The Great Psychedelic Experiment

Hey guys,

The title might seem pretty bold, but that was kind of the feeling I'm going for. I want to create a series of trippy visualizations, showing how the effects of acid and other drugs might be perceived. For years, movies and technology have tried to capture the experience that many drug users have talked about, but with marginal success.

I think the closest that come to mind are "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas", and "Enter The Void."

So my entry into the fray is this first attempt. Granted, it's probably a little bit cheesy and retro, but that's what I was going for. It's unmistakably "trippy." Hopefully these videos will improve and get more realistic and subjective, depending on your point of view. In the meantime, enjoy:

"Save-the-date" Wedding Invitation

Hey guys - I know I haven't posted in a while. I've been busy doing other things. This is a video template I created last November. The idea is that people can have their personal information submitted, and they receive their very own wedding invitation which they can email to all of their friends.

It's created within Blender, and the music has been added in After Effects. Took me a long time to get the timing worked out, and then sync the music to it afterwards.

Enjoy!

Playing With Sketchfab - Global Illumination With Cornell Room

Hey everyone. Happy new year!

Just thought I'd bring in the new year by tinkering with Sketchfab, the cool 3D model hosting site without plugins.

This is my first foray. I'm not, obviously, a modeller nor a gamer, so this is not to show off any skills other than my competency in uploading this ;)

I basically wanted to recreate the global illumination with cycles, but make it real time. To do this, I had to bake a light map for the environment. Unfortunately, there's no easy way in blender to bake a lightmap in Cycles (feature request!), so I basically had to cheat, unwrap the objects and back using orthagonal projection. After a long process, I finally got all the lightmaps working and in Sketchfab.

Take a look!

GI Cornell Room Test from Blender Illusionist on Sketchfab.

Blender User Pyroevil's Blog (Creator of Molecular Script)

Hey - I just discovered user Pyroevil's awesome blog and amazing new particle script, Molecular. It basically creates finely generated particles with true hard collisions!

Awesome stuff:

http://pyroevil.com/

Large Hadron Collider - v02 W.I.P. - Larger and More Post Productions

OK, well never content to leave well enough alone, here's another render that I made, spending the better part of yesterday rendering. It's at 1920x1200 (the resolution of my monitor) in case anybody wants to use it for a desktop image. It's still a work in progress, but I think it's cool.

Notice the darker look (I accidentally rendered out in "linear" space for you color geeks out there), and a slight film grain to dirty it up a bit. Also some very slight chromatic abberation, because lord knows how easy it is to go overboard with that sort of thing.

I've been meaning to show my process more, so I think posting unfinished stuff is a good start. Enjoy!

Click to see the full size image.

Hadron Particle Accelerator - W.I.P. Test

Here's a little something I wanted to test out today. Using my new 780 GTX graphics card, I was playing around with making the particle accelerator from the famous image HERE.

I'm going for a procedural approach this time, trying to get the modelling to be as editable as possible using multiple modifiers. The metal poles are just a bezier curve and the metal octagonal rings are spun instances using Blender Cookie's awesome technique with the array modifier. The stairs are also multiple instances, and the crappy material on the pipes is Cycles procedural brick material. I plan on making it much more elaborate and detailed in the future. This was just my original inspiration for today.

I think the noise is not too shabby, after rendering only about 1000 samples in 7 and a half minutes. The image is based on a sci-fi script I wrote a couple of years ago. Who know, maybe it'll be resurrected someday... :)

Skip Frame Interpolation Test (a.k.a. How to Only Render Half As Many Frames In Cycles)

Hey guys - just tried an experiment with a dry scene in Blender Cycles. I wanted to know if it was possible to save time by rendering at 12 frames per second, and then "create" the in-between frames later using After Effects.

Turns out, it works pretty well! Here's a quick video demonstrating the method. I know as the scene gets more complex, it probably won't work as well. But for fairly simple scenes with a slow to medium speed camera, it looks pretty solid and has a minimal amount of "streaking" (that trail-like effect you see on older consumer video cameras).

The only trick is, when you're in After Effects, make sure to use the TIMEWARP effect plugin and set the "Error Threshold" to "0" so there's no weird chunky blocks. I set it to 50% speed which then equals 24 frames per second.

Nice - Demonic Ink Tutorial Just Reached Over 1000 Views on Youtube!

I would say 1030 to be exact. It's nice to know people are enjoying it.

Would also like to say thanks evermotion.org for promoting the video! I'd never heard of your site before. Rock on.