residing outside of the US doesn't make it any easier. The alternative time-sucking solution, is web surfing. Sometimes you come across something which really gives you a jolt. The work Robert Hodgin does is clever and beautiful:

Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.

He uses Processing, an open-source programming environment for graphics and audio. See their exhibition space for more examples of what can be done. Robert Hodgin has a bit of his stuff on that page too, and great explanations of how the software was used (Birds/Flocking). I've become quite interested in procedural animation of late, and have been wondering what we can do with Massive (and a bit of time) to create some visualisations. We've done a bit of stuff on films using Massive to create things other than crowds (like traffic, pedestrians, etc); so another logical step would be to use it with some input data to drive different aspects of it... hmmm... music clip anyone? With the right input data, I am sure you could make something quite special.

The age of the plenoptic lens, etc.

Mr Rogers — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 05:16:25 +0000

May we all see like insects: light fields and plenoptic lenses. There could well be an interesting shift in specialised photography where extracting 3D data from digital images shot with either special lenses or sensors (and with a lot of post-processing/number crunching) become useful tools for VFX practitioners. (Full disclosure: like most people, I’ve had [...]