Project Nion

Some weeks ago a came across this wonderful piece of art:

http://priteeboy.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d339ct2

After just being stunned for a while, I thought: The only thing, which would make it even more stunning is if it also had a 3D stereo effect. I thought about that idea for quite a long time and it turned out, that this would be a very difficult task. Combinig a 360° prerendered 3D scene with stereoscopy is almost impossible on a direct way (unless you save lots of images for various viewing angles).

Anyway I wanted to try that. And because I still have a student project to do, I suggested that topic to one of my professors and it got accepted. So now I will be working on a viewer for 360 degree prerendered 3D scenes in stereo 3D. I will not make a web implementation at this point. First of all I will stick to what I already know: OpenGL. This will be somekind of research project, which means I'm also allowed to fail, if I at least get some interesting results out of it.

I think the approach I'm going to try is to save an additional depth information and use that to achieve the 3D stereo effect via post processed distortion.

I've got 6 months to do this, but I don't plan to use that much time. I will keep you posted on my progress and I will upload my software as soon as it is available.

Because of the never ending questions I receive about my two effect compilations, I decided to add annotations to the videos, which explain the general idea behind the effects. This is far away from being an alternative to a tutorial. The annotations only explain the "How is this actually possible?" part and nothing else. Not to mention that I used compositing on every each one of those effects.

But if you expect some actual tutorials about the effects, I have some good news for you, too: Gottfried Hofmann from Cgtuts+ told me, that he has figured out most of the effects and he is probably going to make a series of tutorials about them. Nothing is set in stone, yet, but it is very likely that you get your highly anticipated tutorials sooner or later.

My website has been hacked today. I was able to restore a backup from a week ago. No serious damage was done, but your latest comments are gone.

The changes on my website resultet in a syntax error, when trying to open it. After checking what caused the error I saw an additional line of code in the index.php file, which would have included a hidden iframe to an unsafe website. Luckily it resultet only in a syntax error, instead of actually including that hidden iframe. Although probably only this one file has been altered, I restored everything from the backup just to be sure.

I am going to change my passwords and will regularly check the index.php file in order to prevent further attacks.

I have just finished a new videotutorial. It is about clipping masks. I probably have to dissapoint you: it has nothing to do with my latest animations.

Nonetheless this is a very tricky technique and I hope you appreciate my effort. It took me over 3 hours to make the video and it is 17 minutes long. How is that time difference possible? You might not always notice it, but it is cut together out of 15 small clips.

If you don't have an idea what I could mean with clipping masks, you can watch my demoreel from 2009. In that last clip when the suzanne comes out of that bowl with black liquid, the area between the monkey and the liquid is glowing... that was made with clipping masks.

The video is currently uploading. I will embed it here later on.

Update: Here you go:

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