Saturday, 16 May 2020

Blender 360

I managed to import 3D scenes into Blender 2.82a, and add one of my animated drawings.  They were exported as 360° animations, which can be viewed in YouTube, accessed by the links below.  Move your mouse over the video in YouTube (while left clicking) to experience the scenes in 360°.


PANORAMIC VIEW




The background from the video above, is this scene below.  The original panoramic image was 13312 x 6656 pixels, and taken from Google Maps, following this tutorial.


Reduced 3D cityscape scene,
1920 x 960 pixels,
used for the animation above


I used these softwares below to make the panoramic animation above:

I roughly followed -- this tutorial to get the 360° image; this tutorial and this tutorial to import the 360° image into Blender; and this tutorial to export the animation from Blender (tutorial playlist).

This blog post explains how I turned my drawing into a 3D OBJ file with PhotoAnim. After that it was easy to import the OBJ file into Mixamo, and export an animated FBX file.  One can import an FBX file into Blender 2.82a.


3D CITYSCAPE




The 360° animations can be viewed with your smart phone using Google Cardboard and the YouTube VR app.  This YouTube video shows you on to view in VR (virtual reality).

Screen shot of  the
YouTube VR view on an Android phone


I used these softwares below to make the animated 360° cityscape YouTube video above:


I followed this tutorial to retrieve the 3D cityscape from Google Maps.

This blog post explains how I turned my drawing into a 3D OBJ file with PhotoAnim. After that it was easy to import the OBJ file into Mixamo, and export an animated FBX file.  One can import an FBX file into Blender 2.82a.


MEXICO CITY

I added my dancing figure drawing to a spot in downtown Mexico City, after erasing most of the texture map on my model (referencing this tutorial and discovering the erase function).




Here is a YouTube link of a walking tour of the Zocalo, just two blocks away.



GALLERIES




I took 360° pictures of the "Prints by Southwest" exhibition I put on at the South Broadway Cultural Center in Albuquerque in 2017.







(Not 360°)


In 2018 we posted 360° videos of our Desert Triangle Print Carpeta exhibition in Riverside, California.  "Mint n Chip" 3D filmed and uploaded the videos.







YOUTUBE TUTORIALS



OTHER BLENDER LINKS


THOUGHTS

  • 3D Rendering is Slow!
The 360° animation videos had to be rendered in "Cycles," the most powerful rendering engine in Blender 2.82a.  However, "Cycles" requires a lot of computing power, and heats up my laptop for long periods of time.  That is the reason why my videos are so short, at the beginning of this blog posting.


"Cycles" rendering engine


However, one can render the animations remotely.  They would just set up the scenario on their laptop, and send the Blender file to Blendergrid, Amazon remote servers, or even Crowdrender, and download the result.  Isn't the 21st century fascinating?

Apparently one can buy a $50 a month (one month is possible) unlimited render service from Render Street, via Amazon.  Also there a second Amazon option as this video  describes, on how to use the Amazon computing (with a free option for the first year).

At one point D-Wave Leap was offering a free minute of quanatum computer time (which I linked to in my "Computer Assisted Drawing" post).


  • Karl Sims
At the dawn of the computer age, Karl Sims, my tocayo, posted engaging simple locomotion animations online -- Evolved Virtual Creatures -- before there was YouTube.





More recently I made an animated a blocky voxel figure (in Voxel Canvas) that were reminescent of Karl Sims' animations. The free online software now allows anyone to make similar feeling animations.  We have come a long ways in 20 years.

Of course Karl Sims' animated creatures are also intelligent, and remind me of those by Rodney Brooks in the movie "Fast Cheap and Out of Control" (whom I referred to at the end of this blog post).  Both Karl Sims and Rodney Brooks are from MIT.

From his website, I discovered a new interesting computer animation by Karl Sims.


  • Soda Constructor
I also admired Soda Constructor and Crayon Physics in the early days of the Internet.  Maciej Matyka reconstructed the online game, originally created by Ed Burton.




  • Back and Forth animation with a mouse
I like scrubing my mouse back and forth on the screen, to go backwards or forwards in the animation --like in this old Paleomap project by Christopher R Scotese.  The Java applet is no longer supported in new browsers, so I added the CheerpJ Applet Runner extension to Chrome to see it.  The animation comes out small, not as large as I remember it ten years ago.

You can't do this in YouTube, but you used to be able to do it in Quicktime.

Webrotate will set up a 360 spin image rotation for a fee, like other commerical services. I believe you can do this with Scroll Magic.

There is also a parallax scrolling approach for websites (do you have to use custom CSS?).


  • AI
Can AI (artificial intelligence) be used with Blender.  Andrew Price said so in his TED Talk.  It's discussed in this PDF.  Midge Sinnaeve is making Generative Art in Blender.




PLAYLIST




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