Forum and WordPress

This weekend I took my web page to a new level by upgrading the disk space on the server, installing software to support a more professional look for future announcements (using WordPress), and creating a forum I will announce at the Blender Conference 2012. The forum is based on Simple Machines Forum (SMF) software package.

Once announced I hope to get some guest or users who share their experience with various renderers and make scenes public available for download, so that someone else can take the geometry, apply shaders, and render with his/her favourite renderer.

Slides for Blender Conference

My slides for the Blender Conference 2012 in Amsterdam are online now:

http://www.janwalter.com/Download/PDF/blender_conf_2012_slides.pdf

My talk will be on Saturday, October 13th, 2012, according to the schedule.

Blender Conference 2012

It's official now:

I will be one of the speakers at the Blender Conference 2012 this year and will focus a bit more on the Blender side of my render tests. Basically I will show similar stuff to the talk I gave at the FMX 2012 but include Cycles and talk a bit about the integration of renderers into Blender and how to import/export different file formats or use render APIs.

LBL Building 90 Third Floor Conference Room

by Anat Grynberg and Greg Ward

Windows and Lighting Program
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
Berkeley, California

This model was created over a period of three weeks by painstaking measurements and many vi editing sessions. The real conference room looks very similar to the Radiance renderings as a consequence, and we would be interested to compare results to other rendering techniques if you have them.

Please do not use this model for any purpose without giving proper credit.

I started to import the geometry of this scene into Blender (using my own Radiance importer from my BitBucket repository) and will soon publish the first results of rendering the same scene with other renderers here.

The Mill talks about FMX 2012 trip

Preparing a tech talk for FMX 2012

Filmakademie Workshop

Last Tuesday (2012-01-31) I gave a workshop about rendering and global illumination (GI) at the Filmakademie Ludwigsburg with the title Evaluation of Render Software & Features.

Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg

Akademiehof 10

71638 Ludwigsburg

Basically a lot of the stuff I was showing is still work in progress and I continually add/update images on my own web page (even though it's not linked from the main page).

The image above is actually rendered with Indigo RT (model courtesy of Martin Lubich, see his blog entry), but in general I was discussing features of the following renderers and gave live demonstrations for most of them to give an impression about the speed and quality of each renderer:

• Radiance (http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance)
• Arnold (http://www.solidangle.com)
• Maxwell (http://maxwellrender.com)
• Indigo (http://www.indigorenderer.com)
• Luxrender (http://www.luxrender.net)
• V-Ray (http://www.chaosgroup.com)
• iray (http://www.irayrender.com)
• and others

It's very likely that I will give another talk at the FMX in Stuttgart later this year about the same topic but in a condensed form (approximately 45 minutes).