where did those logos come from?

Here's an interesting article about the logos of some of the big Hollywood studios, including Dreamworks SKG, Paramount Pictures, MGM, etc. Some interesting notes:
1. Warner Bros. (yes, that's legally "Bros." not "Brothers") was founded by four Jewish brothers who emigrated from Poland: Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner.
2.The original logo of Paramount had 24 stars, which symbolized Paramount's then 24 contracted movie stars.
3.Many of Columbia Pictures' early productions were low-budget affairs, so it got nicknamed "Corned Beef and Cabbage."

Link to the article

I love living in Taipei..

Many people at work asked me :why do you want to study and work here (Taipei/Taiwan), and not in your own country(Indonesia). For me it's a trivial question. For almost every aspect I care about, Taipei just won comfortably. Let me explain some of them:





1. Public security is much better here (though my bicycle just got stolen some days ago,what an irony lol ). I feel safe walking in this city around midnight, unlike my home city (Medan) where I I had to worry everytime I was going home beyond 10 pm .

2. Public transportation is also very good. Traffic jam is rare occasion, MRT is doing an awesome job, and broken signs/ roads get fixed quickly. The only concern is taxi cabs, but I think it's just the same everywhere in the world. Maybe someone need to show me a town where the taxi drivers behave neatly :p.

3. It's a super convinient city. 24-7 stores(yes, 711 I'm talking about you) are everywhere. You can pay phone bills, parking fees,even fines there. Alot of night markets also running until 1 am more. That's why I'm living near one of those night markets, because I can find almost anything I need without driving too far.

4. I think this is the most important thing why I still live and work here after graduating, because I feel at home. Overall people are nice and treat me like a local, not a foreigner. That's something I could hardly get when I'm in my hometown. Funny isn't it? You're treated like a foreigner in your own country, but that's exactly what I felt when I'm in Medan before.

The current global crisis may change the situation a bit (people are more depressed), but I believe it still will be a place to live some years ahead. Maybe Taiwanese poeple need to be grateful to have such wonderful place to live, and not just complaining about something almost non-existent everyday.

rainConnector Mel script

I've published a mel script to split polygon by vertex/edge selection in Highend3d. I called it rainConnector. The tool works by connecting selected edges/ vertices. It's especially useful when the model is in smooth mode (maya 2008 & 2009). The usual split polygon doesn't work in this mode, and it makes splitting polygon difficult to do. But using rainConnector, you can easily connect the desired vertices or edges. And it works on selection order too, by utilizing undo operation. Here's a gif screen shot of what rainConnect does:

This tool is actually inspired by connectComponent tool in OMToolBox. That original tool unfotunately doesn't work on most cases, so I rewrite it.

Mudbox 2009 Demo Videos

Really being tired of fixing displacement maps these days. Especially when the broken pixels are on the seams, then I'm hopeless, really. No software can do 32-bit realtime preview on mesh currently, let alone painting the seams. And Mudbox2009 is no exception. But what I hope is that MB09 is able to produce much better disp maps than previous version. And it's released on Oct 6th. So I guess I'll just ask Digimax to buy it as soon as it's available, LOL.
Here's the link to the new demo videos:
videos

My summary based on video:

GUI
I like the GUI a lot. It's simple and uncluttered. It feels like Maya, now my most familiar software, which is a good thing for me and our artists.

(screen capture from Autodesk demo video)

Sculpting Tools
Not much different from Zb3.1, I guess. It has stencils, steady stroke (similar to lazy brush in ZB), Grab (move), etc. As what I stated in previous post about MB2009, the performance has been increased a lot, and it also support 64-bit version, so it's a huge performance gain over previous version.

Texturing
There's only basic texturing tools shown in the video. There're only Paint Brush, Projection, Color Picker, Airbrush, Pencil, and Paint Erase in the menu. I don't see any tool similar to clone tools in Photoshop, and i'm quite dissappointed. It's an essential tool to fix texture seams. Yes, you don't get any seams when you paint directly on the mesh, but sometimes we just take texture from photoshop and continue painting it on the mesh, and seams will exist this way.
Let's see if there's workaround for this limitation. But it feels alot nicer than Zbrush IMHO. It has the advantage of polypainting (paint directly on mesh with the ability to manipulate camera while painting), and projection master (high resolution texture without the need to subdivide mesh too much).

(screen capture from Autodesk demo video)

Realtime HDR light render
Not an essential feature, but can be useful to show closer to final render result to Art Director, if needed.


Bottom lines: very solid release, and able to compete with or even surpass ZBrush3.1 in terms of performance and workflow, but not feature. It's feature-packed enough for our department though. A definite buy when it's released.

9 months to learn as much as possible

I have 9 months prior to contract expiry, and currently I'm not sure whether the Taiwan regulation still allows me to continue working here, and if so, whether Digimax does enough effort to keep me in. Thus, I need to accumulate as much experience as possible for my portfolio later, if I really screwed up here.
First thing is actually be familiar with basic to advanced rigging and animation, since currently this is the field I'm lacking the most. Also, I've started playing with Panda3D, a 3D game engine created by Carnegie Mellon University. It's easy to start with, and packed with enough feature to keep me busy for a while. Then I need to improve my technical knowledge, especially on Maths and advanced programming stuff.
So yeah, that's basically what I'm trying to accomplish in this 9 months. I still hope to be able to work in Taiwan for at least 1-2 years, but if my path is blocked, then I'm open to other countries too, such as Singapore, New Zealand, Europe, Canada, or even US :p.

Mudbox 2009 in October

Mudbox 2009 is scheduled to be released by Autodesk in October 2008. From the information in Area forum, here I conclude some of the notable features :

1. An ability to match or even surpass Zbrush3.1 in terms of polycount. It is said that mudbox will be able to handle tens of million polygons easily. It means that the performance will be increased by tenfold at least from current version (1.0.7). Also it is available in 64-bit version, meaning that we can maximize or memory usage.


2. 3D painting feature. It's not polypainting, nor screen projection painting it is. SkyCastleMud in the Area forum called it “tumble style painting”. It seems that we can avoid having artifacts with projection painting when some mesh overlap each other from screen. He also said :

-Paint faster than ever without the need to enter projection modes with full GPU acceleration
-Paint in reflection (ie: with mirror X ON for example. Both sides of the a head even with different UVs on both sides )
-Project across multiple high res texture maps within the same scene
-Paint/view multiple shading channels like diffuse color, specular, bump, reflection etc…
-Paint with multiple texture layers with support for multiple resolutions and bit depths within the same layer stack
-Paint using brush tip stamps with color and alpha channels

link to area

Hopefully the painting feature is intuitive and easy to use, unlike polypainting in Zbrush which has too many limitation.

3. Realtime lighting and shadows. Mudbox 2009 supports CGFx shaders and HDRI lighting, which means that you can use your own custom shaders, so that the preview results will be much more resemble to final result in rendering.

link to area


Can't wait to try it in our production pipeline. If it is as smooth and feature-rich as it seems, than I think our texturing process will be a lot more intuitive than now!

Zebruv released

Two weeks ago I have released the ABF++ unwrap plugin, which is ported from Blender, and I called it Zebruv (Zebra+UV). The file can be downloaded at highen3d .

Currently I'm still not that satisfied with the result from Zebruv, compared to Roadkill or Blender one. It seems that there's parameter called "fill holes" that makes the result much better. I'll try to dig into the codes later when I have more time. Currently I have a lot of displacement maps to generate, all 4K. One image require about 1-2 hour to generate, while more complex ones can take half a day, so it's very time consuming. Hope that with the new version of Mudbox, I'll be able to generate maps in much more efficient way.

Here comes ABF++ for Maya!

Finally I have finished a stable version of ABF++ unwrapping plugin for Maya. The result isn't disappointing, but it's still not a 'wowing' tool yet. But it does a good job for most UVing purpose.
Here's the screen shot of my tool (call it dgJustUV for now, I'm planning to choose a better name for him, lol).


I really hope to be allowed to released this plugin for public (in highend3d), so this could be my first contribution to Maya community which has give me a lot.

The box is finally out of the mud!

Two days ago Autodesk (finally) released a performance preview of Mudbox Dali, or officially named Mubox 2009. From the demo video we can see a lot of performance improvement especially from polycount wise by almost tenfold I think. Also the realtime lighting and shading could be a nice plus, although not that essential. We do not need to many polycount,around 10 million should be sufficient(for 1 objects), but we need a stable and robust displacement exporter, sadly this is not the case with ZB. If this is really a solid release, then We will switch from ZB to use it. This is a big possibility, because currently ZB, although massive in polycount wise, but is very buggy and lack a lot of core 3d feature such as an ability to group some objects easily or doing 3D texture painting directly on mesh without the need to project it into 2D. Polypainting is not a solution really because it is limited by polycount, thus is not able to produce high quality uv texture. And with its 2d core, its not that easy to integrate new 3d features, and also integrate with other software such as Maya or PRMan. But we'll see the next release of ZB before judging it to early.

Anyway, here is the performance preview of next release of Mudbox.
http://area.autodesk.com/mudbox_preview

Overtime

This Saturday is officially the first time I worked "overtime" at Digimax. It's not that bad actually. We got pizza treat, and I had free access to PC and air conditioning, which I would turn on in home anyway. Besides, Now I have 8 hours free time to spend on the other days. So yeah, it's not a bad exchange at all.
But I think I had to postpone my project on UV unwrapping. It's on alpha stage now, very unstable, I haven't found whether the problems lies on wrong logic or just memory issue. But I still hope that i can finish at least a stable basic version at the end of this month. Hope that the people at Autodesk are focusing on things other than this feature :p, otherwise I may just have wasting my time.

2 projects ongoing

Recently i have been busy writing some tools for Maya. For current time i have 2 projects in hand:
1. Animation baking.
2. ABF unwrap plugin.

Hopefully I should be able to finish both in a month.
I think I'll release the UV plug-in for public use, since some of the codes are taken from other softwares such as Blender.

Spain win The Euro 2008!

Finally Euro 2008 ends, and with excitement (at least for me). Though i'm not a hardcore fan of Spain NT, but i'm happy that they win, since there are some players I enjoyed watching like Cesc, David Silva, and David Villa. In fact, I think they fully deserved to win this cup, since they played with full confidence from start to end. But there's some nervous moments in the final match when they looked shaky at the beginning, played a lot of wrong passes, and seems to be afraid of those Germans. But slowly they found their rythm and played with more fluid passing.
The particular player I like to watch in Spain team is Cesc, obviously because he's the Arsenal player. He's not having a good (but not great) tournament, partly because mostly he came in second half. But he has some good moments too such as setting up 2 goals in semifinal and scoring 1 in group stage. Hope he can keep improving and most importantly stays loyal to Arsenal!
Bottom line : Viva Espana!!

Fotball (soccer) fate in Taiwan

It's really shitty that football is so unpopular in here (Taiwan), such that there's no live coverage of Euro 2008, one of the most popular event in the world in this month. All they're showing on TV are baseball, baseball, and baseball. My Goodness!!
The Taiwan people here adore New York Yankee like it's their national team. And it's all just because one of the players is coming from Taiwan. Though it is respectable, it doesn't mean that you need to cover all their matches 24 hours a day (ok, not that much, but almost 23 hours i think).

==continue==
Maybe I'm biased, but I really think that baseball is not a good choice for "national sport".

1. It takes a lot of time for a match (3-4 hours).
2. Most of the time it's just boring throw and catch. Once in a while you'll see home-runs and some nice catch, but that's all.
3. It's not intense & continuous action like football,basketball, or badminton. You'll see the pitcher do some pose, and the batter swinging his bat waiting for ball, etc. That's why you see a lot of players who are overweight(like pics below):






But sadly I don't think the sport trend in Taiwan will change in any foreseeable future, at least when some (or even just one) of their players are playing in MLB. it's a pity....

start it again!

wow, it seems that i've stopped posting on this blog for almost a year. Well, i'm now in mood to start over again LOL.
First, Blizzard has announced its new game to be DIABLO III ! i'm very excited right now. Haven't played any game lately, the last game i played was in fact Diablo II, some months back!
The Blizzard site is very lagged right now, so I couldn't check the gameplay. But hope that it won't be exclusively online multi player, since I don't have that much time too play online.
Bottom line, GO GO Blizzard!!

edit: Just saw the cinematic trailer and gameplay,and i gotta say: WOW!! (not world of warcraft) , it is astonishing!
I'll buy a new PC just to play this game. Considering that my PC is 5 years old now, it shouldn't be able to render those amazing scenes. But I don't think it'll come soon though, so i should have enough time for saving .

More info on Diablo III:
http://eu.blizzard.com/diablo3/

logo: (looks very nice)

we are big, and small.

Here I found a very interesting pictures of comparison between earth and other planets/stars.
Although it is common knowlodge, i'm still astonished to find out how small earth is compared to the whole universe.
Here's the pictures(don't drop your jaws, you have been warned!)


The smaller planets compared to the Earth


Smaller planets compared to Jupiter


Planets compared to the Sun


Sun compared to Arcturus, Jupiter is 1 pixel in size and the Earth is invisible as this scale


Arcturus compared to Antares, at this scale Jupiter is invisible and the Sun is 1 pixel in size.

And Antares is just the 16nd brightest star in the sky !!! (according to wikipedia).

Ractopamine (瘦肉精)

A much debated issue here(taiwan), yet the term 瘦肉精 is very unintuitive. After searching for a while, i finally found that it is actually called Ractopamine. Here's some explanation of this chemistry term, taken from wikipedia:

Ractopamine is a drug that is used as a feed additive to promote leanness in pigs raised for their meat. The feed additive Paylean®, produced by the U.S. company Elanco Animal Health, contains ractopamine hydrochloride. Paylean was approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration on December 22, 1999, and has also been approved in more than 20 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and Thailand.^[1]

Ractopamine in feed for animals is responsible for dramatic muscle growth, yet it is not a steroid or hormone, but rather a compound known as a beta agonist. Only a trace amount of ractopamine need be added for a marked increase in protein and decrease in fat accretion in animals, in particular swine. For the last 90 pounds of live weight gain, a mere 18.5 grams of ractopamine added to a ton of feed (20 ppm) will increase protein by 24% and decrease fat by 34%.^[2]

In July 2007 Chinese officials seized U.S.-produced pork for containing ractopamine residues.

or in chinese:

俗語說的好，豬養肥了就要殺來吃，但是怎麼讓豬能夠產出最多的肉，賣更多的錢，我們必須讓豬吃的飼料裡面，含有讓它可以更紥實的物質。目前主要用於改進動物體組成的方法，有以下幾類：一、生長激素；二、腎上腺素受體促進劑﹔三、營養調節；四、合成代謝類的類固醇。

最近鬧的沸沸洋洋的瘦肉精就是屬於第二類，事實上瘦肉精是一個統稱，有很多種化學物質都可以有這個效果﹔目前衛生署公布可以核准使用的就是 Ractopamine(Paylean培林)，Paylean是在在一九九九年經美國ＦＤＡ核准上市，在肉豬上市前二十八天加二十ppm的 Paylean於飼料中，可使每頭豬隻增加瘦肉五公斤，降低脂肪三公斤，節省飼料十八點五公斤，並且可提早四天達到上市。體重另外一個毒性較高的是 Clenbuterol，衛生署正打算核准中，天呀!!為何要核准毒性較高的瘦肉精，台灣人真是眾人騎，沒人疼嗎??(參考電影悲情城市)。無能的政府你 們在幹麻??

Ractopamine本來是禮來藥廠預計研發在治療氣喘的用藥，但實驗中發現Ractopamine要達到能治療氣喘的藥量會產生極大的副作用，因此不適用人類使用，但在動物試驗中偶然發現，少量用於豬隻時卻有提高豬隻精質瘦肉的效果，就如GSK公司開發憂鬱症藥物Zyban，而意外發現可以戒煙一樣。

在台灣較常使用的則是Salbutamol最為普遍，因價格便宜，它的毒性比Ractopamine高，比Clenbuterol低。

腎上腺素受體促進劑(agonists)主要有類似腎上腺素和正腎上腺素的結構，能夠大量提高瘦肉率，在近二十年來深受重視。但是世界各國幾乎都已經禁止使用，剩下美國還採用大量的高標準，只是不知道是不是都用來輸出給落後的第三世界國家，例如台灣。

modeling TD

I have been assigned as modeling TD today. So now i need to be very capable of manipulating maya's modeling tools. Hope that i can give some contribution to the team!!

3 years for a siggraph paper

I have made a target for myself. Three years from now, i must submit a paper to SIGGRAPH! Whether it is accepted or not isn't a problem. At least i have to try.
The process should be like this:

• First year for understanding maths behind the previous papers.
• Second year for reviewing the existing papers.
• Third year for writing the paper itself.

I know it's pretty demanding task given my lack of depth in maths, and without any specific tutor, but i truly believe i can do that, so yeah, add oil!!!

in memorial of...shrek

After playing a while with maya, i decide to render a satisfying image.
This image was rendered with maya renderer, using scene from 3DRender.com, and the 'pitiful' shrek picture was taken from tx.technion.ac.il using google image search.

Click on the image to see the full-size one.

what i need to master a month from now

1. MAYA and MEL
This software's complexity is tremendous, and the learning curve is quite steep. But if learned properly, it is a very powerful tool.

2. RSL
Combined with maya, they can produce the most realistic images available now. So it's also essential tool to be mastered.

3.Python
Powerful, easy-to-learn, easy-to-read, this is the must-have scripting language.

In the future:
4.Advanced Computer Graphics knowledge
This is also a must-have for RD department. Without this knowledge, i'll forever be a pawn that performs the low-level jobs.

5.Maths required for computer graphics
To accomplish no.4, this is the essential knowledge.

Seems a lot to learn, huh?