Light painting animations directly from Blender
hackaday.com
hackaday.com
I’m curious as to what the build cost was for the whole rig, and on how long that project took. Seems like he milled a bunch of the aluminum jigs himself, which is pretty cool. Certainly a lot of effort and the results are quite neat. It would be interesting to see what more art pieces can be done now that the basic rig is setup - it would be really cool to “render” several-minute-long light painted videos now that it can be fully automated.
At the end of the video he tears everything down and packages some stuff back up - I'm guessing he borrowed a lot of gear from the University.
According to the documentation[0]:
"Depending on who you are, building the machine and the control box is either the most or the least intimidating part of this. Since the hardware isn't too dissimilar to other CNC machines like 3D printers, I'm not going to go into too much detail. If you want to follow my design, consult the pictures."
> it would be really cool to “render” several-minute-long light painted videos now that it can be fully automated.
According to his comments in the YouTube video:
"Each of the animations I made took between 4 and 12 hours to shoot, one frame at a time. Each frame is 1-3 long exposure photographs of the machine performing the light painting."
Extrapolating from that, a several-minute-long video would take days or possibly even weeks!
I've had a couple projects that would benefit from aluminum milled parts, but I haven't been able to figure out how to go about making 1 or 2 parts without spending hundreds on setup or tooling costs.
Or the old-fashioned way: Talk with local shops who use the tools you need and get some quotes.
Edit: or look for alternatives to parts you cannot make yourself (material or design or both).
3:19 and 4:22 remind me a lot of a tumblr page with animations like these. It's exciting how trippy they are. His direction and animation is beautiful, knowing that it's real light is something else.
Blender is extremely capable in a wide range of areas. It’s much more than simply fuel in your analogy, it’s much more like the car builder’s toolbox or even his workshop.
Blender can do complex 3D modelling, physics based rendering (now including real-time EEVEE). 3D animation including rigging and physics interactions, Video editing, 3D motion tracking, plane tracking, image compositing and spatial audio.
Its grease pencil tool is execptional and allows for powerful 2D animation. The freestyle NPR renderer can export animation outlines to SVG.
It has a wide range of plugins for architecture, 3D printing and CAD.
Everything can be scripted via python and almost everything in the UI can be keyframed.
It is an exceptional project and a credit to the open source community.
Blender is an amazing product being used by a ton of professionals, but a lot of people in the CGI industry don't admit to using it because it is free.
Because of this weird echo chamber of "Blender Shame" you have people who actively promote how cool Blender is, which is not always a conscientious reaction, but still stems I think from this reputation fight that Blender is in.
I think the whole PC MASTER RACE joke was a similar response to Apple snobbery.
> What quickly becomes obvious is that Witcher is very much a PC exclusive game, which are typically designed to be as complex and unintuitive as possible so that those dirty console-playing peasants don't ruin it for the Glorious PC Master Race.
It was not originally intended to be a positive term.
Those I’ve spoken to in the industry have all praised Blender but say they use various commercial tools because it part of their pipeline and they pay for support.
https://www.blender.org/user-stories/visual-effects-for-the-...
The Python integration is truly fantastic. I bought a Perception Neuron motion capture suit a year or two back for use with Unreal Engine, and in just a couple of days I was able to write a Python addon for Blender to take the output generated by the capture suit software and retarget it to the default UE4 skeleton. And I'm no Python guru.
https://github.com/dmo9000/blender-addons/blob/master/ue4-ne...
Right now it's basically begging governments and donations for dev money and the level of polish is rarely at the level of commercial software.
https://youtu.be/wqzihgR_-SI?t=400
Or the slit scan technique used for the stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey:
https://www.dragonframe.com/product/dmc-16/
It is bit weird how there seems to be this Arduino motion control stuff, and then also this dragonframe motion control and they are somehow integrated together. It seems to work fine for him, no doubt about that, but I feel like more integrated approach would be logical next step.
It's what controls all the steppers and some of the lights it looks like.
Truly a cool project
I do think he could probably use a bit more rigidity on the long thing that holds the end of the light tube since it appears to have a bit of wobble, but I'm sure that somebody with this level of competence is already on that issue for the next revision.
For the proper application, you could do stuff with this which would absolutely make a raytracing renderer vomit its bytes in anguish. All my motion design buddies are very excited about this video.