Archive for the ‘ Blender ’ Category

Still here

I can’t believe it’s already six months since my last post here. It’s definitely time to resume regular blogging — also broadening the scope of this blog from Blender to other technical stuff as well. In Milan on Wednesday 17 Even though I’ve not been active as a Blender developer in the last few months, I kept [ READ MORE ]

It finally arrived

It took a while but it finally arrived! Even though this much awaited t-shirt is now secured in my hands, I’m still committed to improve my project. Admittedly I’ve not committed much recently (sorry for the pun) but I’m still working on it, albeit at a slow pace. Stay tuned! [ READ MORE ]

Egocentric pumpkin

I’m back from the Blender Conference, which was very stimulating as always. For some reason, it’s very easy to hang out with the other participants, and to relate with people you’ve never heard of as if they were close friends! My opinion is that Blender hits a soft spot between technical and artistic interests (and [ READ MORE ]

Leaving for Blender Conference

Tomorrow I’ll head towards Amsterdam to attend my third Blender Conference in a row. This time, besides meeting the usual lot of cool people, I’m also going to talk about my work on lightcuts — and I hope to get some useful feedback as well. Anyway: in the last couple of days I took the time [ READ MORE ]

Lightcuts: multiple representatives

I finally surrendered and added “multiple representatives” to my Lightcuts implementation. This essentially means that you have an option to select noise instead of banding. When computing the contribution of a cluster, you need to select a representative point light, whose position will be used to compute visibility and whose color will be used to shade [ READ MORE ]

The future of the Lightcuts GSoC project

Next week the Google Summer of Code 2008 will be conclusively over. I will sum up my thoughts on this wonderful experience in a future post, adding some suggestions for prospective applicants as well. Here, instead, I would like to detail my plans for the future of this project. Development — Development will continue, but necessarily at [ READ MORE ]

More indirect lighting stuff

This week I have been busy completing the indirect lighting part of my project, but this turned out to be harder than expected. The problem was not particularly the algorithm itself, as I’m currently implementing a naive variant. As a reader pointed out, the state of the art in instant radiosity is currently Metropolis Instant [ READ MORE ]

Indirect lighting teaser

This week I’ve been busy with something rather unexciting: speeding up the light tree creation time. You might remember that, initially, I just implemented a O(n²) method in order to have a working prototype quickly; now I lowered that to O(nlogn) following advice from Miroslav Mikšík. It is now possible to have several tens of thousands [ READ MORE ]

Lightcuts: week 9

Textured area lights turned out hugely popular, so now it’s hard to live up to expectations I guess! This week’s work was indeed far less exciting: I worked on supporting more material features, as so far only lambertian diffuse and phong specular where supported. Now, all diffuse shaders are supported. Every single shader must be specifically supported [ READ MORE ]

Textured area lights in Blender

One of my favourite pictures from the original Lightcuts paper is an office scene lit exclusively by a tv screen. You can do that with textured area lights. In Blender you can already link a texture to a light, but the outcome is a sort of texture projection, which is useful if you want to fake [ READ MORE ]

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