My Camera Broke...

Almost a month ago I headed out on a really hot day down here in the deep south* with coworkers for a day on the delta in Mobile, AL. I had brought along my (relatively) new OM-D E-M5 to take some nature/fun shots with everyone. However, after finally boarding our boat and pulling my camera out to take some shots, I was greeted by a completely white EVF when trying to shoot some photos...

 
My artists recreation of my viewfinder view...

Crap. Looking around online yielded nothing relevant, so off to Olympus service she went. I was so angry at the problem I just didn't want to think about photographs until I could get it back.

I needed to vent some creativity, and turned to something else I enjoy playing with, 3D rendering/modeling! So a few days during my lunch breaks I tried my hand at speed modeling in Blender. In particular learning to use the new dynamic topology sculpting tools (dyntopo).

So I thought it might be fun to share what I came up with here (I had already posted these on Google+, but figured it might be fun to share them here as well).

Bear in mind, I'm not really a whiz at Blender, I just happen to know enough to have fun playing with it and doodling (which is really all these are). I tried to keep everything in Cycles for the most part, and was just having fun...

Pat David Blender Render Cycles Clay Models 3D Whimsical Funny Cute
No, I have no idea. Just playing around...

Pat David Blender Render Cycles Clay Models 3D Whimsical Funny Cute
Mostly just working out materials that I liked here.

Pat David Blender Render Cycles Clay Models 3D Whimsical Funny Cute
Trying something a little different. Sort of an "Alien"-esque thingy (with a vagina for a mouth apparently).

Pat David Blender Render Cycles Clay Models 3D Whimsical Funny Cute
Finally getting something a little more cohesive.

Pat David Blender Render Cycles Clay Models 3D Whimsical Funny Cute
Yes, it's a carrot. I didn't think he was grumpy when I made him, but he does look sort of grumpy.

Pat David Blender Render Cycles Clay Models 3D Whimsical Funny Cute
Testing particle grass on an icosphere - worked out pretty well!

Pat David Blender Render Cycles Clay Models 3D Whimsical Funny Cute
The lightbulb finally managed to fly.

Pat David Blender Render Cycles Clay Models 3D Whimsical Funny Cute
A radish search party.

Of course, now my camera is back, so not sure if I will continue with these. I had a couple of other ideas kicking around that I may go ahead and finish, though.

I did at least manage to use some neat tricks for creating these, though. I did some rudimentary network rendering by passing off a few of these to different machines, rendering different frames with the seed value in Cycles set to #frame. This gave me a different noise pattern for each frame. Of course, I brought them together in GIMP and used G'MIC to mean average the layers together, which really cut down on the noise and smoothed things out nicely!

For example, here's a single frame from the "Radish Search Party" image:

Quite a bit noisier in a single frame

The nice thing about rendering/averaging these frames is that if at any time I want it to be a bit cleaner, I can just render a few more new frames until I am happy with the result.

2 comments:

  1. Your post about image stacking for photography is actually what started my dabbling in image stacking noisy cycles renders too - I ended up making an addon to do it all automatically, allowing you to pause and resume a render too: http://adaptivesamples.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/progressive-animation-render-addon-and-image-stacking/

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    1. I read your post, and it was a great read! It actually got me looking more closely at using an mean blend vs. a median blend, and why the results were not what I expected.

      I think it turns out that the cycles noise is really an approximation of shadow strength at that pixel, so using a median blend will exclude the contribution from other other pixels, giving a higher contrast in the region. Mean blend does more of what we actually want here, which is the average of shadow strength at that pixel.

      Thanks for the great article!

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